Hello readers, over the past week in our Arts Studies class, we have read and critiqued Farhat Shahzad’s scholarly article from 2011 titled “The Role of Interpretive Communities in Remembering and Learning as well as attending a joint lecture presented by all of our CAP professors. Firstly, although the title of the article is rather self explanatory, Shahzad compares and contrasts the roles that authoritative figures have in interpretive communities. However, what intrigued me the most about this article was just how much it relates back to the concept of global citizenship. The views of first generation immigrant parents in this article were also intriguing in the sense that they allow for a privileged outsider such as myself to engage with world-views that I would otherwise not be exposed to.

Furthermore, the way in which the discussion in this article is shaped around the war on terror and 9/11 allows for the theme of globalization to be explored in more depth due to the sheer magnitude of the events of that day and the implications they had across the globe. From an encroachment of civil rights in the united states to the unjustified military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ripple of this tragedy spanned far further than New York. One interesting connection between globalization and interpretive communities brought to light by one of the interviewees in the article is that between mass media and people’s opinions on current affairs. This actually serves as an excellent example of just how interconnected the world is through both the internet and the 24 hour news cycle. Reflecting upon this, it’s incredibly hard to believe that only a century ago it would take days for news of an event similar to the magnitude of 9/11 or the war on terror to spread around the world.