Emma's words

Yesterday, most of our ASTU class either participated in, or observed, many fantastic presentations done by fellow CAP students in the CAP Conference. There were many presentations on the idea of identity, however the one that stuck out the most to me was “Avatar: The Bending of a Traditional Narrative” by Law & Society students Vanessa Chan, Caroline Cassinelli, Niki Lonstantinovic and Melissa Tan. They analyzed the ideas behind the Nickelodeon show Avatar: The Last Airbender, which ran from 2005 – 2008. They identified the importance of a character with disabilities, rather than a disabled character, and they broke feminine stereotypes of weakness and a lack of strength with the four coolest and totally awesome female characters I’ve ever seen. Growing up watching Avatar, I was immediately captivated by what they had to say, and it was so exciting for me to be able to reanalyze the show with my newfound perspective (to be clear I didn’t re watch it all). Now, I could go on for days about Avatar, but for now I’m going to touch on one character that I felt the group didn’t give much, well any, credit to.

Sokka, Katara’s brother, is the one of the other main characters, along with his girlfriend/major badass Suki, that has no bending abilities. In his first episode. He is portrayed with a slight ignorance and lack of acceptance towards those with bending abilities, even towards his own sister, who later becomes one of the greatest water benders in the four nations. However, I find that as he and the rest of the characters grow, Sokka has much more to offer than simply his witty humor. Right from the beginning, we know that he strives to be a leader both in his tribe and with his friends. He keeps the idea of hope and strength alive when the gang needs it most, and is constantly there to push any ‘manly’ stereotypes aside by making new ones. Sokka holds the key representation of intellect through his strength, leadership, and wisdom. He portrays strength in leadership while also allowing emotion to be a clear part of his character. He pushes away the idea of the modern ideas of strength and weakness, by using his compassion and knowledge as his strengths as a leader and as a man rather than brutality, force and a lack of empathy which is often times the used as the portrayal of strong male characters.

He is also given, like every important character, a set of obstacles to over come. Throughout the series, Sokka is constantly plagued by the need to please his father. He struggles to make decisions that he thinks are the right thing to do, rather than decisions he thinks his father would think are right. As he works to find belief in himself, he as like the others, has his ups and downs. He is one of the characters that most clearly learns from his mistakes. At one point, he is unsure of Katara’s abilities, and doesn’t fight it when she is told that she can only be a healer, which is all that women waterbenders were trained to do. It isn’t until Katara stands up for herself and leads Sokka in the right direction that he sees how degrading that tradition had been. Many times when he is unsure of a situation, he accepts his mistakes and learns from them, proving once again the importance of acceptance and not being afraid to make mistakes. It’s important to always remember that, as Uncle Iroh says, “while it is always best to believe in one’s self, a little help from others can be a great blessing.”

ASTU today was focused on the aspect of comic books, or graphic novels, based off of our reading of Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. We analyzed passages, looking at the use of images and words, and the relationships one frame played with the next, combined with the layout and design of the panels and gutters.

When I think of Comic books, my mind automatically goes to the Archie comics that I grew up reading. There were the Marvel comics, and the rival, DC comics, even Captain Underpants could be found on a few of the shelves in my house. I had never, unfortunately, ran into any graphic memoirs, such as Persepolis. Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, is her story as a young girl struggling through the terror of growing up in Iran during the Islam Revolution. Yet, I hesitate to call Persepolis a “comic book”, but rather a graphic novel, because, as Kelly mentions, “graphic novels are much longer and tend to be much more complex.” It’s interesting to note that graphic novels came before comic books, starting with Gottfried August Burger’s Lenardo und Blandine in 1783 (Kelly). As some may have noticed, comic book stories go on for some time, usually taking many issues over the course of a few months, sometimes even years, in order to give full backstories and unravel new plotlines before the big finale. A graphic novel, however, is usually done in one to two issues, developing the characters and dealing with the storyline as one might expect in a regular novel or book.

