Hello my dear readers!

I hope you had a great weekend.

I have the honor to write the class blog for this week. First of all I want to start with what we have talked about in our ASTU class over the last week. We started reading a short story called “Redeployment“ by Richard Klay, and then moved on to the novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist“ by Mohsin Hamid.

Richard Klay tells the story of an returning veteran from war and how he experiences the change of environments and which emotional challenges he has to face below the surface. Mohasin Hamid’s novel tells the story of a young pakistani man falling in love with an american women and getting abandoned from the US. The book is told from the young man’s perspective.

But what’s going on in the  ASTU100 blog world?

Therese illustrates this topic of “Redeployment“  very well in her blog post “ The War We Don’t See“ through writing about a conversation she had with a soldier back in Winnipeg. She comes to the conclusion that tolerance and open-mindedness is very important in such conversations and if they are given a very “civil“ conversation between a pacifist such as Therese and a soldier can happen in a productive way. Martin also writes about the story “Redeployment“, pointing out the struggles of veterans coming back from war. I barely know anything about the veteran programs they have in Canada to help those who struggle with reintegration, so it was very interesting to read a little about this.

Joseph takes a new direction towards the meaning of the dog in Richard Klay’s story. He questions if the dog symbolizes the ability to emphasize with other indivduals… or not. From Klay’s story he draws the connection back to Judith Butler’s question which lives are grievable and ends his blog with the question “How can we get outside of ourselves and understand “others”? “ which leaves the reader with a lot of material to think about.

Olivea’s blog talks about the poem called “The Names” by Billy Collins and how it happens that we associate certain texts with 9/11 without even knowing that the text is about this certain event. It becomes clear that most of the witnesses of 9/11 use a certain vocabulary such as the term “falling bodies“ which automatically causes us to think about it. It is also very interesting to see that not only the texts we read in our ASTU class proof this observation, Olivea talks about an article of Humans Of New York, in which a person uses exactly these terms too. Moving on to Inneke’s blog, she focuses on our joint lecture on Black Lives Matter and the hashtag conflict concerning #alllivesmatter. She summarizes the message of the lecture very well with the conclusion that as global citizens it is our responsibility to tolerate and respect each other, because we are all equal.

It is very exciting to see how everyone develops their own thoughts on all these different topics. Every blog is different and I really enjoy reading them and gaining some insight into my classmates’ thoughts and opinions. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do and that you have a great rest of the week. Thank you for your time and see you soon !

Peace out!

Paolina