Yes, here we are again, for a hipster is never mainstream. It has been weeks of endless discussing and meeting and now: we finally get to the point.

Okay, back to our last update. Somewhere in April that must have been. Before that date we were really stuck in our research and this went on for weeks in a somewhat continuous circle. Maybe some more fieldwork? Maybe just drink some more expensive coffee and shop some hip stuff while we’re on it? But the thing was, we already did this kind of fieldwork and as a student, being broke (because of really nice jewellery which is the latest fashion, a vintage sweater or a tasty soy latte) is not the best option.

Thus, the last presentation was a perfect representation of a replay. As said, we were somehow struggling with writer’s block or in this case: research block. But worst thing was that we didn’t quite know where the struggles occurred. So, we decided to meet a few times more to talk about, for instance, the presentation. We concluded after the last meeting before the presentation that we already told a lot about what we wanted to tell this time and so this would be quite of a repetition but with some little details added.

After the feedback moment of  the last presentation it became more clear to us where we had to improve our research and which links we were missing and we broke the circle in which we were circling around and around. At the same time as the presentation, we had to deliver our draft of the research paper. This also lacked a few things and was sticking too much to the same things also. There wasn’t even a research question then… Could you even imagine our distress at some moments?

Combining the feedback of these two we dove deeper in the research.

First things first: hipsters as a micro-population. Although this maybe seems as something that could have been done before since the layered hipster culture was already mentioned before within the group at a distant presentation, it was not an easy task. We had only a few literal sources to refer back to. Another look at the semiotics came soon after that. The use of literal sources (the ones mentioned in the last blog for instance) was less hard and with the use of all of the existing fieldwork and observations it was just a matter of linking this to the given theories.

The difference between on- and offline hipsters but this time, these two are divided in different aspects or explained per enterprise to make it more clear. For instance the offline hipsters are consisting of 5 different aspects. Of course the use of the interviews are quite useful researching this. The online seems to be very much linked to the offline we analysed. Instead of only  finding out the hipsterness of Tilburg, we also tried to find out what the ‘Tilburgian hipster’ is and what it takes to be one.

Last week was the last meeting before the one but last presentation of the hipster research. Again it seemed as if we didn’t quite know what else had to be done besides using the feedback, make some changes in the paper using this feedback and adding micro-population as the number 1 thing to do. To be honest, I didn’t know what had to be told in the blog as well since we are discussing a lot of the same old thing and as an Tilburgian hipster admirer I don’t want to be mainstream. However the blog had to be written and I was more than happy to do it.

Well, I guess that all has been mentioned up to this day. I think that the most important things for us to do was to come up with a research question that was linked to the micro-population. That’s exactly what happened. Having something to hold on to made it less difficult to write about the research. Secondly we stayed a bit at the surface at first but combining the different theories, literature and our findings we made big steps in the right direction… Well at least, I hope and think we did. Tomorrow is the last presentation before the big research questions presentation so the last opportunity to find out if we did the right thing. Let’s drink some expensive ecological coffee on it.