While flipping though my collection of The Death of Captain America: Complete Collection, I couldn’t help but compare and contrast the comic book to the graphic novel. What really stood out to me was, of course, the different medium used in the illustrations. While I don’t believe that the difference between detail on people’s faces is a huge defining factor, it is important to note how, in this case, both the faces in Cap’s story and Marjane’s are both insistently focused on facial expressions, which does a number on getting key concepts and otherwise indescribable emotion across to the reader. Captain America is full of blues, reds, blacks, and whites, keeping the hues dark and mysterious, creating its own story with in a story. Persepolis does something similar, although it’s use of color has come down to simply the combination of black and white, which speaks to the reader in a whole new level, relating to the lack of color in their own lives during a time of war and fear in their home land.  There’s also the different uses of panel to gutter relations. Sticking with the idea of black and white, the panels in Persepolis are laid out in a neat, sequential order, always with the white gutters separating each panel. In The Death of Captain America, there’s different layout for different kinds of scenes. For action/fighting scenes, the gutters are black, seeming to blend the panels together as one big, action-packed picture. With the general theme of conversation in the air, white gutters are used seemingly to show the neutrality of the situation. The most interesting use of of panel to gutter, is with the use of flashbacks. The story-teller will have a text box, rather than a text bubble, and there will typically be quotations around their introduction. The panels, in this case, are placed either above a bigger picture from the present, or over top a black background, while still being surrounded by the white gutters.

Comic books are such a fun, interrelated set of stories to get lost in, and it always seems to add such a different idea to the story when illustrations are involved, as noted was well in graphic novels. Always remember to never mistake a graphic novel with a comic book, or vice versa, when speaking with an avid reader, because it might just so happen to be the end of you if you do.

Brubaker, Ed, and Mike Perkins. The Death of Captain America: Complete Collection. New York, NY: Marvel Worldwide, 2013. Print.

Kelly, Debra. “Difference Between Comic Books and Graphic Novels.” KnowledgeNuts. 2014. Web. 18 Mar. 2016.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York: Pantheon Books, 2007. Print

More often than not, our society tends to label drug users as an ominous crease in the folds of the world, classifying them as a lower level of the human. Drug use tends to be seen by outsiders as simply a means to an end. People walk by those on the streets and generally just see an empty shell of what might have been a person. It’s when drugs are used by a famous actor/actress or singer/rocker that drugs become either a way of showing their resilience and “coolness”, back when drug use was still part of rock-and-roll, or the butt end of a joke. However, there’s always more to a person than what meats the eyes.

In our ASTU class, we recently watched a documentary on the world of drugs in Downtown Eastside Vancouver, focusing on the interactions between the police officers and a few, notably white, drug addicts that lived on the streets. “Through A Blue Lens”, produced by the National Film Board of Canada, shows the extreme levels of struggle and heartache that is found in many communities of poverty stricken areas (IMDb).

After watching the film, the class briefly discussed how the media tends to portray the lives before and after the deaths of drug addicted celebrities, mainly focusing on the lives of Amy Winehouse, Cory Monteith, Philp Seymour Hoffman, and Heath Ledger. I was too young to remember much about the death of Heath Ledger, and I wasn’t a big enough fan of Cory Monteith to know many details about what happened, but I was very aware when the reported deaths of Hoffman and Winehouse were announced. There was a lot of drama more about what would happen with Hoffman’s upcoming film, the 3^rd installment of The Hunger Games films, rather than news about his death. Amy Winehouse had a considerable amount of broadcasting, with the paparazzi covering every drunken stupor, every drug induced action along the way prior to her untimely death. Another death that was morbidly covered, was that of Whitney Houston. Soon after her death, news vans were reported surrounding the hotel she had been in in hopes of being the first to broadcast her horrific death. The deaths of celebrities become a sort of prize for media outlets, all of them fighting for, like always, the best story. News broadcasters go from one celebrity to the next, pushing away their moral boundaries in hopes of gaining the next bonus that comes their way.

