Thank you for stopping by my page. I am a graduating senior looking to continue work in advocacy and using art as a healing outlet. You can find previous work I have accomplished as a Social Justice major as well as my resume and writing samples.
Thank you for stopping by my page. I am a graduating senior looking to continue work in advocacy and using art as a healing outlet. You can find previous work I have accomplished as a Social Justice major as well as my resume and writing samples.
Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota
Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota
Africa Jam
Hecua
Influential Texts
Below are texts I found most influential in my higher education. The first three I read during my HECUA Program and classify as Art for Social Change texts. The last three I read in Social Justice courses I took at Hamline and classify as Other Social Justice texts.
Adrienne Marie Brown, Emergent Strategy (2017).
Inspired by Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy is a radical, science fiction, self-help book that provides tools and strategies to transform ourselves, our society, and our planet to the greatest future we can have. The consistent uplifting mindset and reminders Brown gives us throughout the book only makes it feel encouraging that change for our future is possible and within reach. She uses examples of science fiction, our ancestors, history, art, and natural human life to use as ways to progress our world and ourselves forward in the midst of the dark times we are facing today in society. This text was incredibly influential when understanding the intersection of social change and personal and generational trauma healing. I was able to use the text as an outlet when processing my own healing journeys and learning to become resilient in my personal life journey and my social justice journey. I find it brilliantly, appropriately, and radically transformative how she is able to combine this text as a self-help and world-help type of book.
Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011).
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Pablo Helguera uses personal experiences and examples as a guide to practice socially engaged art, also known as social practice, through an educational standpoint. The overlap of art and education that Helguera found is important in this type of practice but it should be noted that it is not a practice of regulated rules to follow by a handbook. This text provides more freedom to practice socially engaged art and is personalized based on the experience of the person viewing the art and the work of the artists themselves. A common question asked is, what counts as “successful” socially engaged art? According to the text, this question is not as necessary to answer unless you are a scholar because one successful thing to one person may be considered unsuccessful to another. Instead, the point of this text is to explain how to engage, communicate, and experience art for you. This book was incredibly helpful in understanding my own engagement with public art and with establishing my identity with my own art.
Laurie Jo Reynolds & Stephen Eisenman, Tamms Is Torture: The Campaign to Close an Illinois Supermax Prison (2013).
Laurie Jo Reynolds and Stephen Eisenman’s featured article about the Tamms Prison in Illinois sheds light on the power of art and community in some of the worst conditions. This prison, which opened in 1998, was designed for sensory deprivation. This meant there were no ways of communication from loved ones, no community activities, and no leaving your cell unless you were showering. About a decade later, a group of poets, artists, and musicians began sending poetry and letters to the men at the supermax prison. It was then when the outside community learned the horrific details about what was happening inside. Political artists, community members, and loved ones of the prisoners came together to combine art and social change to shut the prison down. This text, that I read for my Art for Social Change semester program, allowed me to understand the strength and depth of change people can make when using art as an outlet.
Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (2010).
At the Dark End of the Street sheds truth on the Civil Rights movement that one does not typically learn about in school. Highlighting Rosa Park’s activist work outside of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the text teaches about the stories of Recy Taylor and many other black women who faced and battled sexual violence during the Civil Rights era. This text was chosen as a read for the class The Role of Conflict in Social Change which highlights young black activists during the Civil Rights era. This text enlightened me to the realities of Civil Rights activism, much of which was carried out by black women. Knowing black women's prominent role in beginning and sustaining most American social movements -- historically and today -- is essential to social justice learning because it is a narrative told but not often listened to. Understanding that black women were the ones actually beginning most social movements in our history and modern-day is essential when learning about social justice and understanding it at the core in American society. This text also provided an opportunity for discussion in our class about the issues black people face on Hamline’s campus, in our local community, and in our country today. Issues such as microaggressions, police brutality, colorism, and systematic inequalities.
Iric Nathanson, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century: The Growth of an American City (2010).
Shedding truth to the history of Minneapolis in the 1960s was something Iric Nathanson perfectly covered. His book, Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century, examines leaders, the police department, the local government, and the discrimination minorities in Minneapolis faced during this time with providing specific stories and examples to help make meaning of why Minneapolis is the way it is today. The “long, hot summer” of 1967 was a time of racial violence across the nation that impacted black people and Jewish people alike. Nathanson’s book helped me understand the history of the city I am from while being able to connect its past with its 21st-century present. Being able to learn about discrimination and activism in my city first was essential in order to learn about justice across the nation and the world.
Iris Marion Young, Five Faces of Oppression (2004).
If I had to choose one foundation of an influential text in my Hamline career, it would be Iris Young’s Five Faces of Oppression. Young explicitly breaks down the five different types, or “faces” of oppression. They are, marginalization, exploitation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. This text provides examples of the visibility and validity of oppression which, to me, was the first time I ever academically learned about social justice. She uses feminism, theory, and knowledge of past theorists as a tool to use as an understanding of her own findings and conclusions about oppression and justice. Reading this text in my first Social Justice class of my career was essential in learning these contexts of oppression and justice and then being able to see which social movements and acts of injustices fall under each “face” of oppression.