After completing my six week project, I feel that there is still much that could be done to improve the queer community on campus. I would like to share our findings with some of the clubs we talked to, and see where they can make these issues better. For example, alerting them of the lack of queer people of color representation could perhaps spawn a relationship between Rainbow Alliance and Zami, with perhaps a joint meeting of the clubs to teach the other of the issues their club focuses on. It would also be interesting to share our findings with the newspaper, to try to reach more people on campus and educate them on the different issues the queer community has grappled with.

I’m fascinated by my subject. I have been for a long time and I won’t stop soon.  I have a few people that I wanted to/made plans to interview for this project but didn’t get a chance to before presenting, so I plan on going through with those interviews anyways.  Through one of my interviews I was asked to consider writing a column for *the college news*, Bryn Mawr’s feminist newspaper. I want my first one to be about underwear (bras/binders/etc included) at Bryn mawr. There are two style Instagrams at BMC, HepClo and it’s parody account, SchlepClo, but neither of them address the actual implications and very interesting social and historical implications of clothing. The name for my tentative column is Beatrice’s Boudoir Banter. Stay tuned.

I’m fascinated by my subject. I have been for a long time and I won’t stop soon.  I have a few people that I wanted to/made plans to interview for this project but didn’t get a chance to before presenting, so I plan on going through with those interviews anyways.  Through one of my interviews I was asked to consider writing a column for *the college news*, Bryn Mawr’s feminist newspaper. I want my first one to be about underwear (bras/binders/etc included) at Bryn mawr. There are two style Instagrams at BMC, HepClo and it’s parody account, SchlepClo, but neither of them address the actual implications and very interesting social and historical implications of clothing. The name for my tentative column is Beatrice’s Boudoir Banter. Stay tuned.

Abby Rose

Arts of Freedom

Prof. Joel Schlosser

12/11/15             

Confronting Ageism and Embracing My Mother’s Feminism: A Second Look at Women’s Lib

Many of my interviewees said that both the free boxes and the "For Sale or Free!" facebook page were new forms of exchange that they did not use before college. I think my project would be helpful if shared with new students to Bryn Mawr, to let them know how these exchange platforms are used, and their impacts on the Bryn Mawr population. Combining my research with that of Beatrice's, I think the project opens the door to making both the facebook page and the free boxes more accessible to those who are more economically disadvantaged and could really benefit from these local exchanges.

I was impressed by the variety of topics explored for the contact zone projects. While Bryn Mawr currently considers the needs of different identities and the wants of certain services (bookstore, dining hall, timebanks(?), there is always room to improve. I think my classmates chipped away at specifics within the issues that their subjects presented but many were left at the end wanting to do more. Since the student population here is the type of one who speaks up for themselves (SGA being a prime example), this project was a good way to get us, the new first-years who want to get involved but may not know how, to think about the ways we can impact the school. 

For our six week project we focused on the contact zones of animals in captivity for entertainment. I find this topic incredibly interesting, but a little difficult to talk about definitively without having in depth knowledge about the economics and biology surrounding these animals. The struggle to change the treatment of these animals is nothing new, and while there have been minor victories on this front, I do not believe the problem will be fixed anytime in the foreseeable future. Although I feel strongly about seeking justice for these animals, the most realistic efforts I see myself making for now is spreading knowledge, to everyone I know, of the cruelty these animals are forced to endure on a day to day basis.

when amy and i first brainstormed this project, i didn't have a very specific idea of what i was trying to prove or where we were going to conclude it. in a way, our presentation reflected that; we didn't have a conclusive "this is better, this is worse, this needs to be fixed, this is something more people should consider" ending. i think perhaps this is because of the nature of our project-- instead of examining a specific influence within the contact zone (e.g. gender, sexuality, socio-economic class), we chose to observe a specific type of contact zone and see what it showed us about those influences. what we didn't realize was that, in a sense, there IS no one type... in a classroom environment, every influence collides.

During the six-week project, I was able to learn a lot about the dining services at Bryn Mawr and local/ organic food in general. This six-week project taught me how much I could get acquainted with a subject that I had a mere interest in by taking some real actions to get to know it more –interviewing people related into the field, visiting relevant places that I have never been to, perceiving the world more critically and actually seeing things that I have simply disregarded before. Because of this project, I became more attached with the dining services in our college, because I got to know that dining hall faculties are trying their best to serve the best quality of food within their budget and to have better services.

I learned much more about the Muslim community at Bryn Mawr than I ever thought I would with my project. Both the archival work I researched at Special Collections and the current perspectives I gained through interviews truly gave me an insight I didn’t expect to find. In class, I was able to share a lot of the historical aspects of my project during the presentation, but I just barely touched on the current students’ testimonies due to the time crunch.