Web Paper or Special Event

Kate Weiler

Re-evaluating Remedies: Treatment’s Effects on Agency

            In response to “As the World Burns” by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan, Teju Cole, the author of “The White- Savior Industrial Complex” would state that the complex is prominent in any situation whether it targets justice or environmental issues. He would further agree with the idea that one contribution towards environmental problems is the fact that people are not looking at the bigger picture to solve the damage caused to the environment. In Cole’s article, he argues that people, especially white privileged people, go out of their way to better situations merely to satisfy their own needs of making themselves feel better. In other words, it is only based on selfish motives that people go out of their way to help others.

Photo-Journal: The Process 

This photo journal is very much a self reflection. I wanted to explore the theme of black womynhood, with an emphasis on the idea of crazy, inexplicable feelings leading to a conscious and political statement.

I took all of the images myself. I also edited them and curated them. I also designed the layout of the photo journal.

As for the process for choosing the text, I drew from readings (Beloved, bell hooks conversation) we had in class as well as in class conversations (intersectionality, love, and my bringing womanism to the classroom dynamic). I also used my personal writing and one of my favorite books, The Autobiography of Assata Shakur. 

The journal is attached below as a PDF.

The graphic novel As the World Burns, depicts a unique narrative of how the people and the animals of the world stick up for the earth against the governments and corporations trying to destroy it.  The illustration style is very interesting because without it the story would be received differently. They also present hidden messages that otherwise would be lost in a normal novel setting.

“He had given up his self to the alien, an unreserved surrender, that left no place for evil. He had learned the love of the Other, and thereby had been given his whole self” (LeGuin, “Vaster...” 37). The lines, from Ursula k. LeGuin’s short story ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow’ read like a celebration of empathy. This is surprising in its contrast to LeGuin’s other  tale, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, which portrays empathy as too weak to overcome fear, an ineffectual emotion that appropriates the suffering of others in order to provide a more complex emotional experience. In the story about planetary explorers on a conscious world of interconnected plant life, empathy plays a very different role.

In my last essay, I expressed my fear of “nature with all its infinite silence and unpredictability”. Does silence help me or us (humankind) as a society? In education, teachers/professors tell us to be quiet for a test or to take time alone to think about a concept, but does silence allow us to actually reach any solutions? When we are young parents tell us to time out, leaving us with only our own frustrations and anger, alone in our own silence.  Yet in in these interactions we are hardly ever in actual silence. Even right now as I write this, as I think I am in silence, I hear the hum of my computer and the mumble of the TV coming from downstairs. So why would I be afraid of nature’s silence, and why does it leave me feeling vulnerable to an unpredictable world?

The Power of Education

Slippage: The Stubborned Mind 

Effectiveness of the Novels

As the World Burns, by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan and “Collapse of Western Civilization” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway are both books targeting towards the same points: the severity of our environmental issues and urgency to make a change. Both of them are effective but to really different audiences. However, one is more effective regarding the aspect of education and really making a change. 

My friend once asked me, half joking: does crab think fish can fly? In response, I asked him back: how do we know birds are not swimming?