The more time that passes --- the more time I have to process the "restorative justice" mural tour yesterday, the more problematic I find it... and the mural arts program in general (plus someof the comments made by our tour guide). The question I'm contemplating most now is about the difference between these murals and street art/graffiti. Especially if one (the mural) is combatting/silencing the other.

          Although I want to respond to my first web event on active listening, I don’t think I will be able to. I’ve learned so much about communication and how communication is affected by privilege since that reflection that I have to move in another direction.

            This past week in the 360 has been an emotionally charged one – challenging, frustrating, belief shaking. After Tuesday’s class, I felt so confused about my voice, about my place in the world and my privilege that I walked out of class in a daze, and ended up screaming in the woods with Johanna. After Thursday’s class on academia, rationality, and coherence, I was flooded with doubts about how I speak and write. My classes have never left me feeling so vulnerable and uncertain about everything – so I’m in a place of utter confusion.

Why am I the only one in class who adopted an indoor campus site at first? I must admit I have long been “suffering “ from “natural deficit disorder” coined by Richard Louv in his book: Last Child in the woods 2005. I remembered how I causally read that book and didn’t buy his words at all. I have been so comfortable residing within the concrete walls of human creations that I rarely try to look up to the sky.

Sitting on the bench on the plain grass platform behind Thomas Great Hall on Friday night, so how, maybe out of boredom, I looked up the sky. The star were amazing, more beautiful than the night sky I watched in document films, and more approachable. How much more I am missing?

New site I chose

One issue I’ve really been struggling with in class is the question of “who is allowed to represent who?”  I contemplated this in my post after reading the article by Dimitriadis in our class on Silence, and during our discussions of Anna Deveare Smith’s acting in our class on Voice.  In jhunter’s reply to my post, she raised some important points about who has the authority to speak for whom, and how characteristics beyond race and culture may impact this authority.  I want to push back on this idea though, and demonstrate why I believe race and culture alone are such important factors.  I want to display this by attempting to represent Uninhibited’s paper, which she titled “I Choose to be Silent You Don’t Make Me Silent”.

            Uninhibited and I grew up in the same town (although she was born in the Dominican Republic).  Though we have never actually discussed how much money our father’s make, I believe we are of a somewhat similar socioeconomic status, at least in simple terms of finances and what is deemed “working class” in America.  Both of us are currently being raised by a single father and both of us have experienced the death of our mother’s.  We met in December of 2008 when we were chosen to be members of Bryn Mawr Posse 9.  We are both interested in social justice issues.   We are close friends.  I believe it is safe to say we have a good amount in common. 

Maybe it's because I find myself biting off more than I have before, in activities, projects, and jobs outside the classroom (not more than I can chew, though--once I develop that attitude, I'll be swallowed whole by my own onslaught of thoughts and anxieties). Maybe it's because I've been entirely overwhelmed by this course, especially in the past week and a half or so, with the complexities of silence, voice, vision, intermingling as I try to quiet myself to better listen to others voices and see their points of view--I've been thinking about this Swedish (?) proverb. 

I chose to revisit the image I chose as my BMC representation. I am going to list the guidewords that are fitting to my representation and some that are not before discussing how I now see my representation.

This image is:

Permaculture

Footprint

Foliage

Campus

Native

See

Adaptation

Green

Ecological

Pattern

Wanderlust

This image is not:

Garden

Country

City

Interaction

Know

Anthropocentric

It would be very hard I think for a representation of our campus to be all of the guidewords that we collected as part of our ecological imaginings… as we discussed in class, our campus is much more than the ecological representations that most of our class posted. Our campus is all that plus the people, the buildings, the history, the man-made infrastructure; until we embrace the idea of rheomode (or perhaps, more likely, Goatly’s call for a less Newtonian reality where the “observing instrument and the observed object cannot be wholly separated”) I do not think that we have the language to describe everything all at once. My lens, camera or otherwise, is simply not wide enough.

How can you grow as an individual in a family that has defined your role even before you begin to walk? How do you strip yourself of inhibitions because of whom you are told you are or need to be in order to keep the family together?  What do you do when your responsibility to the world, to your family, and to yourself stand in opposition, ready to battle for the crown? My life since coming to the United States has been a constant push and pull between reaching for new opportunities and holding on to traditions. It has been a constant imagining and reimagining of how I can use voice and silence to define who I am in relation to others.

Many of you probably saw (if you didn't, please read!) the lead article in this morning's NYTimes, Power, Pollution and the Internet, which makes it clear that our thinking we are being "green" in this class, by being paperless, is worse than an illusion; what we are actually doing, as we meet virtually each weekend, is helping to waste vast amounts of energy: "what’s driving that massive growth" is "the end-user expectation of anything, anytime, anywhere.”