Choose Your Own Adventure Assignments

For the Choose Your Own Adventure Assignment, I chose Option 4 - the 3 videos. Here are the main ideas from each video and how they reflect on my own art-making and community engagement ideas:

1. TED Talk: "The Danger of a Single Story" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 
1. Our consumption of media, culture, and literature influences how we define other people and places
2. Having a single story creates barriers and alienates, not allowing for a feeling of commonality and unity but rather of foreignness and difference, not considering people as human equals.
3. Because of these single stories, when people of the place write their own stories, they are seen as unauthentic or trying to be someone they are not when they are writing about the actual reality.
4. "Power is not just the ability to tell a story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person." - Adichie
5. "The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete." This leads people to only associate a person or place with negative qualities, getting a flat perspective and never truly engaging all their stories.
2. "One Woman, Many People" by Sarah Jones
1. There is a changing relationship of you to your body and of other people to your body, and it reflects what the world tells you about your body.
2. You have the power within your own body to regulate against messages of others that label and define you.
3. Each individual represents their views and opinions only, not those of a larger group.
4. Instead of setting examples of minority negative qualities and people, we should start focusing on setting examples of people who can serve as role models. 
5. One person speaking as others from both a place of privilege as well as one of disenfranchisement.
3. Anna Devere Smith on Theater and Activism
1. The questions you ask/how you phrase them define the response and how it is received by those being asked.
2. "The only whole heart is a broken one. it's the kind of cracked that lets light in.
3. It is important to make work that has a long shelf-life: its relevance extends beyond the time it is written in.
4. Civic engagement and moral art start with people of good heart wanting to have a bigger art. It starts with a conversation. 
5. You should not have to hold the burden of representing your entire race.
6. Always take into account dissenters and surround yourself with them - let it inform, if not adjust, your point of view and art.

Overall themes touched that stood out to me were those of representation, telling your own story, defining a people or place, civic engagement, and how to create lasting and important work.