Blogs

To be entirely honest, before we arrived and started working with the 5th grade students, I wasn't looking forward to this trip.  Because I was exhausted from the past few weeks and had little experience with teaching, I was very nervous, both about messing up the lesson and about being too tired to connect as much as possible with the students.  When we were told that we'd be working individually with students in the greenhouse, I grew even more anxious, worried that I wouldn't be a good teacher or learning partner to whomever I was paired with.  But, once we started our introduction activity and I saw the students' enthusiam, and their awesome dance moves, my worries dissipated and I felt better than I had for days.  Their energy and enthusiam was infectious, and I found myself increasingly engaged in everything we were doing.  It turned out that my worries about working one-on-one with a student in the greenhouse were unfounded- I really enjoyed working with and talking to the student I was paired with, and I loved hearing about how she likes gardening and math (it always makes me so happy to hear that students like math, since too many educational systems are far too good at teaching students to hate it).  One of the most powerful moments for me was when I was standing with the student I was paired with and another student and, when they asked if I made rubber band bracelets and I said I wasn't sure what they meant, the other student showed me the one she was wearing and said I could have it.

http://parkeharrison.com/

Artist Statement: "We create works in response to the ever-bleakening relationship linking humans, technology, and nature. These works feature an ambiguous narrative that offers insight into the dilemma posed by science and technology's failed promise to fix our problems, provide explanations, and furnish certainty pertaining to the human condition.  Strange scenes of hybridizing forces, swarming elements, and bleeding overabundance portray Nature unleashed by technology and the human hand." 

S.A

Intertwined Threads

Mexican-American, I’m both, not one stepping over the other. My skin radiates historical adventures that trace back beyond what my spoken memories can share. My speaking tongue and my perking ears can understand both sides of the spectrum as I walk on the land of the free, America the brave. I walk each step with fluidity and flexibility, making sure I don’t get too tight on one niche. As a Mexican-American, I carry both threads in me, I’m “heterogeneous and a complex network of entities.” I’m absorptive of both cultures and my existence as a whole is porous and permeable, for both cultures to flow in and out of me but never dissipate.

I have the privilege of being able to jump from one niche to the other. The access and ability I have to be flexible between both worlds is undeniably one of the best advantages of growing up in two different cultures, two different homes fostering me into a young woman with insights in both worlds.

When I was first asked to write about home, I wrote about a place, a school that sheltered me and offered me the landscape to feel safe and free of judgment. But after analyzing the works of Yinka Shonibare’s Magical Ladders and the reading article by Stacy Alaimo: Porous Bodies and Trans- Corporeality, my thoughts on home have altered. My home, my environment, my ecosystem is the intertwined threads of my identification as a Mexican- American.

Since we’ve written our first papers about home, I have realized that there are more factors that go into a home and what defines a home. In my first paper Anne mentioned whether I would consider geologic and natural disasters as part of my home. After reading Exile & Pride by Eli Clare I saw natural disasters as being part of my definition of home. However, in my opinion, natural disasters try to exiles humans from their homes. 

In Exile & Pride Eli Clare talks about his physical disabilities but how he still embraces nature through hiking regardless of the fact that he has a “disability.” People don’t choose to be born with a disability, but if they do have one they learn how to work with it to live a “normal” life. Eli embraces his disability just like he embraces nature. He works with his disability to be able to do what he loves and wants to do. This ties into the idea of where we choose to have our homes and what events will try to “exile” us from them.

Natural disasters are a part of the planet. They affect various areas of Earth mainly along coasts or on plate boundaries where two plates (oceanic or continental) collide, separate, or slide past each other. Natural disasters include volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. In most cases, these events cause property damages, injuries, deaths, and in the long run economic issues due to the rebuilding of the area(s). In particular I wanted to focus on Hurricane Sandy.

this guy (robert fairbanks) is teaching in bmc's soc dept now!
--maybe we should ask him to come and talk w/ us???
sounds like he has some interesting ideas re: the "recovery model":
http://www.ssa.uchicago.edu/end-mass-incarceration

Porous: “having small holes that allow air or liquid to pass through; easy to pass or get through” (Merriam-Webster). Being porous is being open, understanding that we are not just one, standalone, unchanging, impenetrable being. It is understanding that nothing in our world ever is. However, the other aspect of being porous is that to be ‘easy to pass or get through’, it needs to be separate, distinct, and individual. It must, in some way, be nonporous. Can gas be porous? How does gas be considered porous if it is entirely penetrable, and in no way can it be nonporous? In order to be porous, one needs to be an individual entity. With porosity always comes distinction and self-identification. It is in some ways a given in our lives, but it can also be a choice – to see, experience, and interact with the world from different perspectives and vantage points of life. It helps determine who we are as people, and how we function as a society. I feel I have come to my own definition of the word, and my own understanding of the relevance of porosity in our lives to finding our homes and ourselves.

When I first entered this class weeks ago, I wrote an essay defining “home” as “self,” not a structure or a contained space, not family or friends. Home, within my own spirit. In some ways, this demonstrates just how porous a mindset I live with—pushing against the confinement of stability and instead reaching for fluidity. Yet in retrospect, I have come to realize just how bounded my view of “self” in fact was. In separating “self” from place and community, I failed to recognize that these crucial aspects of my life, in fact, create self.

“The material that passes through a body also transforms that body,” so described of the trans-corporeal self (Alaimo 3). Self is, in essence, the reflection of past experiences, relationships, and places. Self might not be inherent or fixed, but instead porous and dynamic. Occasionally my dad notices similar characteristics that delineate parallels between all of my aunts and I, hidden genetic connections dotting our identities of self. At least part of my self may stem from birth, but much of it grows throughout life.

                          Sometimes, when I think about all the people I know and consider friends and all the groups and activities with which I am involved, the places I have lived and the “homes” I have made, I realize I do not have anything I could definitively call my community. Community connotes a number of things-similarity, cohesion, belonging-and while I can easily identify the commonalities between myself and the others with whom I interact, I cannot help but be aware of the differences that exist and suggest difference. Here at Bryn Mawr, for example, I could consider myself a part of many communities: I live in Rockefeller Dorm, I run track and cross country, I am a sophomore student, I am part of this eco-literacy 360. The problem I encounter when I contemplate this, though, is the differences that not only persist between myself and the other individuals in the above communities, but also the fact that difference, separation, and exclusion, arguably the exact opposites of community, delineate and divide these groups to lend them existence in the first place. Scholars and the philosophically inclined have debated and continue to debate what makes an ideal community, but I feel that, before one can describe the ideal community, or community at all, they must first address the differences and divisions that separate one community from the other and how the inclusiveness of community exists alongside isolation and exclusion.