I'm interested in pursuing a project that deals with the contact zones between humans and animals. After watching the popular documentary Blackfish a couple years ago, I've refused to go to sea parks and zoos, mostly due to the way these places treat the animals. However, I know zoos can be educational and are a part of a conservational process, so I would like to research to what extent zoos and other such institutions are beneficial, and how our relationships with animals change as a result of keeping them in captivity. I would also like to research the consequences and the moral issues of using animals in captivity for entertainment purposes. 

Through my research, especially in reading Howard Zehr's Doing Life, I have started to notice some trends and themes in the way prisoners (particularly lifers) talk about themselves and the system they are in. The lifers in Zehr's book talk a lot about reforming themselves, about how they are different now than they were when they committed the crimes, about penitence and sympathy for victims and their families. Reading these narratives makes me wonder how much those included in the book were vetted, how much of their story was selected to support Zehr's arguments about prisons and prison reform.

Cheryl Strayed decided to go hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail from Mojave, Los Angeles to Portland and the backpack she would carry is her only property on the way. The backpack appears throughout the whole book can seems really important. At the same time, readers can see how she changed the weight of her backpack on her way. The things in backpack are just like the things that she carried on her mind, tormenting her at first; when she took something out of the backpack and throw them away, it is like she threw the painful thoughts out of her mind.

Even though I live in Rhoads Residence Hall, it only had been few days that I got to know Rhoads Dining Hall on the second floor. The first impression when I encountered the place was just so inexplicable. That grandiose chandelier and the wide space with high ceiling were some of the things that I would have never expected to encounter at Bryn Mawr. Who could have ever imagined a place like that in a college campus, or even in a residence hall? And I started to wonder what it would be like to have our ESEM class in that fascinating and exotic place. I tried as much as I could to put the image of Anne, Aniya and girls having class into the place, but I just couldn’t. The more I tried to imagine, the more I dared to choose Rhoads Dining Hall for the place to have the next class.

As a dancer, you are constantly walking that ever so slight line between the paradoxical gesture of making yourself at once as small and as big as possible. Our bodies are both our instruments, vessels that we bend and tone and stretch and compress to convey our deepest expressions of human emotion, and our greatest tragedy. The body will never achieve what it sets out to do; you can always bend further, tone more, stretch farther and compress smaller. You can always do more. And because you are always reaching for the unattainable, the dialogue we strive to achieve becomes lost in the inaccessible in-human.

One of Tocqueville’s aims in Democracy in America is to explore and examine how democracy could be incorporated into other countries apart from the United States, where it supposedly originated. I could not help but thinking several times while reading this book that when we yell, “Show me what democracy looks like” and then people respond “This is what democracy looks like” I hope we are not referring to Tocqueville’s ideas about democracy, specifically his notion that instilling the practices of Christianity into the government will make all citizens equal under the law, which has openly condemned and limited people’s rights, has led to genocide, millions of deaths, and was ultimately created by white men.

Article about a prison art project in Philadelphia now.