ASTU100 || HI IT'S K.YLO'S MIND

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around for a while, you could miss it.” (Shoutout to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for the quote, I love that movie, I highly recommend watching it if you haven’t seen it already) It’s crazy to think that in just a few weeks, the school year will end. It honestly feels like it has just started because it went by so fast. Anyway, this transition from high school to university has come to be something else. Coming into UBC I didn’t…read more

“The question is, what type of human do I want to be? How do I want to use my platform? Do I want to be safe under my umbrella of white privilege? Or do I want to push back and resist?” On Wednesday, our Global Citizens CAP stream had a second joint lecture of the school year; focusing on the Black Lives Movement after touching on the refugee crisis in the first term. We also expanded on our discussions about global citizenship using this contemporary movement as a lens. Personally,…read more

“I speak.” In our earlier unit, we analyzed Judith Butler’s article “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect. Frames of War: When is a Life Grievable?” where she raised questions such as where do we draw the line between Us and Them? As well, to what extent do we grieve certain people? Why do we grieve who we grieve for? Her article and the questions that arose came across my mind once again these past couple of weeks as we have been focusing on poems. Going along with our themes of Trauma and Memory,…read more

“My insides don’t match up with my outsides.” Absence. For the past two weeks, our ASTU class has focused on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This novel illustrates the theme of absence through personal loss and trauma from three different perspectives. Oskar Schell attempts to come to peace with the recent death of his dad and his grandparents as well, walk down memory lane and reminisce, triggered by the tragedy of 9/11 and the loss of their son. To quickly introduce my point of view, I read…read more

“So where did it all begin?” For the past few weeks our ASTU class has been reading and analyzing Joy Kogawa’s Obasan. This book is a fictional story about the Japanese-Canadian internment during the era of World War II, a real-life tragedy that Joy Kogawa experienced herself. Our class took a field trip to Irving’s Rare Books and Special Collections space and had the opportunity to explore the Kogawa Funds to uncover the hard work that was put into this novel. Before we delved into the artifacts, Chelsea gave us…read more

“What does it mean to be human and alive?” This is what my Anthropology Professor Wade Davis asked us to keep in our minds as we explore a spectrum of cultures this semester in our lectures, discussion groups, and readings. But as our ASTU class started reading Safe Area Gorazde, this question came into my mind again. In the context of war, what does it mean to be human and alive? Throughout the last week and a bit, our class discussions have revolved around the themes of humanity and femininity,…read more

“We aren’t allowed to have any opinions. People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but it doesn’t stop you having your own opinion. Even if people are still very young, they shouldn’t be prevented from saying what they think.” – Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl This young teenager grew up in the confinement of the Holocaust. Under Hitler’s regime, the dictator ordered for an ethnic cleansing of Germany, believing that only Germans were “the master race” of the world. As a Jewish girl, Anne and…read more

“First of all, you don’t know me. Second of all, you don’t know me.” And fortunately for all of you, this is your chance to take a peek inside my mind and learn the greatest of idiosyncrasies.. or ambitions. Hello avid readers! As you can already presume, I am absolutely terrible at introductions and not eloquent whatsoever, hence my opening quote taken from the tv series, One Tree Hill. But hey, in this first paragraph, you gathered that I love One Tree Hill so this isn’t a lousy start. My…read more