People have a tendency to judge those they know nothing about, putting assumptions (and we all know what those do…) onto their victims in a way that discredits them from being normal humans just trying to get through life. As those who don’t know the extent of the troubles the addicts may be going through, it is unfair to both ourselves and to them to try and make rash generalizations about people we know almost nothing about. As someone looking in from the outside, I can only imagine what it must be like for those people, and continue to live my life with compassion for those who are struggling.

Yesterday in our ASTU class, I had the pleasure of watching the fantastic presentations done by my fellow classmates of their archival studies we have been working on for the past few weeks. There was a wide range of work done, from a family tree of the MacLennan family, to an interactive website and a book about the artist Jack Shadbolt, to the Tumblr page documenting Japanese internment camps in Canada during WWII, focusing specifically after Pearl Harbor. The collaboration of hard work and so many different ideas to make these contributions to knowledge was both fascinating and the end to a fair amount of stress.

My group, consisting of Anna, Emily, Mishal, and myself, focused on the Chinese oppression in Canada throughout the 20^th century. We took documents and photographs from the Chung Collection, and made an infographic focusing on the lack of representation of the marginalized in a contextualized manner. While working with these archives, and making the infographic timeline of the continual marginalization and racist remarks, make me think of the article we read by Jiwani and Young, Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse, about the continued ignorance by the general public, mainly in Vancouver BC, of the mistreatment Aboriginal women in the Downtown Eastside. Both my group’s project and the article by Jiwani and Young have interconnected ideas of the lack or misrepresentation of the marginalized. The article focused mainly on how missing and murdered women from the Downtown Eastside, mainly those of Aboriginal background, don’t get enough attention by the police forces and the media outlets. They are mistreated and pushed aside as the other when it comes to political and economic, as well as social matters. Both the Chinese immigrants and the Aboriginal women had similar features of degrading tones. The Aboriginal woman were noted as the “bad” (Jiwani and Young, 900) women, due to their sex trade and rough ways of living, which as then categorized as the way of Aboriginal people everywhere. The Chinese were considered less in every way, being called the “canker of Canada” (RBC), and blamed for taking all of the jobs that were supposedly meant for the Canadians.

Racism plays a huge part in both of these topics I’ve mentioned, which is what led me to connect the sociology lecture about racism from today to both the infographic work my group did, and the Jiwani and Young article from class last week. While talking about four elements of racism, racialization seemed to be the most fitting to how the infographic and the article frame their findings. Racialization is the “social process where groups of people are judged and viewed as inferior or superior based on their intellect, morality, and culture” (Dilley). I think that this sums up quite well the gist of some of the points both pieces were trying to get across, implying that the differences in peoples and cultures shouldn’t reflect how each one of them is treated and recognized in society, even though, sadly, it does.

Works cited:

Jiwani, Yasmin and Young, Mary Lynn. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.4 (2006): 895-917. Web. 10. Feb. 2016

UBC Rare Books and Special Collections, Chung Collection, FC106_C5_O74_1912; https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/chung/chungpub/items/1.0056195#p12z-6r0f:race

As the second term of ASTU has come around, we have begun to look more closely at archives and how can tell their own sort of life narratives. I never realized what archives really were until we started to work with them. However, after seeing all of the history in one room, and getting to actually hold some of the work done by Jack Shadbolt, it finally hit me how incredibly real it all was.

I have always been drawn to the precious items that document snippets of people’s lives throughout history. How something has withstood the test of time and is living on to continue to make memories will never seize to amaze me. Hearing old family stories at the dinner table, seeing love letters that traveled from one soldier to his love back home in America, finding old newspapers in old abandoned houses. Each story shares something new, is a different piece of history in this never ending circle of life. So, it came as no surprise when I started to make my own family tree as part of a school project in the 7^th grade.

Over the course of a month, I gathered information and articles from both side of the family. Digging through old boxes in my grandparent’s attic, searching through town records to try and connect missing links, even making calls to family members all the way across the Atlantic. I started to compile some of my data onto ancestry.com. I got up to 3 generations through my work, and learned a great deal about my family history in the process.

