Dear Readers,

We only have a few weeks left before the years wraps up and I can’t believe it’s already over. Many of you chose to write a reflection of the year and our time spent in ASTU. A lot of us came into this class not knowing exactly what to expect, but having read your posts this week, I think it’s safe to say that no one is leaving this class without tons of new and useful knowledge thanks to Dr. Luger.

Paolina wrote, “ASTU100 took  away  a lot of my fears regarding scholarly articles”, and Alex summed up his blog post with the well put sentence, “Ultimately this course has significantly broadened my worldview and made me consider current affairs through a much more critical lens”. Isaiah wrote a great piece on the way this class’ focus on the subject of trauma in the context of our literature affected him and the way he can now think about such a deep topic more critically. Clara’s blog this week focused on how reading our class’s last novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid caused her to think about her own identity in a new way. She wrote  “In my opinion this is something that an individual has to figure out somewhat on their own. In essence, an individual  choses what they want to identify as.”

While we are all coming away with different and new perspectives, ideas, and skills, I don’t believe a single one of us will be able to leave this class claiming not to have learned anything. Melissa put it very well stating “Never in my life has a course opened me to see things in such a big perspective and now that I look back at it, it’s insane at how much we’ve got covered in one year and how we’ve learned how to write a literature essay not just some recap and summary”.

Reading my peers’ words on the year that is now behind us left me feeling great. We’ve all shared a lot this year in our CAP Global Citizens stream, and I get the sense we all feel like our time and energy has been well spent, and we feel confident and well prepared for the years still ahead.

Big thanks to Dr. Luger for everything she’s taught us this year!

Best, Olivea

Hey there readers!

This week instead of writing a personal blog post about a specific topic, it’s my job to read through my classmate’s blogs and give you a bit of a recap. It has been several weeks since we last posted, so there was quite a bit of material covered, meaning the blogs this week covered a lot of ground. I’ll try to cover a few different topics that came up.

We read two very heart wrenching books in the last two weeks revolving around war. The first was a book called Obasan by Joy Kogawa a novel about a woman recounting her experiences as a young Japanese girl living in British Columbia during World War II, a time of Japanese-Canadian Internment.

This week Paolina wrote her blog about Obasan but focused on how it relates to the idea of cultural and collective. She wrote towards the end of her blog “It reached a great importance even if the characters in it are fictional and became part of Canada’s cultural memory”. She explains that even though it is not a true account the Kogawa’s story has become part of the way we remember and understand these events. She reached farther by asking the important question “But how reliable is cultural memory if it is based on constant remediation of previous memories?”. Clara also wrote her blog this week on Obasan, however, she took a different approach and tied the story into her own life experiences. She tell us about a family friend’s grandfather. He was a Japanese- Canadian man attending UBC at the time of the war. She explains to us that he was expelled from the university at the time, but has recently been given an honorary degree along with the other survivors who attended UBC at the time. This is something I found incredibly interesting because I had no idea that this happened, and I hadn’t considered what must have happened to Japanese students attending university in Canada at the time of the war.

The other book we read was Safe Area Gorazde by journalist Joe Sacco. Safe Are Gorazde is a graphic “journal” about the Bosnian war in the 1990’s. Sacco was an American visiting Gorazde and taking interviews from the locals and survivors in order to recount the war. Isaiah explains that as an American Sacco represented many things to the Bosnian people, but most of all he represents the idea of “escape”. He explains that while they have no choice to leave Joe sacco can come and go as he pleases. This is something that all of the citizens of Gorazde long for. In class we talked a lot about the idea that the locals are trapped and isolated while Sacco has the freedom to just flash his blue card and he can leave immediately and go wherever he pleases. He had mobility.

Alex wrote about the book from a different point of view. He chose to write about the way Sacco illustrate his story. He compares Sacco’s very detailed depictions of events and people against Marjane Satrapi’s simple and stark drawings in Persepolis. He writes “as soon as I saw the first illustration in Safe Area Gorazde I knew the two graphic novels were about as different as they could possibly be”.  Alex explains that he sees Satrapi’s style as a way to represent the “conformity” she saw during the war, while Sacco “encompasses graphic detail in to his illustration in order to further emphasize the dramatic violence that occurred during the Bosnian genocide that occurred in the 1990s”.

This week Ryan decided to write about something aside from the books we’ve been reading. His blog post was about all of the academic article we have been reading in class and how new they are to him. He explains that in this field the ideas are very abstract and it can be hard to determine whose ideas are “right” or “wrong” because unlike hard sciences there are no formulas or hard evidence to back them up. He quotes Dr. Erikson “’when one states they are just, they are immediately unjust’” and explains that he thinks this idea could also be relevant in this context. He expands on it asking the question “Can this be used in the context of when one states they are right, they are wrong?”.

Thanks for reading!

Love,

Olivea