I am no stranger to literature searching, which is one of my main jobs in this project, but I would say I am learning a lot of little things on how to refine a search. Looking back on it, my old way was basic brute force. I would take my search terms and just scroll, but that can also have the downside of being very time-consuming. Now what I can do is download the search files, merge the CSV files in Excel, delete duplicates, and then easily scroll through all the titles! I also got to learn how to use Mendeley, a citation keeper, which I will definitely use in future writing projects. It was always annoying having to keep track of the article and citations, but with a simple extension, it functions together with Word, so I can create a reference list and insert citations very easily. I think the most obvious thing I learned just has to be the subject material. Prior to this, none of my WGS coursework had ever centered on AI/AN people. Although unfortunately, what I suspected of the tribes getting the short end of the stick many times ended up being true mostly, it was interesting to see how cultural differences shaped issues in a unique way, although that wasn’t entirely the main focus of the project. As for my biggest challenge definitely RACING THE CLOCK!
As for my social identity, I am not of the AI/AN community. I learned about this community in small pieces through Western research studies that it has a notoriously bad relationship with, for good reasons. The whole picture is mostly lost to me, as I am not familiar with their history or tensions with the US government. My research focuses on medical records and demographic characteristics. Indigenous ways of being and medicine are not analyzed, which is a critical component of many of their lives. Just through my own off-work hours findings, the way indigenous people talk about their maternal health crisis is cultural revitalization, not so much, for example, diabetes management, though that is not to say that isn’t important. The WGS student in me wants to find a way to marry these two concepts into my research, but sadly, time constraints mean I must limit my scope to actual available data.