Baby Steps Towards Ecological Intelligence

Who is your mother? Are you someone’s mother? According to Oxford Dictionary of English, the prior meaning of ‘mother’ is ‘a woman in a relation to a child or children to whom she has given birth.’ Original meaning of ‘mother’ was a biological mother. However, the meaning of ‘mother’ has altered so far. It is no longer simple as such.

In Baraitser’s postscript of Ruddick, she introduces Ruddick’s argument saying “maternity is only ever a social practice, one that can be performed by men and women alike, and with a range of ‘others’ that may or may not be our biological children.” She says ‘mother’ neither has to be a woman who gave a birth to her children nor even a woman.

Joie Waxler

12/12/15

A Second Chance for Educators

Wild impressed me a lot as a memoir instead of a novel. I was attracted by Cheryl’s description about her past and her straightforward attitude to those desperate memories. However, as long as I read, I found she is a pretty complex person. She is not that responsible to herself and her family to some extant, and I found it is not that reasonable to me when she discarded herself after the death of her mother. She is also destined and strong in other aspects through her decision and experiences on PCT. This is the kind of inspirational story, but I can feel the sincere emotion in it. I’m really looking forward to read the following stories.

Project Proposal- BMC and HC Contact Zone

Caitlin Otter and Alison Shao

October 23, 2015 

In America, as we have often discussed in class, incarceration is more often viewed as a space designed to punish, rather than rehabilitate or empower people to escape a system designed to capture and isolate them.  Further, the prison system tends to punish a very select group of individuals, those labelled “dangerous” by our white, patriarchal society. It is rigged to take in greater numbers of the people deemed most contrary to said world, as evidenced by the fact that the numbers of black women in prison is swelling the most (Halkovic).  Removing them from general society not only allows society to create many lies around them, but keeps them from expressing their own needs and having them resolved. Out of the public eye, they are easily forgotten.

Through this project, I experienced emotional up and down and also I understood people’s different reactions to the same situation.

In the first one or two months, I saw many international students cry missing their home countries but I had not cried at all since I enjoyed the life here so much. However, I cried for the first time here when my dean asserted me that I have no choice but keep on living in the dorm and eating the food in the dining hall when I told her that I wanted to live off campus to eat safer food. I was shocked because I studied and experienced about organic food and GMO food and felt uncomfortable to eat at the dining hall. This experience made me realize how important the food is to me.

When what's learned here doesn't leave here: Prison education with a life sentence

I feel like there is so much that I can do about my topic even now that I am done with the presentation. I would love to talk to the heads of Zami and ask them why they feel the need for a seperate gender and sexuaity affinity group for people of color. Moreover, I would like to know about more people's experiences and see if there are any other dimensions of people's identities apart from race, and inclination towards sexual acitvity that clash with Bryn Mawr's queer community's general perception of what it means to be queer. I would also like to talk to the heads of gender and sexuality afinity groups and ask them to conduct discussions including the findings in our project.

( I'm sorry for being that ahead of time, but I really want to document my feelings and thoughts as they are still fresh )

In Jody’s class Thursday after the opening of our exhibition, I critiqued on my own work in the group project that I didn’t feel it is accessible enough to the viewers although I kind of intentionally created some ambiguity. However, my views started to change after hearing people’s opinions on “Freedom” in Friday’s Socrates Café.

Feeling free is very subjective and it can mean anything to different people. And Abby said that, citing her friend, freedom is people having equal limitations.