As we were reading Diamond Grill, I kept thinking how Fred’s book itself is like a family tree. Each person in his book has some sort of story to tell, and in turn they intertwine themselves in the lives of both Fred’s family at the café, and his family at home. As I was going back to look at my family tree that I had made all those years ago, I couldn’t help but see all the stories that I have to go along with all of my family members. With the digital file, the map of the family ancestry is there. We can look back in time and see our great great great great great grandparents, while with the work of archivists and narratives like Fred’s, people get tot see the bigger picture. We get to live along with the authors of each memory, walk in their shoes, if only for a few words at a time.

I think that both types of archiving is useful, however in different situations. The archives available to us in places such as the Rare Books and Special Collections library here at UBC, provide a unique experience allowing us to physically hold, say, a journal relaying the events a certain day back 50 years ago. While there is nothing really that can compare to that, the ability to trace family ancestry online is still a great start to delving into the fascinating history of the world around you.

As we do most weeks in ASTU, we are continuing our line of life narrative work, and blogging about the research we’ve done around it. As we’ve mentioned before in our class discussions around HONY and Facebook, we’ve come to the consensus that some pictures are, in fact, worth a thousand words. Pictures provide life narratives of their own, holding history, secrets, memoires, and life, and portraying emotions that there wouldn’t otherwise be words to describe. They tell the stories of precious moments, providing us with small snapshots into each others lives. However, with all the social media outlets, it’s sometimes hard to find the truth behind the filters.

As I was perusing through Facebook a few days ago, I came across a BuzzFeed video, asking five people to talk about their Instagrams, and share the details behind their perfect picture.

In the video, one of the women mentions how, in her picture, she used the “dorky, totally didn’t know the picture was being taken” candid, saying how that was a more likable look in a picture than one of a woman with confidence. Another mentions how he zoomed in on his photo so he could “look skinnier”. Every one of the 5 interviewees mentioned their self consciousness, either with their debate on how they looked in the picture, or how they thought people would react to the picture, whether it was good enough for the world to see without feeling too judged. These pictures aren’t lies, to put it frankly, but they’re not whole truths. They tell stories, however they’re stories that have a little bit of a twist on them. Everyone tries to conform to social media, tries to look casual but cute. Everyone wants to feel good about themselves, so why not add a filter to cover your insecurities. Yet these half truths are fooling no one. Everyone tries to share their stories, yet they only share what they want to be known. They show what they think the world wants to see, pleasing others, not themselves. It’s a vicious cycle of tormenting yourself for the most likes, while trying to seem casual enough to be cute. To make everyday actions look just on the inside of artificial to pass as acceptable. That’s what people work for though. To just be accepted, even if it’s someone their not, instead of being someone they are. That’s why on Sunday the 22^nd, BuzzFeed challenged social media users to post a picture with the hashtag, #ifsocialmediawerehonest, encouraging people to post an honest picture of themselves. Not hiding behind their insecurities, but sharing their love for themselves with the world.

As part of our fourth instalment of our ASTU 100A blog posts, we are to look even farther into the discussion of life narratives. As in my literary review, I analyzed how media plays a role in life narratives and global events. Everyone nowadays has some form of social media that is just a few taps away. Easy access, easy distraction, easy information. It is no secret that social media takes away from the now, providing easy escape from human interaction, and, of course, from homework. However, it is also the fastest way out there to spread news world wide. For the better or the worse, media provides information from the here and the now.

