Sania's ASTU 100A Blog

Hello readers, This past week, in our ASTU 100 class, we’ve read the novella ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ by Mohsin Hamid. What I realise from reading it and the discussions in we had in class, is that I can relate to Mohsin Hamid at quite a similar level. When Professor Luger pointed out that there are many students who realise that they experience something similar when they come to university, I felt a very close connection to the novella and Hamid, especially when I went over all the events that took…read more

Hello readers, With the beginning of 2016 and half way through the CAP’s Global Citizen stream, and half way through my first year in Canada, I now feel that I’ve formed a better understanding and a clearer perspective on Canadian politics. I’ve noticed that a lot of the political talks that I’ve had since I’ve come to Canada and a couple of the assignments given in Sociology and Political Science have been about immigrants, specifically Syrian immigrants. At this point in history, one of the most important issue for many…read more

The theme in my ASTU 100A is memory and trauma, and we have been and will be looking at novels and some graphic novels. We’ve recently read the graphic novels, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Safe Area Goražde by Joe Sacco which is a journalistic comic book- both are about historic conflicts. Satrapi shows to her readers about her experience of the Islamic Revolution in Iran as a child and Joe Sacco portrays the Bosnian War through the narrations of a first hand witness. I found it interesting when we compared them in class…read more

It’s been a month and half here at UBC and I remembered that about a month ago, everyone in the CAPS stream of Global Citizens had to answer the question ‘what (or who) is a global citizen?’, and I could sum that up in fifty words after giving it a bit of thought. However, when I asked myself, ‘what about me as a global citizen?’, a dozen other questions followed that question with intertwined thoughts of my life so far. I feel that I’ve been exposed to many different cultures,…read more

In my ASTU 100 class, we’re currently working on the graphic memoir called ‘Persepolis’ by the Iranian-French writer, Marjane Satrapi. In which Satrapi presents her childhood growing up during the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the war with Iraq. I read this graphic memoir about four years ago as a part of my leisurely reading, and now coming back to it for my ASTU course, I realize that as I went along reading it, I’ve grown a new perspective on this graphic memoir. I probably even started reading it this…read more

Since around grade 11, I’ve been quite rigorously citing my sources and referring to relevant scholars and researches for my essays and other coursework as a requirement for showing evidence for my research. But after attending the ASTU 100 classes with Dr. Moberley Luger as a part of my CAPS stream and reading the second chapter from the book ‘An Introduction to Academic Writing’ by Janet Giltrow (et al.), I’ve realized that there are more reasons for citing than the ones I knew about during my high school years. Now…read more

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