Blogs

Last Friday (December 9th) I posted an opinion piece on the napkin notes and MTVu discussion that’s been happening in Erdman Dining Hall for the past few weeks. When I wrote it, I knew it would be public – that was part of the assignment for our class. However, I didn’t realize how quickly it would spread to be a topic of discussion. Even as we speak the MTVu situation is growing more and more complicated.

On Wednesday night (December 14th), I spent three hours talking to some friends about gender, class, and different appreciations for body types based on race and culture. I can’t possibly capture everything that was said, but one aspect that I felt was very important to our discussions of objectification and the television was who is criticizing the TV’s presence, and why. 

Disruption in the Interpretation of Embodied Symbols

Final Web Event

Assumptions are made about individuals through the expression and interpretation of embodied acts and body language is the conduit for social meaning.  The social meaning behind bodily acts are disrupted when the movement itself is not completely controlled by the individual.  Disability, gender, and communication are all entangled in a web of perception, symbolism, and agency.  This web of entanglement causes people to not see an action for as it was intended and make assumptions about a person on their limited controls on bodily action.  Interpretations of bodily actions are often misunderstood when an individual is not completely able bodied.

In my second web event I questioned Bryn Mawr Colleges admission policy regarding transgender students. I wrote a mock scenario in which a prospective transwoman has a discussion with her mother about wanting to attend Bryn Mawr. In preparation for this project I talked to a few people in administrative positions at the College and was faced with requests at remaining anonymous in their answers. Because of the lack of receiving answers to my questions, I posed my web event as a question. Are transwoman allowed to apply to and attend Bryn Mawr College?

In my third web event, I traced the history of the College in regards to its mission and history of transgender topics. There have been several web events posted by Bryn Mawr students on Serendip, which were very informative and useful in my own movement towards gaining more knowledge of how to build a right relationship between Bryn Mawr College and transgender students. In this web event my focus switched from not only transwomen, but also transmen. I also used information on the Transgender Task Force, which was created in 2007. I noted that President McAuliffe approved the recommendations made by the task force in 2009.

Now, where do I go next? I’ve noted what I believe is Bryn Mawr’s role in the 21st century regarding transgender students. However, I don’t have enough facts. I lack information…knowledge…

I created my third web event with every intention of deriving from it a workshop meant to bring together Israeli and Palestinian young adults over shared literatures. Literature was a medium through which, I had argued, right relationships had the space and time to emerge, and was a form particularly suited toward broader socio-political change. While I was excited about this final web event and its possibilities, I was also somewhat daunted by my own distance from the site of relationship building. I was also concerned by the spatial impracticalities of actually translating this workshop into action. I have become, through the course of the semester, very interested in how academic conversation can be used as groundwork for activity and doing; it seemed duplicitous to consider in my postings how “a group of listeners becomes a group of actors,” and even create frameworks for such a transition, but have no intention of taking this kind of action myself.

For our final performance, Sam and I organized two games that inspired by two articles that we felt impressed:  Pedagody of the Opressed by Paulo Freire and The Achivement of Desire by Richard Rodriquez. We hope it would make our performance more interactive and try to cover some of the main themes we talked about in class, including: social mobility and education, interactive education and generally, the affects on class on people's behaviors in and approaches to their education. Here I attached our script used for the performance:

21 QUESTIONS

Occupations will be posted on the backs of each participant. 

Have sections of the room help people guess who they are by answering their questions. 

Rule is that you can only ask yes or no questions.

1.  First Round: Basic (doctor, lawyer, Michael Jordan)
2. Second (more difficult) Round Use money to signify the amount of questions that can be allotted to each participant (a quarter for 25 questions, dime for 10 questions, a nickel for 5 questions)

ROUND 1 EXPLANATION:

First off, I would like to commend every person for her insightful, creative, and moving representation of the issues surrounding class and education. The presentations caused me to both reflect on this course and further my thoughts. One thing I thought was neat about the presentations was that the groups were integrated from both classes. The variety of approaches to this assignment reminded me of just how successful and progressive collaborative diversity can be. The diversity of the presentations really amazed me – they showed the many ways we can approach the issue of class, the wide variety of issues surrounding class (it’s not quite as simple as one might think!), the diversity of thought about class, and, most importantly, how every single one of these topics influences and furthers the “class” discussion (no pun intended.) It was also interesting to see how some people were particularly fascinated and influenced by specific authors and their ideas. I feel like understanding what has been written about class and education and either furthering it or arguing against it is one of the most crucial aspects in continuing the discussion within the academic world. I focused paper number eleven on the way in which academic writing restricts access to thoughts and ideas, so I was especially excited to see academia engaged in so many creative ways: further proof that writing is not the only way to share and change thoughts and ideas.