The morning started with an insightful conversation with traveller and author Ben Aitken. In order to explore the experience of immigration, alienation and isolation, he migrated to a Polish town. His experience in Poland as a British outsider was condensed into writings and eventually the book (), in the form of a collective of diary-style passages. Ben shared quite a few readings from the book with us, including being invited to a Polish wedding, adopting a teaching position in a Polish school, working at a fish and chips restaurant because of the assumption of his ‘British Identity’, and so forth. Much of his comments on the current political situation were extremely intricate, somewhat controversial but never a bore. Indeed his thoughts stirred up a lot of conversation among the audience.
Then anthropologist Zora Kostadinova gave us key pieces of advice on fieldwork. She emphasised that, as investigators of a culture (or, as she put it, an ‘experience’, because of the politically-loaded connotations the word ’culture’ has), was to view the interviewees as personal agents rather than a calculated reflection on a political or geographical entity. It is important during our interview to make the person we are interviewing feel comfortable and welcomed. It can be achieved for example, by empathising with the person, by asking him/her what it feels like to be home, and by being completely honest about our initiatives and how the footage or photo is going to be used in the project.
In our language session with Petroc we recapped numbers in Welsh, and the grammatical mutations that occur after prepositions. Then we moved on to talking about famous Welsh places and traditional and pop Welsh culture. Petroc offered us an extremely interesting into the range and dynamics of modern Wales.
Then we divided into a portrait group and a film group. Most of us visited the Welsh centre in the late afternoon as preparation for field materials.
European London 