The earthquake on January 12, 2010 left Haiti destroyed, taking around 300,000 people with it. After that day in 2010, the media swarmed in, insistent on catching the newest pieces of information about the devastation, focusing on the big pictures rather than the individual stories. Dany Laferrière’s book relays his experiences during, and after, the earthquake, providing a different outlook on how to tell the story of such destruction, along with some of his thoughts about the media. He sees the media as trying to spin their own stories, instead of telling the one that is already so blatantly visible, sharing that “[t]he worst thing about is not this succession of misfortunes, but the absence of all nuance in the camera’s cold eye” (Laferrière 79). As he identifies the motives of the media, he is able to identify his own sides of the story. He is able to see himself as a Haitian and an outsider, documenting his experiences through the eyes of both. While the media generally tends to fit their stories to the interests of the Western societies, Laferrière distinctly strays from that aspect, relishing in the fact that he’s not just a Western pleaser, but also a victim in this tragedy. Through his autobiography, he was able to bridge the relationship gaps between the personal and public, and the personal and historic spheres which had held Haiti at arms length from the rest of society for so long. With the interconnectedness of media and life narratives, it is interesting to see how Laferrière uses his story to and knowledge about the ins and outs of media to share his story.

Humans of New York was a blog started by Brandon Stanton in 2010, initially focusing on gathering photos of New Yorkers. Soon, however, his project evolved into mini snapshots of people’s lives.

It’s not just the words that tell the story, but the pictures themselves. Like a snowflake, no two pictures are the same, crating a massive canvas of color and life with just the click of a button. Each photograph holds so many stories, ones that are always itching to be told. With his photography, Brandon provides each of theses individuals with the opportunity to tell the world, sharing a little bit of their life stories, creating an endless stream of heartache, loss, love, and hope that manages to connect everybody in one way or another. These photos create an intimacy within this big, wide world allowing people not only to react to the photos, but to react to the responses of the photos. Each picture posted brings on an onslaught of support, a sharing of stories, and a felling of closeness that isn’t always found in a traditional family photograph. Autobiographies are a way for people to tell their whole life stories, giving people a blow by blow of incredible events that made them who they are today. The most popular stories, in the Western societies, are told by people who have changed the world one way or another, allowing the readers to relate to someone who is generally otherwise not relatable. We read the story, but we don’t always get to feel the same rapport as we do with Brandon’s photos. In his, we see the passion in each little boy’s voice as he so proudly comes home form school. We see the ambition in the little girl’s eyes as they tell us their dreams. We see the joy, and also the sadness, in the faces of the men and women who allow us to see just a little bit into their elaborate tales of life. Every person we see on the street is a mystery, but with the sharing of these photos and stories, the world doesn’t seem that big anymore.

She was answering my questions in English, while speaking to her mother in Japanese, so I remarked how impressive it was that she spoke two languages already. “Well her father is Russian,” said the mom, “so she speaks that too.”

I’ve been to enough bookstores to know exactly where I want to look for my new favorite book. Always at the front they have the new releases, the best sellers, and the on sale books all in fancy displays. Usually, I walk right through and off to the left as I head for the juicy, stereotypical, teenage heart throbs: fiction. Yet today, as I painfully kept walking past my go-to safe haven, I noticed that the different types of advertising that big companies go through for their products is incredible. Pretty displays, similar color themes, popular authors, bestsellers, all of theses techniques are used to catch the eye of the innocent passerby.

While perusing through these many books, I happened to stumble across Bossypants, by Tina Fey. The first thing that always makes me laugh when I come across this amazing woman’s book, is the image of her freakishly hairy man hands. Women’s images are so important to society nowadays, that when we see photos that don’t depict the “perfect body”, it’s, sadly, almost shocking. However, if you know anything about Tina, you would know that those are a perfect representation of her strong, comedic self. With gel letters and a bright background, this book is an attention grabber. In case you can’t recognize this famous icon’s face, which is dead center of the cover, her name is plastered directly over head, making it impossible to miss. As one may have assumed, many different editions have been printed of this fabulously entertaining autobiography, all of which have very positive blurbs from well known News Papers and Editors, with “International Bestseller” or “#1 National Bestseller” posted across the top.

It’s the publisher’s job to make the book sell. The author writes it, the publisher makes it look fancy, and the companies sell it. Teen fiction books have the love struck kids with their faces tantalizingly close. Horror has the dead girl with some blood on her white dress. Depending on which life narrative you pick up, you might see a familiar face, or a safe, light colored background advertising just how great this book really is. Bookstores are like a tree, and each leaf is different.