Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Sunday Post

By meerajay
November 15, 2015 - 17:14
meerajay's picture

Friday at the prison was harrowing, left me aching,  somehow less hopeful than before. But I felt privileged to be in that space, listening to these stories, as excruciating as they were.

Sunday Post 11.15

By han yu
November 15, 2015 - 16:57
han yu's picture
This week in the thursday group we continued the discussion on social activism from last week's topic about voting rights. Always trying to relate what I've learned in class or from readings to my experiences in the facility, I felt some conclusions in Reading is My Window salient to me. One example is that people (no matter what specific environment or community they are in) always have so many different perspectives and there is never one single answer to all the questions, or one single theory that fits everyone. We should always avoid defining the people inside solely by their status as being a group of inmates and should never assume consensus (the fact that they are living in the same environment does not necessarily mean that they all share the same opinions on most issues).

The Subtlety of Environmental Racism

By ai97
November 14, 2015 - 17:08
ai97's picture

Last Thursday, I attended University of Oregon Professor David J. Vasquez's public lecture, "Fueling the Agribusiness Engine: Helena Maria Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus and the Cross-Currents of U.S. Environmentalism". This talk was interesting to me because it highlighted discrimination in places that I didn't clearly see discrimination before. I was fascinated by the subtleties of environmental racism that are never at the forefront of our minds, such as how there is much less funding available to have clean air in low-income, minority neighborhoods. Vasquez intrduced the idea of ecocriticism, which imagines people of color as too busy/unconcerned with environmental harm.