During the time of coronavirus, students of SCIE are all staying at home for the purpose of quarantine. However, members of the Politics ECA have successfully reunited through internet technology, and have gone through a wonderful discussion about the Super Tuesday event during the ongoing presidential election in the United States.
Our ECA activity was led by Mr Richard Driscoll as always. Before the class, Mr Richard has sent a little task for me and Davena: research on the Super Tuesday event and some of its primary candidates, including their original positions, main policies the number votes they get respectively. I will give a little summary here. The US presidential election is usually split into two stages, namely the primary election and a formal one afterwards. Super Tuesday is the primary election usually held in February or March when the greatest number of US states hold primary elections and caucuses. It will strongly impact on the final results of the election, so this day is therefore named as “Super Tuesday”. (We don’t really know why it’s Tuesday and not any other day though!)
The main candidates during the 2020 presidency election include Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (these two had just quitted the election unfortunately), all from the democratic party. From the other side we have Donald Trump for the republicans, and he is leading the votes in his party as the current president.
Joe Biden, being the 47th vice president of the United States, is an outstanding lawyer and politician in Delaware. He was also an experienced vice senator in his state and was ranked fifth as the youngest senator in American history.
Bernie Sanders is a Jewish American and is currently a senator in Vermont. He appeared on the ballots as an independent in the previous years, but as he joined the democratic party in this 2020 election he is considered to be a democratic candidate. He called himself a “democratic socialist” and seeks to promote welfare guarantees for the middle and lower classes and favours protectionism in hisdiplomatic policies. Based on his policies he was often considered as the “JeremyCorbyn of the United States”. (They look alike indeed)
Davena also gave an introduction onElizabeth Warren, a libertarian from the democratic party. Warren was once a republican in Pennsylvania, and changedto the democratic party in 1996, also became the first female senator from Massachusetts. However, her election results did not seem to be satisfactory. In the Super Tuesday primary elections, Warren did not actually win in any state, including her own state Massachusetts and her hometown, Oklahoma.
In this discussion, someone raised an interesting question: Why are the candidates for presidential elections getting older in recent years? Joe Biden was even close to 80 years old in this 2020 election. We have come to the conclusion that in recent years, the demands on the political experience and financial situation of the candidates have become higher and tighter. Many candidates have to work in the Senate or the House of Representatives for many years before they can finally climb to the top.
We also made an interesting comparison between the US election and the previous British prime ministerial election. Unlike the traditional 21-day campaign in the United Kingdom, the presidential election in the United States are much more time-consuming than in the United Kingdom and usually lasts for 1 to 2 years. Elections in the United States also focus more on the personalities and standpoints of the candidates: how they stand on issues such as racism, gender equality, and the issue of abortion that has attracted a lot of attention in recent years will usually severely affect their support. This explains why elections in the US will usually bring out many trivial and gossipy news (e.g. Hillary Clinton ’s “Mail Gate” during the 2016 election and Donald Trump ’s sexist comments used by his competitors to attack him).
The students of politics club have had an opportunity to engage in a wonderful discussion and had benefited a lot from it.
My essay is on the recent development of China’s mental health care system and how it can help address this question. Though, I actually parried the question raised by the prompt, and I did not in the end emphasise too much that more care should be devoted to the socially vulnerable. Rather, I intended to underscore the complexity and ambiguity in any employment of these two notions — “socially vulnerable” and “responsibility” — in the concrete working of society. Through my study I discovered that the train of legislative efforts made in the 1980s to 2000s to legally recognise, to enhance public knowledge of, and to erect new asylums for, “the mentally ill,” in fact coincided spatiotemporally with government efforts in putting new agendas of foreign policies and city development to work. Thus, the recent development of China’s mental health care, from scratch to full maturity, is not solely the consequence of “humanitarian effort,” but also of some other ulterior motives. In my conclusion, I hinted that any answer to this question would entail empirical investigation into the concrete working of social institutions, and depending on the nature of this “socially vulnerable” group, claims of “responsibility” may be leveraged as veils for other purposes.
Before starting my research I did not by then have a well-formed hypothesis, but I did have Michel Foucault’s intriguing study on madness in mind. Due to the rather peculiar nature of the object of my study, I was not able to apply the sociological theories (Marxism, Functionalism, e.g.) I learnt in class to my own research. I must thank my sociology teacher for his encouragement and provision of many textbook resources and classical studies done in the field of mental health care. In addition to that, he prepared a statement of the school for my application to conduct short interviews at a local mental health hospital — this application, however, though quite expectedly, sank into oblivion — without his help this project would be very difficult.
I made a documentary “The Definition” about the situation of elderly in Shenzhen to enter this competition. As I have some previous knowledge in filmmaking, learning from TBU studio, I though it would be meaningful if I combined my filmmaking skills with sociology knowledge. In the meanwhile, after learning the very first chapter of sociology, The Family, I found out that the situation of elderly in the UK is different from that of elderly in Shenzhen. For instance, elderly have the responsibility taking care of their grandchildren and dance in the park for entertainment is distinctive in China. Therefore, I decided to make a documentary to record the interesting culture.
I learnt a lot during the preparation for the competition. I learned a lot about how to carry out an individual primary research when I was filming “The Definition”, which helps a lot in my current sociology study. Also, I understood sociology theories better. For instance, postmodernism used to be only a vague theoretical perspective for me, yet it amazed me knowing that elderly people participate actively in public activities can be considered as view of postmodernism.
Most importantly, I realized filmmaking can make some impacts on people, portraying problems of society. Experience of BSA opened my eyes and led me rethink about my future major in college. I want use my skills and knowledge to help more people, so I will probably try a major with humanity and filmmaking combined instead of pursuing the dream of being an artist alone.
Learning sociology gives me a new perspective in seeing how the world works, and it also lets me care more about the vulnerability in the society. Thank you to my sociology teacher, Richard Driscoll, who gave me lots of inspiration such as filming the dancing in the park, which is interesting to British people, and recommenced lots of sociological books about the elderly.
By listening to his advice, “The Definition” eventually divides into two parts: one is about the elderly in nursing home and the other is about people dancing in the park. Also, there is many interviews in the documentary to give a more well-rounded perspective.
I would like to thank my Math teacher Michael Jin and my friend Franchaska, who helped me with the voice over. Also, thanks to my family members, especially my dear grandmother, who gave me lots of insights related to the issue of elderly.
I made this documentary just before the deadline, thus it’s not so perfect. I’ll probably elaborate some shots and reedit it in the future.
If you are interested, you can click the link below and watch it.
Teng Xun Video:https://v.qq.com/x/page/u0862usad2v.html
Bilibili:https://www.bilibili.com/video/av38188271?from=search&seid=10452775157822232568