Hi there fellow bloggers and classmates!

I cannot believe that this is going to be my very last blog post for this school year. “Why are we blogging? this is a very weird assignment especially when you are in an English lit class in this prestigious university”, those were the exact words that was in my mind when Dr. Luger told the class that blogging is going to be one of our assignments for the year. But it turned out that this is more than just a normal blogging, this is where you can share your ideas for the whole class to read and another way to share your thoughts when you are too afraid to share it during class time. This by far is my favorite assignment from ASTU.

Talking about ASTU, at first when I signed up for the CAP program, I already had some ideas about the classes I’m taking except for ASTU, I had no idea what art studies class is going to be like, I did not know what makes art studies and the usual English class different. After a month or two passed by, I already got the idea that this class is totally different than the English class I had in high school, take, for example, my English teacher used to say that we can’t use “I” in our essay, whereas in ASTU, Dr. Luger encouraged us to use the discursive “I” to make our paper more scholarly. After a year taking ASTU, I can say that I have really improved my writing skill, I remember during jump start I went to this essay writing seminar because I had no clue how to write essays in university and what do they expect from me.

In ASTU, I also learned some new interesting concepts such as forgetting, cultural memory, technology of memory and so on. My favorite concept is “forgetting”, if you ask me in the beginning of the year the definition of “forgetting” I would probably simply just answer the the act of not remembering, but now, I’ll say that forgetting is more than just not to remember but we can also can equate the term “forgetting” with “delete” since “forgetting” means, selecting what to remember or delete and what not in order to move on from the past.

We also got the chance to read some amazing novels, poems, graphic narratives, etc. My favorite literary text was Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. My biggest fear is losing my love ones and I would do anything to be able to redo it if something bad happens to them, and that is why I can relate to the book especially the character Oskar Schell.

I think that is basically a recap of my experience in ASTU class and I’m going to end this very last blog post here. If you have any comments or questions, don’t hesitate to comment down below.

Goodbye,

Inneke S

Hey there fellow bloggers! I have a story to tell you guys, so… a few weeks ago, I was in the AMS Nest attending an event that the Indonesian Student Association at UBC held, the event was an eating competition. We made so much noise until there were some complaints from people who also had an event in the AMS Nest. The event was Black Lives Matter, they told us to keep our voice down because they said their event is a sad event. We all had no idea what Black Lives Matter was so we didn’t bother to keep our voice down.

But this week, the CAP program had another amazing joint lecture which we talked about Black Lives Matter. So Basically Black Lives Matter is an organization working for the existence of black life and their intention is to build the Black liberation movement, they emphasis that this is not just a moment or like what Dr. Luger said, not just a hash tag, but a movement.

One of the TAs shared a story about a black guy named John Crawford III which I found very interesting and shocking. So basically, he went to Walmart and stopped by the toy aisle and played with a toy gun while talking on his phone, then someone called 911 and he was shot dead. I was shaking my head the whole time and wondering would it be different if he was white? would people still call the police or just simply ignore him?

Another interesting thing that someone brought up during the lecture was it should be #AllLivesMatter instead of only #BlackLivesMatter since everyone is equal and not only we need to solve issues regarding black people but regarding everyone in the society. Because as a global citizens, not only we should have tolerance to one another, we also should treat everyone equally since we are all the same and have the same responsibilities.

– Inneke Soeyanto