Hello fellow readers and bloggers!

In this blog post I’m going to talk a little bit about memoir. Memoir, usually known as a collection or records of memories of an individual about their life experience. What makes memoir and biography or autobiography different is that instead of telling the whole story of a life, memoir focuses on just a certain meaningful event from the author’s life.

This week in my Art Studies class, we’re reading a memoir titled Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Instead of telling her stories in a boring way, she made it way more interesting by making her memoir into a graphic novel (comic). As I’ve mentioned in my last blog post, graphic novel is another way of how English/literature can express ideas about social and political issues such as social justice, human rights, etc.

Persepolis Part 1 Book Cover

I can say that this book is somehow connected to social and political issues is because basically, in the first part of her book (There are two parts of the book, but we’re only reading the part 1 which is the story of her childhood), Satrapi depicts how is it like to live in Iran during the Islamic revolution. Satrapi also mentioned detail information about the war between Iran and Iraq that she experienced.

Anyway, going back to memoir itself, I think Memoir is a great way to tell your past experiences especially the ones that is connected to social and political factors because it gives you the inside look since its the authors itself that experienced it. I also wrote a paper back in high school about a little boy’s memoir, called The Way of a Boy written by Ernest Hillen, he is talking about his childhood when he lived in Indonesia during the war era. Even though he is Dutch he tells us how the Indonesian and Japanese culture affect him and how the intersections of the cultures had affect his personality as a boy.

The Way of a Boy by Ernest Hillen

I think that is it for today’s post! again, if you guys have anything to say or ask, please do not hesitate to leave comments down bellow!

Till next time,

Inneke S

Hi there fellow bloggers and readers!

This is going to be my first blog post here, so I’m going to tell you guys a little bit about myself. I am currently a freshman in UBC studying in the faculty of arts. In UBC, they offer a program for arts students called CAP. CAP has many different streams such as Individuals and Society, Global Citizens (the one I’m in), Media Studies, etc.

So for global citizen’s students, we had an online mini discussion about what being a global citizen means. There were a lot of great ideas, definitions and thoughts about global citizens. But for me personally, a global citizen is someone who understands what is happening around them i.e the world. Understanding the world locally and globally through political factors, social factors, etc. A global citizen is also someone who shows concern of their surroundings and feel the urge to make a better change for their society because they feel like it is a part of their responsibilities.

Another great thing about being a CAP student is that we had two events last week which is the CAP gathering where students and professors from all CAP’s streams got to meet for a “tea time” and had small talks. The other major event was the joint lecture which all Global Citizen stream’s professors and students were gathered in one room to discuss further more about what a global citizen really means in political, sociological and literature/English view. We had so much fun and gained so much knowledge that deepens our understandings about global citizens

In sociological view, a global citizen usually translates local issues and problems into larger global context and provide possible explanations or the other way around. They also understand local and global cases of inequality to understand better about social problems and provide more effective actions.

Sociology and politics have different views of global citizens. In sociology it focuses more on how people act, think, reason and understand social life whereas in politics, it focuses more about being a cosmopolitanism, which means citizen of the world. Politics focuses more about system of orders in the society and how it creates conflicts about people’s different purposes.

Last but not least, the English view of global citizens. The main focuses of English is how they can create analyses, imagines solutions and reproduces about social issues and experience. English can also create personal stories about political and sociological phenomena. English can also express politics by rewriting dominant ideas and express sociology by cultural practices i.e poetry, graphic novels, etc about social issues such as social justice, human rights, etc.

I think that is it for today’s post and if you guys have any questions or ideas to share, please don’t hesitate to leave comments down below!

Till next time,

Inneke S