ETHNICITY & COMPLEXITY: When I started this project I was interested in taking a closer look at the issues surrounding the question, What are you? As an ethnically mixed person, answering this question has always been complicated. Through a web based process I posed several questions in survey form and asked people to respond to questions relating to ethnicity and identity. My goal was to discover how people would respond to complicated questions if given an anonymous venue. A web-based process of gathering a wide variety of diverse anecdotes provided me with a rich volume of qualitative data to then organize into a publication. After close to 200 individuals had completed the survey I printed the significant and interesting anecdotes onto coloured cards and began to organize. Inspired by Gery W. Ryan and H. Russel Bernard's "Techniques to Identify Themes in Qualitative Data,' I used a process of pawing through the text to organize the mass of information.
When I began to design the book I had two major sections. The first was Typology which contained anecdotes that were related to experiences relating to ethnic cliches and facial feature stereotypes. The second was Morphology which contained anecdotes focused on how people relate to their ethnicity and ideas about cultural adaptation. The book was also typeset in Courier New and Times New Roman which were standard typefaces for official diplomatic forms of the United States State department.
Overall this project was inspired by personal experience and an in-depth process of investigating that how others might share that experience. The result is a collection of sincere and candid experiences that reveal profound themes that extend past the boundaries of ethnic cliches.
