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In my first paper, I talked about the discrimination I faced in my high school on the basis of gender and how that had stripped me of various co-curricular opportunities. Though the facts remain the same, I have gained a deeper insight into the situation after reading Mary Louise Pratt’s ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’.
The different approach to make “contact zone”
The title of the story is not “the poor child as a sacrifice” nor “the happy people in Ormeals”, it is “The ones who walk away from Ormeals”. It means the author, Ursula LeGuin, focuses on the people who could not stand with the system in Ormeals and left there. Why it can be the point of the story?
Elena Luedy
Professor Cohen
E-Sem: Changing Our Story
9/11/15
2nd Essay
“Imagined Communites” and the World We Live In
What do you define as your community? Your neighborhood? Your town? Your country? The world? It’s hard to say for myself what I identify my community as. In some ways I thought of it as my town and now that I am at Bryn Mawr College, my college. But in other ways I thought of my overarching community as my country. I am a citizen of The United States of America, doesn’t that make me part of the American community? But what really is the American community?
A shower bag, a shampoo, a hair conditioner, a couple of clothes hangers…and, finally, a couple mechanical pencils for me and my roommate. I thought over and over millions of times what I should get for her to deliver my overly excited feeling toward meeting her. The high school where I went to was a boarding school, an hour and a half long distance from my house by car, three hours by bus. It was possible to go home on weekends, but I decided not to except for the monthly mandatory “Going Home Weekend.” The time it would take me and my parents going back and forth to the school and the repeated poignant moments of saying good bye to my parents every weekend were some kind of considerations that made me decide to stay at the school even on weekends.
What brought him here?
That was the first thought I had when I realized exactly who I had struck up a conversation with. He was a talented, older, highly educated man. I was a young girl in high school, who had ordered an Americano instead of a cappuccino because the extra 75 cents still meant something to me. It had been like any other day at my favorite local coffeehouse, but that day, I feel impulsive enough to talk to someone new.
What could he be doing?
I met a young boy online once. He was kind, talented, and very broken. We did nothing more than talk through the phone, yet I understood the pain and the weariness he felt. I sympathized with his emotions and I adopted them as my own in order to grow closer to understanding all the components that made up his consciousness.
I move a lot. I currently live in New York City, but I was born in Arizona and have lived in multiple homes between then and now. Moving is mostly fun and exciting, but it has its difficulties. Perhaps one of the more arduous, painstaking difficulties is keeping contact with old friends.