PDP-Dissertation

 Overall I’m happy with the work I have completed for my dissertation. I picked a topic that I knew would challenge me and interest me to push my writing and research skills further, I think this had personally helped me improve greatly compared to the work I have completed in the past. I think the key to creating my dissertation was the constant development of my ideas, originally focusing on Eastern Art, which then led me to Orientalism and the various components involved in the reinforcement of the Western perception of the East this made me get a greater understanding of the topic I had chosen because I looked at many different factors such as the media and history between the East and the West, Which helped when organizing my argument and making sure everything I said was backed up by various theories and historical events that I had looked at in my research.

Throughout the writing of the dissertation I was really aware of trying to make my argument clear and to make sure the my dissertation structure was easy to understand, this is something that I have struggled with throughout my degree, to make sure I was completing my work in the clearest possible way I made sure I had a couple of days before the deadline to go through and edit my writing to try and present it to the best of my ability, I think this really helped with the standard of me as I was able to check over my work a couple of times which helped me not only with restructuring but also pick up on mistakes which I may of missed if I only checked it once.

PDP-Dissertation

There has been many different things that I’ve learnt throughout the dissertation to do with not only to do with the East but also to with how people’s perception is created. This has helped me to push my subject work further as I knew I wanted to look at how people perceive the world around them within my own work but didn’t really know how to go further with the idea until I had completed my dissertation research. I have always been interested in how people interact with the world and people around them and I think that is how I have managed to keep and enjoyment level throughout completing my dissertation rather than a topic I have no interest in. What I found challenging when writing my dissertation was making sure I wasn’t using big quotes and instead interpreting what people have said and putting it into my own words and making sure to reference properly. This was hard to remember to constantly do trough the writing but after completing various drafts of the dissertation it became a lot easier to remember and I feel like it has really helped with my writing.

PDP-Dissertation

While completing my dissertation and news story came out about an old friend from school, Amina al Jeffery who has been kept locked up in a cage since leaving school the same time as me in 2012. She remained hidden away, people only finding out about what happened after she managed to send a picture to her friend back in Swansea. There terrible news story really affected me and everyone who was in my year in school. We were also deeply shocked by the events, believing that something like this would never happen to someone we knew. After looking into countless news articles covering the events of Amina, it made me more determined to not only look into the laws and customs found with different cultures and societies of the East, but also really look into the way the Western media portrays the East and how this could have an effect on the way in which the West sees the East.

This is a very sad event which really made the dissertation topic feel close to home, I decided after the discovery of this story that instead of writing a 6,000 word dissertation that I would in fact write 10,000 because it would then give me the scope to really interact with the subject matter and get across everything I wanted to say on the construction of the views that the West has of the East.

PDP- Dissertation

After the discovery of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which in basic terms is the way in which Europe tries to come to terms the vast and very different cultures found with in the East through domination and cultural stereotyping. I became really interested not just in the ways the perception of the East was constructed, but the different factors which have either reinforced the idea of Orientalism or develop upon the existing perception the West has of the East.

One thing that I wanted to make sure was that throughout the dissertation was that there was no prove of taking sides, although I’m obviously looking at the topic from a western point of view, it is imperative for me to stay impartial, commenting on the factors the influence the Western perception and not a comparison between the East and West.

I feel strongly about striving for equality and that everyone deserves to be treated the same and have the same rights without any discrimination therefore I found this topic really interesting because I feel a personal connection to the topic, which helped me stay enthusiastic and determined to keep researching and writing my dissertation.