Outside the Walls

Like others have said, I felt a lot of different things about the Mural Arts tour and look forward to having the space to talk about it tomorrow!  I don't want to merely repeat sentiments already expressed so will instead focus on just how it felt to be in Philadelphia outside of the walls of the Haverford/Bryn Mawr bubble with our group.

I thought that it was interesting that, as a group who defines ourselves in this course as members of a 'walled community,' it was good to have the reminder of how radically different our walls our from those of prisons.  It is as easy as jumping on the train to get into the city, but we almost never do.  How much do we imbue our walls with significance and how much purpose do they actually functionally serve?  Bryn Mawr is not actually worried about students escaping and welcomes visitors (or the right kind of visitors at least, as we discussed in Barb's class on Friday).  So why put walls around the college?  Haverford doesn't have the same architectural features as Bryn Mawr, including less of a formal wall, so I've been taking the term pretty loosely but actually looking at Eastern State and Bryn Mawr made me realize that I do live in a pretty different environment (visually).  Our tour guide had us name reasons people build walls as well as emotions walls provoke, and that, as well as the art installation, have made me think a lot more about walls specifically over the past few days.