1. What did you set out to do in this class? What were your initial objectives and expectations? Were they personal? Were they political? Did you want to elicit and/or evoke and/or understand or make sense of and/or persuade? What did you want your project to serve and do?

My thesis research is on popular education; I was drawn to popular education because it makes the link between democratic learning and democratic economic and political systems. In my work, I facilitate educational programs based in popular education at a non-profit that works on community organizing campaigns. However, rarely have I had the opportunity to explore my own personal experiences and that felt like an important thing for me to experience firsthand as an educator.

When my mother died, the need to connect with people and share life experiences became a much more pressing need for me. I had gone through something so intense, and the world seemed to move around me as if death was an inconvenient or unfortunate topic of conversation. Things looked so different to me after the experiences I had of being a caretaker for my mom and witnessing her grapple with what was happening and showing us the things most important to her.

In beginning the project, I wanted to better understand how people express the kind of connection that grows out of loss and separation. I was interested in this because I felt communication- expressing and receiving- with others was so central to making sense of my lived experiences. I felt very viscerally how processing experiences into wisdom is a collective endeavor. I was also interested to do this because I wanted to be part of creating the cultural dialogue around the meaning of death and the value of life I so craved. I thought I could create this dialogue in my project with artists who sought to express connection through loss and struggle.

As I developed my project more, it became less about dialogue with artists whose images I was finding and more about the dialogue that was happening in our class and our blog. I came to realize that presenting my project and witnessing the projects of others was a form of the dialogue I was seeking. This encouraged me, and I stopped conceiving of my project as compiling the work of other artists and starting trying out what I could produce myself. I wanted to put my experience out there, just lay it bare, and have others grapple with it, as I grapple with it myself. It felt valuable because of the universality of what I went through with my mom, the cultural silence around death, and the immense light it sheds on the purpose of life.

2. What was the first arts-based artifact you produced/collected/elicited whether it was a sketch or something more “finished.” What did you produce/collect/elicit next? Make a list of all these pieces and place each in the order in which it was produced and collected.

Rubbings of the floors in my mother’s apartment

Sketches of the outline of Manhattan

Pictures during the process of moving out

Torn fabric with fragments of conversations written on it

Sketches of images from one of my mother’s books

Sketching of my hand

Sketching of a photo of my mom

Sketching of a photo of us together

3.Write down what you were thinking and feeling with each image listed above. You might also document your feeling/thoughts between images.

-Rubbings of the floors in my mother’s apartment—There was a sense of calm I experienced while doing these. There was something about the act of having the apartment rubbed into the paper that felt like the right thing to be doing in that moment. It allowed me to see the floors anew, which seemed to me to mimic the ways in which I would return to memories over and over, seeking new meanings. It also allowed me to feel I had a tool to show people on some level what I was loosing—these floors over which our feet walked through so many moments, through a full lifetime.

-Sketches of the outline of Manhattan—This was an interesting thing to do because I realized that I had never focused so closely on the shape of Manhattan. I traced maps from before European colonizers arrived up through this year. Yet, through all of those massive changes the way the island curved just so stayed just the same.

-Pictures during the process of moving out—This was an idea that grew out of the group reflection we had on the maps I drew during our working session. Gene asked me how our relationship to place would be different if we marked what was sacred. How would it be different if the life that had been lived in my home was somehow conveyed. I wanted to experiment with creating that marking of the life lived there before we left. Then, I also thought to take photos during some of the moments that represented the contradictions and irony of being a caretaker in capitalism. How when you love someone in a society that values things over people, that love means you may have to do something you would never want to do, like signing an affidavit for the landlord saying we were leaving voluntarily so we wouldn’t be taken to court. But then the next moment, we were writing notes to the people we grew up with in the building. The humane and sacred existed side by side with the business of daily life in capitalism.

-Torn fabric with fragments of conversations written on it—This was a wonderful thing for me to do because I revisited audios of conversations I took through out the process, and I got to reflect on my words and the words of friends anew. The fabric was something we had used during the Jewish tradition of embodying the rupture of death through tearing fabric. Cheryl Strayed wrote how the “obliterated place” is equal parts destruction and creation. I wanted to show this through writing on those torn pieces of fabric the conversations I shared as friends, family and I tried to understand what had happened and how we went on from here.

-Sketches of images from one of my mother’s books—This was something I wanted to do to show the ways in which the experience of packing up someone’s things is so many, many things we might often think of as contradictory. It would be one of those things where in the saddest of moments you would find something that made you think of how very silly that person was.

-Sketching of my hand—This was a more difficult photo to sketch because it was challenging for me to see the lines and the creases of my hands and the fingerprints, which was why I was sketching my hand in the first place. It’s hard to sketch a good hand!

-Sketching of a photo of my mom and sketching of a photo of us together—These were the sketches I was most hesitant to do but turned out to be the most meaningful for me to sketch. It was one of the most beautiful experiences I had of bringing the feeling of care which was so strong during my mom’s illness back into my body through the care my hand put into the sketch.

4. What was the relationship between you and your materials? Why did you choose the materials you chose? How did the materials you used mediate your thinking? Did the relationship between you and your materials change over the course of the semester?

At first I thought I would work more with paint on canvass. But using the glassine paper ended up giving me so many more options and became a very valuable material to me. The glassine paper itself started to represent to me the experiences I was having of the power and limitations of communication and memory. The way in which I could trace something, and you would sort of see what its full form had been but not quite. This evoked for me the imperfect-ness of conveying lived experience through words. The sketches on glassine- which both evoked what I had traced with surprising clarity at points and also were unable to fully convey what had been traced- also evoked for me the difficulties I had in even connecting to my own memories and the life I lived with my mother, which sometimes returned to me very strongly and other times felt completely inaccessible. The paper also brought me into much closer relationship with the story I was telling. In helping me focus on these important artifacts- floors, photos, handwritten notes- I would be transported back to moments that I was hoping to convey and investigate with people. I was being transported to the experiences out of which I was theorizing. I felt I was being given an important tool for expression that would translate into more meaningful communication with others.

5. Did you find it necessary to add text or sound to your imagery? If so, why?

I did add text to my imagery because it felt like to evoke the moments I was trying to convey there were certain words I wanted to share. I also did an audio recording of walking through the apartment, which I haven’t figured out yet exactly how I’ll incorporate. The audio of that sound felt important to me because the way a place sounds is one of those things you can’t bring with you and also so much a part of the feel of a place, even when we aren’t aware of it.

6. Reflect upon how your thinking about arts-based exploration changed as you were creating/curating images.

I think during this course I gained a lot more confidence in using images to convey and theorize around my experiences. There were moments when I would finish my sketches and look at them again and see reflected back to me what it was I wanted to communicate. What a wonderful feeling! And something arose from seeing what had lived in me as a memory looking back at me. Curating allowed me to understand how I could externalize what lived inside of me through the narration that the images created in a particular sequence and as a totality. I spent a lot of time thinking about which order made sense based on how I thought people might feel from one image to the next.

7. Has your thinking/feeling about scholarship changed as you were creating/curating images? How?

The work I did in the course opened up for me experientially a whole new way to communicate meaning. I’m working on my literature review for my thesis right now, and I used images in my lit review as a base from which to explore and understand popular education. I don’t think I would have had the confidence to do that if I hadn’t taken this course. Arts based research feels like one of the strongest practices to theorize from lived experiences that I’ve encountered.

8. Did anything unexpected happen as you were working on your project?

Many, many unexpected things happened while I was working on my project! The rubbings were unexpected. At first I thought I was going to do something abstract with paint and string. But it didn’t feel quite right. There was a way where I wanted to return to the concrete-ness of my experience to investigate. I also moved through many different questions throughout the course of my project. One of my hopes for this summer is that I’ll have time to return to our videos and writings more fully to incorporate the process and how my questions evolved throughout my project.

9. Were your objectives at the end of the semester the same as those at the beginning of the semester? Explain.

My objectives at the end of the course were tied to but distinct from my objectives at the beginning of the course. In the beginning of the course I had a general question- how do people convey the experience of connection in loss. At the end of the course, I had a series of questions tied to particular experiences I was conveying in my rubbings, such as how does identity shift through grief, what is the relationship between place, people and memory, and what is the importance and limitations of communication. These questions arose organically through the process I went through of interacting with my lived experiences through creating images.

10. What do you think the strengths of your process and products were?

I think the strengths of my process and products were the depth of feeling I brought to my project and how much I cared about what I was doing. I put a lot of intention in what I did, and I was really moved by our classes and seriously integrated our dialogue into my work.

11. What, if any, are the dissatisfactions with what you’ve done?

My project was difficult for me to work on at times. I had to have time to create an environment in which the work felt productive and healing to engage in. I had more ideas than I was able to do, and I had to accept that I would present my work as in process and work against my own perfectionism.

12. Do you plan to continue using arts-based methods as part of your scholarly activities?

I will definitely be using an arts-based methodology as part of my literature review, and as part of the pedagogy in the educational program I lead at my work. My thesis is about this program, and so the ways in which we use images and art to investigate themes and generate knowledge will be part of my analysis as well.

13. How would you characterize/assess your experience taking this course?

This was a beautiful course. I have developed such a fondness for each one of you. I think it is a testament to the impact of arts based research that I really feel engaged in what each of you do, in how your projects develop and what they ultimately become in your work. I loved the combination of guest artists, sharing projects as a class and having our blog. Even though our posts were sometimes inconsistent, I read what people posted every week, and I feel like I learned just as much and at times more from that and seeing how people’s processes were evolving as I did from the texts we read.

14. Anything you would like to add?

I really look forward to continuing to develop our projects over the summer and to see how they evolve into the context of the exhibition. The learning keeps going.

Hi everyone- This week I started answering some of the questions for our end of semester reflection.

1.     What did you set out to do in this class? What were your initial objectives and expectations? Were they personal? Were they political? Did you want to elicit and/or evoke and/or understand or make sense of and/or persuade? What did you want your project to serve and do? 

When I saw this class on the course schedule I was drawn to it for a few reasons. Firstly, I am researching education in a community based setting and what kind of pedagogy can spark collective insight into the relationship between structural realities and lived experiences. I’m interested in how community based educators working for social justice create a process whereby critical reflection on the things we experience each day can lead to political action and political action can lead to new lived experiences in conditions that foster a greater sense of dignity. My mother had been a driving force in my interest in popular education- first, introducing me to the highlander center (if you haven’t heard of it, look it up! It’s been a behind the scenes force in the past 100 years of social movements in the us) and as a teacher at the Bank Street School for Children (which is an elementary school that values the arts and integrates it into all the core subjects). My interest in arts based research grew out of my interest in popular education and a hope that it would give me greater insight into the philosophy and practice of making systematic and personal change and transformation interconnected.

When I started the semester it was a very good opportunity for me to explore my own lived experience, which often, as a facilitator I don’t have the chance to do (more working towards creating this process for other people). I was so aware of how our personal practice is connected to the work we can do with others, and I felt a big need to have an experience myself of looking at my life and thinking about how to go deeper into the themes it brought up for me and the ways in which what I have been through is connected to larger societal systems and ways of thinking. When I thought about what my starting point would be, it was obvious to me that at this point in my life that I had to do something related to my mother. I needed this both because I wanted to know how other people made sense of and got through these experiences, and I also wanted to bring my experiences into a public space because one of the things that has been so difficult for me is the cultural silence around grief and death. I wanted to ask myself and others, what is there is to learn about life from these experiences? How does life look different when we think of these experiences as central rather than as something to fear and run away from?

To be continued soon….

I really enjoyed reading through your posts about Maya since I did not meet her. I found her work quite interesting, especially thinking about the connection between literacy and art as pedagogy of inquiry. I’m thinking about the social movements in Brazil, Cuba, Nicaragua, the southern United States, and so many other places across the world. As I mentioned earlier, Paulo Freire is one of the educators I’m influenced by; he too asked similar questions to Maya. How can the limitations that arise from oppression be confronted and transcended by pedagogy? The community research team Freire worked with that included community members and university professors confronted this dis-identification with reading by starting with images that affirmed the importance of the daily lives of people. I understood Maya to be doing this by recognizing that conscious or not, we all start with a dynamic relationship to a piece of paper. It’s loaded. In a culture where people facing oppression in school might be taught that the piece of paper is separate from them, not them, I see Maya trying to bring the piece of paper into an intimate relationship with the student-writer-human. It’s the rupture caused by oppression I see her seeking to transcend. It would be interesting to ask that as an organizing question looking at literacy campaigns- how did transcendence happen? And what kind of relationship between paper, pencils, people, land, community, etc was supported to grow? Gene, didn’t you do work with the Sandinistas? I’d love to hear about your experiences and the pedagogy you learned there and how that might relate to this discussion.

In terms of my project, a major question on my mind this week is how I’ll connect different elements i’m working with. I have my rubbings, audio recordings of our class and memos I did on my own, I have drawings I worked on of maps of my walks, and I also have pieces of fabric I want to write questions of reflections from my walk on and place beneath those drawings. I think it’s interesting to think about the space between these different elements and how I want to use that space because I’ve mostly been focusing on the elements themselves.

I found Victoria Restler’s work incredibly helpful – I loved how she made connections between care, space and tacticile interaction. There’s something very deep there about how we bond with each other- we bond with each other in spaces and in our bodies. In my life experiences, this connection came to the surface in a powerful way through the ways in which physical acts of care were so connected to me with emotional processing of what was happening. There’s a Jewish saying that being a caregiver is the greatest mitzvah (honor) you can give- I think the mitzvah of being a caregiver is so bound up in the way that in each daily act lies the essence of the experience. What I mean is that Victoria’s images capture those daily moments of care in how they influence the space. That’s so powerful because if you zoomed in on one of those care moments in that, you could understand so much of what it means to be a teacher. For my own experience, I felt in general our culture really abstracts death and makes it something we should fear. But if you are caring for a loved one who is dying, you understand death in a different way. It’s not abstract, it’s not scary in the same way. If you don’t die suddenly, death is a set of steps- steps that exist in your body but also exist in the interaction between your body and the person’s body caring for you. What Victoria helped me think about further is how these tacticle moments show themselves in what a space is like. She helped me think about rubbings as a tool for capturing the physical elements in a space that reflect the physical movement of bodies which reflects the way people are being and acting towards one another out of which identity (ie what it means to be a teacher or a student or a caregiver) grows.

Visiting the museum was a wonderful experience for me. I found the drawing of the dioramas when we were by ourselves most meaningful. I drew the mountain goat diorama, and I got really lost in the scene. The interesting thing for me was how the first angle I choose really drew me into the mountains and being in the mountains and clouds brought out a feeling of awe and wonder for me. Towards the end, I changed my angle to be more focused on the goats. There was a baby goat looking up at its parents. There was something hesitant and sort of forlorn to me about that part of the scene. Hard to explain why, but it definitely drew me into a different sort of feeling and understanding about what was going on. I was interested by how much one scene offers when it depicts the complexity of every day life. This is of special interest to me because of work pedagogical work engaging with people about the dialectics of every day life and systems of oppression. As I mentioned earlier, Paulo Freire is a particular source of inspiration to me about how to use visual depictions of moments of life that spark generative and collective inquiry about the ways the structural shows up in the interpersonal and the interpersonal shows up in the structural.

In terms of my project, the trip to the museum got me thinking about the environment in which I choose to do my work. I think of my project as tapping into experiences I’ve had and the work I do with fabric, paint and paper extending out of that connection between emotion, memory and my hand’s movement. Being in the museum, I realized how much our environment (where we choose to sit, what we choose to look at, what we might be listening to at the time) effects our interrelated systems of motor movement, cognitive processing, emotional wisdom and insight.

I also started to think about adding another element into my work. I’m interested in thinking about rubbings of surfaces in places that are significant to me as being the back drop to the text and fabric I put over that. I’m still not certain about it, but I put paper over parts of the door frames and the wooden floor in my mother’s apartment and drew over it with colored paper to see what that felt like to me (I think I would need a different kind of paper because it was hard to see the texture on regular computer paper). I’m going to have to move out of my mom’s apartment at the end of April (that story of NYC real estate and how bad succession law is for rent stabilized apartments could be another piece). So, the idea of how a rubbing brings your into the physicality of a place felt important, especially in light of the conversations we had earlier about how physical care taking work is and how the searching I’ve done around connection and loss is such a step by step, day by day, action by action type of experience.

I’d love to get started with really starting to make something this weekend. I’m still thinking about where and when and the environment I’d create around myself. I’ll keep updating this thread with my plan because I think that will give me the encourage to get going!

I loved our reading this week about Cristina Trowbridge’s work at AMNH. Along with being a movement teacher for kids, my mom also taught museum education with Cristina. Of course I didn’t know the theory behind what she was doing. I just knew how fun it was to go to the museum with her. Freire and Vygotsky, two of the educators I’m drawing from in my education research, speak to the power of social learning. Vygotsky to the zone of proximal development, meaning that when we work on a shared project or task, individuals are able to do things that they wouldn’t be able to alone. Freire also speaks to the greater wisdom that emerges when people’s reflection on lived experience “encounters” one another. I love how Cristina and the Education Department at AMNH use dioramas as an entry point into group observing, reflecting and learning.

Cristina brings in mindfulness and how the experience of social learning at a diorama could translate into growing contemplation in the classroom. I thought it was an interesting way to think about a critical approach to education in the classroom. In so many of the teachers comments, I could see their frustration arising from policies that make learning impossible, which to me are rooted in a racist, economically unjust system. As a community organizer, I’m more familiar with responses to injustice that have to do with collective action towards new laws, policies and choices at the institutional level. What I saw in Cristina’s writing was another type of subversion I hadn’t thought of before;  neoliberal educational policies undermine learning because they create this frenetic pace in the classroom that undermines the authentic learning Cristina speaks about. I found it fascinating to think about contemplation as a tool for having more agency over the pace of learning and that slowing down (as I see it a subversive response to the neoliberal pressures to speed up) is a bridge to understanding imperfection as a part of learning. Cristina showed me these links between the pace of contemplation, opening up to imperfection, and engaging in authentic learning.

In terms of my project, I’m planning this week to start some writing I may want to include in my piece about different stories in my mom’s voice she told me throughout my life about her own life and our family history. I’ll also do some writing in my own voice, and I’m thinking that will either be my voice recounting different important moments in my own life or it could be questions I’ve asked myself and reflections I’ve had through this process of care taking, searching for connection, and identity transformation. I may also begin to put some of the fabric on regular computer paper to start testing out different mixes of fabric, paint and words.

One note- it’s been hard for me to figure out how to paste certain images on here. Maybe we can have five mins of next class to discuss best ways?

This week, I went to an amazing placed call the Interference Archives to find images I could bring to class that spark conversation about how artists have used lines. For my work, I’m still wondering what I will do with the lines. Will they make some piece of or a full image? Will they be without an identifiable form and more about how the ways in which I’ve torn, stretched, knotted the fabric reflects the experience and struggle of searching, finding, loosing and searching again for connection? I wanted to find images where the artists’ lines were visible, maybe even the main attraction, so I could get some ideas sparked for what I can do and why I might choose to do one rather than the other.

For some background, Interference Archives is a place that has movement art for many decades. Tons of political flyers, posters, calendars. You can find their website here: http://interferencearchive.org/ During their open hours, you can freely browse through things. it’s lots of fun.

I found mostly loosely connected pieces, and I wanted to share them because they are beautiful. I was drawn particularly to images from social movements in Mexico because that is where my mother’s family is from and the art was very powerful to me. What do you think about the lines in these pieces? How does their visibility impact your experience of these piece? What are they saying to you?

The last piece I also liked because the artist used the lines quite well to evoke labor, as Luttrell did with her cut outs. My own identity transformation I’m exploring in my lines (as I mentioned earlier, the experience of going from hearing the stories, to telling the stories) is very connected to my labor, to being a care taker. The things we do, and who we become. The daily acts of lifting, holding hands, bringing water. It makes sense to me to think of experience, identity and labor as intertwined.

These pieces I also thought spoke beautiful to the connection between our labor and effort, our connection to land and our people (however we define that), and our identity.

Amanda’s Reflections on 2.26

Reading Luttrell’s pieces this week I was struck by how much information a self portrait or portrait can hold. Particularly when the person is talking back to a cultural narrative about who they are and what their experiences mean. I really enjoyed how she brought in the actual conversations along with the visuals in Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds. It really helped me understand the collective process of inquiry that grounded her research. If anything, there were points where I wished she had brought in more of what she and the students had talked about, and I wondered if she had shared some of her overall reflections with them and whether they had had a chance to give her their interpretation. For example, when she described that the students’ depictions of romance allowed for more of their nuanced and complicated emotions than their idealized depictions of motherhood, I felt she may have been missing something here. In the comments some of the young women made about always being there for their kids, I saw a recognition of the value of that kind of support, perhaps born out of struggle. There are many interpretations, but in many of the places where she related some of the specifics of their classroom experiences to theoretical work I wished there was more of a voice from the students.

