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In Ruth Ozeki’s novel All Over Creation, identity and environment intersect continuously, especially for one character in particular. Yumi Fuller, the daughter of a Japanese woman and a native Idahoan, grows up in an area where she, as an Asian American, looks quite unlike any of her other peers. At age fourteen, she runs away, leaving her home environment behind and focusing on creating a new life, as well as a new identity, for herself. No longer is she the foreigner in Idaho. She is now the self-made woman: A real-estate agent, professor, and single mother.

Anne Dalke writes that slipping is “often unconscious, form of resistance that I’m [Anne Dalke] calling “slipping”: an act of associative mis-speaking” (Anne Dalke, website version). In her work, she cites a few examples, a student hanging the confederate flag out of her window, a student opting out of a learning experience, and the hanging of Christmas lights in a common room. Dalke also quotes a former student, Emily Elstad, “these notions of “slip” posit a new state emerging from the act of slipping, a temporary loss of control that yields both a personal, subjective truth and a changed state that has moved away from “a standard” and into new thought and order.

Two summer’s ago, between eleventh and twelfth grade, I held an internship in a malaria vaccine research lab. The laboratory was testing a self-assembling protein nanoparticle vaccine, and my job for eight weeks, as told to me by the lab’s principal investigator in an email, was to “characterize the protein.” At that point, I knew how to analyze the characterization of Lady Macbeth, Huck Finn, and Nick Carraway but I had no idea what it meant to characterize a protein. Was I to determine its personality? And how did the researchers not know the personality and nature of the protein if they so specifically engineered it?

In class the question was posed: “What is the environment?” A lot of the responses alienated the natural world from human existence by saying in roughly: “I don't eat plants or salad so therefore I have no relation to the environment.” This breakdown of body vs body, we vs it, completely negates the existential threat if sustainable and practical cohabitation is not meet.  The class’s view of the natural world as anything other the human experience removes all responsibility for protection of the earth due to its severance of belonging. The premise being all thing created by human is void of origin when in fact all interactions we, as human have, involve the environment, ie the chair I am sitting on, the wood floor, etc.

I feel that there are several places that I could go with the results of my project with Delilah.  Primarily, I'd like to talk to the Health and Counseling Center about what happened when Delilah and I called several times to schedule an interview and our calls were not returned.  We feel that this oversight may have left a gap in our data that would have been helpful if filled.  Additionally I'd like to consider sharing the information we gathered from our survey with the Health and Counseling Center, if they would be willing to set up a meeting with us.  Although it is obvious that this information does not encompass or speak for all of the students at BMC, we feel that it is still pertinent.

Environmental issues must be addressed, although they are extremely difficult to discuss.  In a conversation about it in person it is hard to engage other people.  In writing, it is even harder to get (and then, keep) the reader’s attention.  This explains why there are so many individuals who lack even a basic understanding of the harm that is being done to the planet, and continue to contribute to said harm.  The only way to have an impact on these issues is to educate the masses in a way that is both accessible and digestible.  The novel The Collapse of Western Civilization and the graphic novel As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial both were written as attempts to reach this goal.

Princess Jefferson

A Project Worth While

            I am not one who naturally likes projects, and I must admit when my professor announced that my class and I would have to do a six week(s) project, I became very anxious. With the end of the semester drawing near, I began to wonder just how productive my project would be. But this project was different; unlike some professors, Anne Dalke, and her Partner in education Jody Cohen, allowed this project to be chosen based on what we, the student would like to conduct research on, and for this I was very grateful. I decided to conduct my project on the culture of politeness here at Bryn Mawr College.

           Humor can be used in writing to teach about a certain topic, make fun of a theory, and most importantly, engage the reader to create a more interesting story.  While humor can be a very useful tool in many different ways, it may not always express the ideas in the most effective manner.  As The World Burns by Jensen and McMillan is a graphic novel that uses a lot of humor to show the awful effects that we humans are having on the environment.  On the other side of the spectrum, The Collapse of Western Civilization by Oreskes and Conway has absolutely no humor in it, in an effort to describe the severity of the environmental problems that will occur in the near future.  These two books express an extreme lack of humor and an excessive amount of humor, but both bring the reader

Intro to Afro-Pessimism

Theoretical Framework: