Mexico Trip

I've been busy thinking hard about what it is exactly that I want to do my research on while I'm in Mexico. I'm leaving in 4 weeks and it's not much time to find something brilliant. I'm starting to wonder if my focus should be less about finding the perfect topic and more about giving myself over to the experience of being there, learning from my first ethnographic research opportunity...?

Journal 1

June 29, 2007

Reading has always been an integral part of my identity. I have always been a reader, one of those kinds of kids who exaggeratedly, “could read since before they could walk.” I suppose when I was younger, I viewed reading as a way to experience new adventures, new settings, casting myself in different character roles and developing new perspectives. I would often stumble across some new idea or philosophy that seemed to fill in missing pieces of my knowledge, personality and paradigm. By my teens I was interested in literary device and forced myself to read through dry seminal works that produced no visceral emotion within me, but that gave me a base for recognizing the craft and art of writing.

Most recently, I see reading as an inherently political action, one that is focused on connection, dissent, and purpose. I am haunted with questions about stories. Whose story is told? Who is it important to? How does it get told? How does it make the world bigger…or smaller? Why does it matter?

What inspires me so much about the Everybody Reads project is what I see as the real goal behind it all, which is to create a starting point, a shared knowledge and experience that creates dialogue in the community. I see isolation as a finely sharpened tool of oppression, and by choosing stories that illuminate that isolation, we can began to dismantle the dark spaces in humanity that contribute to oppression and apathy. To move forward in the class and project, I would most value a belief that the project act as a spark, but that the impact of connection and understanding could go on forever, could be limitless in it’s power to recreate our world and humanity.

test

test