Still, much of what she wrote was powerful to me. I decided this week to look back at Nancy Borowick’s photography, the young woman who lost both her parents to cancer. I wanted to see what portraits can say in the context and themes I’m exploring. I found a great picture below she took of her mom. In this photo, I see slowness and humor in the midst of cultural narratives of fear. I see someone being really unique in the midst of cultural narratives that others people who are sick.

As I reflected more this week on my project, I continued thinking about how I might use lines to explore my experience of finding, loosing, finding again connection in loss. I thought about what material would these lines be. Would they be a significant fabric to me, something I chose because of its aesthetics or something that is perhaps just plain white? Would I write something on these lines? I thought of perhaps writing questions I’ve been asking myself throughout our class as I’ve looked at these photographs. I also thought of writing different significant pieces of my life story and my family’s life story and intertwining them. Visually representing the ways in which we take on each other’s stories, how the stories continue and change through the generations, what it means to shift from hearing stories to telling the stories. I thought I could also play with the fabric itself (fraying, weaving it, etc) to express more about the experience of seeking roots and connection in loss.  I wondered if I would want the fabric to loop around something, climb up something, and if it would make an overall design or not.

As I discussed in class last week, I’m giving myself the next few weeks to open endedly explore different images that speak to the theme of roots and connection across space, place, time and loss. This week, I returned to the artist collective, Dignidad Rebalde, and went to look at some of their shows. Dignidad Rebalde is an artists’ collective out of California that specifically dedicates itself to making movement art. One example of how they brought visibility to gentrification in the mission is this amazing street sign post here:

More towards the themes I am exploring, I found they had done a show called “Future Ancestors: A Ceremony of Memory.” You can see the full show here.  

Made by artists of color for their community, the show really sparked my interest because it centers it’s inquiry around connection to past and future generations based on reclaiming knowledge of indigenous peoples. I thought of our readings for last week in that the audience is a participant in the piece and the way that they become part of the show is that they are asked to dream. I thought of bell hooks’ quote “From what political perspective do we dream, look, create and take action?” I found these artists to be engaging with this question of connection to ancestors and future generations which gives rise to dreaming, perspective and action. Some examples of how they engaged their community out of their own self inquiry are below:

I particularly enjoyed the article on Brief Encounters this week. I thought the article was a really good example of how text and image can work together to bring us into the greater whole of experience Pink describes. The second NYT article I was less certain about the purpose of the photos (I actually wondered if the editor added them in) except to enact in the reading process the actual experience of looking at all these folks together and how recognizable they are individually and as a group. I found it interesting how Pink broke down barriers between senses and then between modes of expression. While I wouldn’t have thought about it in this kind of a theoretical ways, some of the experiences I want to explore in my research are so poignant that the sensory experience of them is interconnected and vibrant. When we go to the more intense of experiences humans have, some of what she wrote is very intuitive. I also thought about how when I was in Cyprus I learned that they used to have walking debates where people interested in philosophy would walk around town discussing ideas together. I thought this was great.

Walking is very important to me. It’s something that helps me process what I am going through. What inspired my research project was my mother being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last March and passing away in June. After she passed away, I would walk literally miles every day. I would walk along the river to and from work every day. Walking was essential for me.

The experience of illness and death I’ve gone through have been very difficult, and they have also not been what I thought they would be. This is why I’m interested in my research focusing on roots and struggle. I think there is so much fear of illness and death in our culture that the knowing which comes from these experiences is something I’m interested in exploring and particularly those representations that make us see what we might not have expected- for example, interdependence in loss. Connection through distance. I’ve attached a few images here that I found interesting towards these questions. The first two are from Nancy Borowick who is a young woman that lost both her parents to cancer (her parents are the ones portrayed below). Her photos make me think of the question, “What if there were no good and no bad but just experience?”

This is an image of roots by Van Gogh I found beautiful.

Some questions I have about my work are how much of my own narrative will I bring in. Will I depict any of my own experiences or will these experiences more live in the underlying questions I explore. I’m also thinking about what my process will be. So far, I’ve been thinking that I will give myself a lot of room to collect images towards the broad theme of roots and struggle and in a few weeks start to organize my theme and question more based on inspiration and exploration into these broad set of images. I’ll also likely write about my own experiences for myself during this time to see what narrative and/or images I might like to bring in. I’m also wondering if there are programs online where I could engage in graphic novel storytelling without having the best drawing skills. I could also imagine myself using collage in storytelling.

I look forward to discussing our projects together on Wednesday.