Web Paper or Special Event

Hair is a physical marker of difference onto which social signifiers are imprinted. Hair of all kinds is reshaped and chemically altered by different processes in order to exploit socially established notions of beauty. In this way, hairstyles and hair function as social capital. Nevertheless, hegemonic interpretations of Black hair and hairstlyes inscribe additional levels of cultural and political meaning onto the ways that Black womyn decide to style their hair.

Dear Anne,

Having chosen and came to this class is one of the luckiest thing I have in the first semester of Brynmawr. I was born and raised in a small town of China until I was 15, then I came to an international high school in Shenzhen alone, an international city, for four years. Now I come to US, a totally different country and culture for me. This is how my story changes. The esem topic “changing our story” is hence an appealing topic for me, I hoped it would help me to understand different cultures and also ourselves. At the end of the semester, it turns out to be true.

By the end of the semester, our presentation project topic also comes to an end. Compare to the conclusion and the process of presentation that lasted for 7 minutes, our process of drafting the plan and the research process that lasted for more than a month is much more meaningful and significant.

                                                        IN COLE’S SHOES

       Dear Anne,

            Many organisms on Earth have dealt with pain. But what exactly is pain? The definition of Pain is “physical suffering or distress, as due to injury or illness”. Humans associate pain with organisms that have a conscious or can experience emotions. For example, animals feel scared when they are to be eaten by other predators. What about the other organisms on Earth? What about the plants? Do plants feel scared when they are to be cut off from their roots in order to be eaten or made into other products? Many people don’t associate plants having a conscious because they are supposedly “emotion-less”. But they grow and reproduce like many species and eventually die due to consumption.

this zine will always be a work in progress because identity is always a work in progress.

Interring Black Humanity

What does a grave give to a body? Perhaps not to a body, but to the survivors. To the loved ones. To those who remember. To history. They say you die twice: once when you stop breathing, and a second time when somebody says your name for the last time. But what if the subject experiences systemic dehumanization, social death, before they reach their last breath? In this essay, I will focus on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Getting Mother’s Body, and Alice Walker’s search for Hurston’s graveto highlight how the burial of Black bodies is significant to the construction of humanity in a White supremacist society.

In last paper, I recalled that before starting to read As the World Burns, I thought the main solution to people’s indifference toward the global warming is to tell people what they can do in daily life, no matter how trivial they are, instead of just stressing on how serious the problem is becoming.