Location, Location, and Location! Location is a term that I use a lot in my day-to-day life.
Where is this event tonight located? How do I locate my AirPods? When do we arrive at our final location?
When I typically think or refer to a location, I am talking about a physical place where someone or something is. This can be something like a home. However, a home does not necessarily have to be a physical place like a house or an apartment complex where you live. Home can simply be a feeling that you get when you are around a person or group of people you love, something that comforts you, or maybe is a constant in your life. While location can be about a place like a house, it is important to look at how we locate ourselves within a location like a home. Part of why location matters is that our experiences and perspectives are inherently going to be different from those of the person being documented. As documentarians, we need to take a phenomenological approach by being aware of the intersectionality of the people we are documenting, yet recognizing individuals and not grouping people together. Even in the same location, one’s experience will always be different from another ‘s, regardless of how similar or close someone is to someone else.
In chapter 1, Coles talks about the writers James Agee and George Orwell and shared that when they wanted “to get something off their chest, want to let others know how they reacted on the spot, to something they had seen or heard , or what they recalled, then the words “I” and “me” come to the fore…”(Coles 27). I found this statement from Coles to be very compelling since it speaks to the self-scrutiny that individuals like Agee and Orwell felt when locating themselves in the lives of other people. This makes me think a lot about my experience of being a Resident Advisor (RA) for the first time in Prosser Hall (One of the first-year residence halls on campus).
As an RA, there is little to no separation between me and the field, and where I live and where I work. While I share living spaces (ex: communal bathroom) and live on the same floor as all of my residents, I feel incredibly distanced from them, and I know I could never say that I know how my residents feel or experience the same things as them. Due to my job and motives (why am I doing this work?), all my day to day experiences (ex: every conversation I have, how I behave and live my life, how I walk in the halls of the residence hall, how I react to conflict, etc) are influenced by my prior experiences along with being the resident advisor I want to be and what others expect of me. Sometimes it feels like I am never not working. It does not matter what time of day or where I am on campus, I always need to be a leader and ready to help and support others for the betterment of the community, which I want to help build and keep safe. While it does not always feel like I have a physical home away from the field, I feel as if I am able to locate myself in front of friends, coworkers, therapists, family, etc, where I am able to get something off my chest, take care of myself, and reflect on my own experience in the first person. Coles’ emphasis on why location matters in phenomenology and documentary work allows us to see the effects that locating ourselves physically and mentally has on our psychological health.