Sharaai's blog

The Perry House Couch: Sittin' Down to Take a Stand ; our tumblr!

I ended up writing my memo on the various changes of the program, mostly on what could have happened if we ended up in FDC and how our class ended up adjusting and working out with the Cannery. And I like this image cause it shows how the paths have no end, which is how I feel like our journey with this course will be for a long while. At least for me, I have no idea when it will all come full circle for me. 

"Silence is pregnant, not empty.”

When Linda-Susan Beard came to our class, I didn’t know what to expect. I knew that I had heard her name in class and during my time at Bryn Mawr but that was all I knew of her.

But when she began to speak, I was immediately pulled in. I was worried that I was going to have a hard time paying attention since I had such a long week but I was completely pulled in from the beginning.

So with Thrusday’s Silence class came along some “prayer” and when Anne was talking about the activity we were going to do, I could not help but begin to feel a little anxious. And if I can recall correctly, I remember mentioning that in class. Anywho, I just want to reflect on why exactly I felt that way. I think a lot of it has to do with my apprehensions with religion. and I don’t think that these apprehensions really have to do with the idea of religion versus an actual type of religion. The class activity went better than I expected, even though I found myself asking a lot of questions during the praying section and not necessarily having/getting any answers…

“Finally it’s my turn and I want the best education I can have”

In thinking about Bryn Mawr’s campus, it becomes obvious that many small communities exist within our walled community. Communities consisting of students of color, international students or students from the same area. An important community within Bryn Mawr is the Katharine E. McBride Scholars Program or McBride Scholars for short. They are women, twenty four or older, who did not complete their college education after high school for one reason or another. Bryn Mawr looks for non-traditionally aged students that exemplify intelligence, talent and achievement. These traits may be displayed through volunteer work, their jobs or some form of formal study. What separates McBride scholars from many traditionally aged students are their life experiences. Many of the women have family commitments such as children and aging parents or full time jobs. Some have put their education on a hiatus due to financial reasons or simply because of life and the tribulations it can bring along.

Mode of address is a concept based out of film and media studies, it is a way for filmmakers to think about who their audience is going to be, a form of analysis on the power relations between the audience and the subject of the film (Ellsworth, 1997, p. 1). It allows for the filmmaker to think about ideas of class, gender sexuality, race and much more while working on their product. This process allows for them to frame their stories so that the viewer can relate or interpret it in a way that plays off of the filmmaker’s assumptions. As analytical readers, we contemplate what the author is trying to tell us and what they want us to take out of their stories. As readers, we can take this concept of mode of address and analyze why we think characters make their decisions and what the author would like us to take out of it. We can interpret their choices, the relationships they are part of or the neighborhood they live in to figure them out. Through this process we, as readers, would be exploring Gayle Jones’ mode of address in context to Eva. We would be thinking about Eva’s choices, what they mean to her and what Jones could also mean by them.

This is the image I used in my summary. It is a photograph by Jacob Riis, taken in 1890, that I feel exmplifies Howard Zehr's ideas of looking at crime/criminals with a bigger frame in mind. This photos purpose was to show that enviroment was a cause of crime and not biology.

Reading about niches really got me thinking about my own personal niches, other's niches and specifically what the women at the Cannery do while they are there to make their niches.

When I think about my own niche and about it's relationship to Bryn Mawr, I realize that if I had not found my niches within the BMC community, in many locations, that my experiences here would not have been so fulfilled and satisfying. But my discovery of niches does not feel comparable to those in the reading. I feel that they are found coming from different reasoning but I also feel like they can be compared because people find niches for the same general reasons.

In connection to Doing Life, I wonder if those in the book found their own self-discovery as a niche. I say this because alot of the people in the book talk about how they have changed as people and how they have realized their mistakes that brought them to where they are. Have they found niches within their own minds that have allowed them to escape and reflect?

With Christine Sun Kim’s visit to our class, her silly but thoughtful activity, and our visit to the “What Can a Body Do?” exhibit at Haverford, the idea of silence and sound in respect to members of the Deaf community, ASL and those that can hear have continuously popped into my head. I have always found myself intrigued by signing and how beautifully it flows and how much can be said in simple signs. Along with signing come the facial expressions that make up most of the grammar in ASL and the sounds made during conversation. But when it comes to those that hear, silence is often something we fear; a part of our life that we choose to push away but crave at other moments. Ideas of sound and silence are both topics that link themselves with her visit and our class as a whole.

Being able to experience Kim’s art first hand and welcoming her into our classroom, I couldn’t help but feel like connecting it all to our class’ conversations about silence or our approaches to silence. I feel like they are similar journeys. Not to say that our journey is anything compared to hers  but that we have also been struggling to figure out where we belong in an environment filled with silence and what that means for us as a whole class and individually. As Kim said to us and as it says in the “What Can A Body Do?”  gallery pamphlet, her art is her own way of taking “ownership” of sound. As we have been constantly discussing, silence is an element that we may have not directly considered or consciously considered.

After writing my paper, I looked up some images of 2Pac with his quotes and I found this. I really like and wanted to share.