Arts of Resistance Tags
Shirah, Han and I are all planning on working together for this project (rosea may be as well, due to our overlapping interests, but we have not all interacted as a whole group to discuss the full posibilities yet.)
“Black people should just forgive and forget and need to just move on,” one black woman in the prison said the first week.
Moments like these interest us: how does the prison system affect prisoners’ sense of self and of justice? Is this like sex-gender oppression and the creation of docile bodies, removing the right to be hostile? How much does education in prisons influence prisoners’ ways of thinking, about themselves and the world as a whole? Without compromising our relationships with the people we engage with every week, we want to focus on stories and experiences—they are so powerful and True with a capital “T.” We can also integrate this qualitative data with quantitative data.
We think it’ll be an open kind of collaboration- we’ll work together in several areas, but we won’t be afraid to diverge on others. That way we won’t impede on each other’s artistic ideas or research directions, but we’ll still be able to collaborate and better our work as a whole.
Comments
Research Update: Some personal reflection
Submitted by han yu on October 3, 2015 - 13:00 Permalink
Can something still be implicit if more and more people start to acknowledge its secluded existence? Can any policy continues to survive if the majority realized the conspiracy behind? Can we tolerate ourselves of being part of a contradicting law of jungle game in a civil society after have been disclosed to the fact that our vulnerability and ignorance are always being used for some political greed?
To be honest I am still not clear about my accountability here and this fact upsets me. I am not a politician. I am not a significant academic figure. I feel my disability and absurdness if I claim any aspiration to a huge, intangible topic like saving the society. I do not know and I am not confident to the question of how many people I can save, except saving myself. And I doubt my position and agency and the right to tell someone else that “I am here to save you!”
However sometimes I still believe that, if more and more people can start to save themselves, just themselves, by being able to learn and exercise their own psychological process, in such an aggregating process the hope of a society will emerge to the surface from an abyss again. Only thinking from this perspective can I become motivated again.
At this moment, I want to keep learning about the psychological aspect of people’s implicit racial profiling process (well, obviously the people in power), their implicit participation in this punish-based criminal justice system, (and for the people disenfranchised), their sense of self, interpretation of being a “criminal”, their reason and rights of expressing anger and despair, their willingness of accepting therapies and how the therapy, or rehabilitation should be like.
I am also grateful to see three other classmates, Abby, Julia and Shirah have some overlapping interests with me, willing to learn more about this issue together. I have read through my sources which I posted at the beginning of research proposal and I still believe they are helpful. And I still want to focus a little more on children and students. To add on those, I started to read The New Jim Crow, in order to learn more about how politics, depending on history and people’s ignorance and disadvantages in grasping the whole picture, to further make use of the majority. And I genuinely believe that, through our learning and sharing about the truth and human nature (especially people’s psychological vulnerability), we can save ourselves and simultaneously provide the resources and opportunities for other people to save themselves.