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Category Archives: ASTU100A

Looking Back

It’s hard to imagine that my first year at UBC is coming to an end. All the people I have met and the friendships I’ve formed have made the year all the more memorable. But putting the social aspects aside, I must highlight just how educational the classes I’ve taken with the Coordinated Arts Program this year are. However this only occurred to me during the second term. Initially, I applied for CAP for an easy transition into university – […]

Thoughts on What We All Long For

Dionne Brand’s characters in What We All Long For possessed very unique traits and personality. Personally, I loved them all. They were real, and really spoke out to me. Unimpressed by their immigrant parents’ current lives and past, they distance themselves from their cultural background. Furthermore, they are also represented as misfits within society, being loners throughout high school and then moving to a run down neighbourhood following graduation. Because of these two factors, they face the internal conflict of identifying themselves. […]

Three Day Road – Thoughts

Upon finishing Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road, my immediate thoughts were: “That was a sick novel.” Boyden’s novel was a first for me. Three Day Road isn’t just another war story. It possesses themes of Indigenous Aboriginal Identity, which really stood out to me. This aspect of the novel was especially intriguing as I was able to experience the First World War through a Cree Native’s perspective. Not only does one live through the lives of Niska and Xavier, but one […]

Gilead and Australian Colonizers?

Earlier last week, my History 105 class studied a short satirical film called BabaKieuria. The Australian mockumentary depicts the relationship of Indigenous people and the colonizing Europeans. The film demonstrates a reversal of roles where the people of European decent or “whites” are colonized by the Indigenous people, or “blacks”. Not only does the film portray the struggles of those who were colonized in history, but it also reflects the ignorance of the colonizers who are blind to the awful lives of […]

The Handmaid’s Tale: Thoughts

The Handmaid’s  Tale was an incredibly interesting read, as it reflects an extreme world where feminism ceases to exist. The world which Atwood creates is very vivid through the eyes of Offred, the protagonist. The elaborate system of government and the roles and niches given to different people is also very intriguing I constantly question how Atwood develops all this. The whole topic of feminism is rather fascinating. As a fan of fiction novels where lots of action, I had hoped […]

Fighting Feminism…?

I have heard of the Ecole Polytechnique Massacre (A.K.A. the Montreal Massacre) before, but never have I actually read about it in detail. My initial thoughts after reading: What the hell is wrong with this guy…? Before I thought it was simply a psychopath on a killing spree for no apparent reason. On December 6, 1989, twenty-five-year-old Marc Lepine, armed with a rifle and hunting knife, shot twenty-eight people before killing himself at the Ecole Polytechnique. He claimedto be “fighting feminism…” […]

District 9

I never got around to watching District 9 when it came out in 2009. A couple of friends and I were planning to watch it together, however, I had another prior engagement and could not go. I had never read any synopsis about the movie online either. Eventually, I just forgot about the movie, thinking it was just another typical alien science-fiction movie, where aliens come and take over the Earth while the good guys, the humans, fight back and take […]

Connecting Things…

Martha Nussbaum’s Democratic Citizenship and the Narrative Imagination and Willie van Peer’s Literature, Imagination and Human Rights invite us to explore the idea of literature and its effects on our outlook on the world. According to both writers, literature develops our imagination, and through imagination, we can picture the perspectives of others. Allowing our imaginations to run free and change perspectives  change our thoughts and actions in the world. In short, literature yields imagination, imagination yields empathy, and empathy yields change in our […]

The Power of Imagination…?

The past week, we were to read and analyze Martha Nussbaum’s “Democratic Citizenship and the Narrative Imagination” in our course package and it immediately sparked faint interest in me. Nussbaum argues that the arts, more specifically, literature, has the ability of “cultivating powers of imagination.” In turn, imagination yields compassion, and compassion is a necessary requirement to become a responsible citizen. Furthermore, compassion helps us  recognize the suffering and misfortunes of others, and ultimately, we relate to their misfortunes. Apparently, we […]

Thoughts on the Sauder Rape Chant Incident

One thing came to mind when we were told that we were to discuss the most recent pro-rape Sauder FROSH chant incident: “Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.” Having many friends in UBC’s Sauder School of Business, I happen to be a victim of constant bragging and gloating. And although I really take no offense, it can still become quite a nuisance when I see typical Sauder students walk around campus with their heads filled with hot air. It seems as though the UBC faculty hierarchy […]

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