Hello readers!

In the past two weeks, our ASTU class took apart and discussed the article “The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning” written by Farhad Shahzad. The article focused on how people’s memories or perspective are linked/affected by their social ties, political standing, nationality and up bring. All of us wrote a blog post in response to the article and here are some of the few blogs worth noting.

After reading the blog posts, I have a clearer understanding on what an interpretative community is. It is interesting to see how differently everyone reacted to the article and the questions that they raise regarding this topic. Everyone is able to link either their own experience or the things happening in their immediately environment to the topic.

Some students used their own experience to approach this topic. Take Rapheal Gamo and Kihan Yoon-Henderson’s blog post as an example, they talked about the problem of identifying their ethnicity in a globalized world. The increase fluidity between nation caused people that were brought up in a different culture or have a mixed heritage become more common. The fluidity of people with a mixed cultural background or a mixed ethnicity find it difficult to identify themselves with one ethnicity group. Kihan’s blog focused on the topic of ethnicity and the identity crisis she encountered as being a ‘Halfie”(a term used for being half Asian half Caucasian ) and gave us some insight on how being a Halfie affected her mindset. Kihan stated that,”my[her] ethnic identity remains a sort of grey zone to myself [herself] and to others.” This is due to the fact that people from different counties sees her ethnicity differentiates with how she sees herself.

Other students discussed how media, book, social network and the government can alter the perspective of the readers. Priya Adhikari, Taylor Khatkar and Dione Yeung argued that the media is bias and can affect the view point of the public. Priya stated in her blog post that,”I [she]  believe[s] that media nowadays is somewhere misleading and manipulating memories.” I couldn’t agree more with her statement. The word choice of a news report can greatly affect the readers. Take the Syrian refugee crisis as an example, if the the media used the word “immigrant” instead of “refugee”, I wouldn’t think this matter is urgent or serious at all.

Taylor Khatkar proposed an intriguing question, she asked weather it is possible to remember or learn without having a perspective or being bias, and I honestly do not think it is possible. From a young age we are influenced by our parents and peers without even realizing it. One is not possible to write without a perspective because everyone has their own set of values and it is impossible to ignore.

Lastly, Dione Yeung’s blog resonated with me, I personally can relate to Dione’s blog post since we have similar upbringing given that we both lived in Hong Kong, China. She pointed out that, “the government, or the state is actually constantly shaping the way we think without us being conscious about it.” To further support her point, Dione gave an example that high schools in China will not teach students about what happened in the TianAnMen Incident where countless lives were being cruelly taken away by the communist party when students go on strike against them. In Hong Kong, we were also not taught the specific of what happened in the TianAnMen incident. Although thousands of citizen would go on protest on the day of the incident every year, urging China to apologize, there will be nearly no news coverage of the event. The government tries to cover up what happened by manipulating the student.

All of the blog posts are extremely incisive and the writers of the blog post gives interesting examples and valid reasons to support their point.  Hope you all reading find this post enjoyable and have a wonderful day!

By Rachel Lam