Prof. Meredith Tweed
WST 4021
17 November 2011
Action:
Involvement this week was very limited. Because our meeting was with the big sisters (our last one of the semester, sadly), we did not have the opportunity to collect tweets from the girls. We did, however, have another fundraiser for YWLP on Wednesday night, this time at Chik-Fil-A. I was unable to attend because of my work schedule, but I heard from people who did go that it went well. More specific to our project, we still have only one submission for the ’zine. We reminded the girls about it again at the fundraiser and plan to once more at Saturday’s picnic alumni event. Chances are, though, that we will have to extend the ’zine into a two-semester project with contributions from girls in both terms, unfortunately meaning that we will not have a final product to give to the girls at our last meeting.
Reflection:
Again, I have spent most of this week focusing on the lack of response from the girls to the ’zine and am still questioning whether our decision for the girls to have them work on a ’zine was the best call. Throughout the semester, we have promoted both the ’zine and the tweets as ways for the girls to get their voices out, express themselves, and otherwise be heard. This misses an obvious question: what if the girls do not want to be heard? Or, alternatively, what if they do not want to be heard in this way? I recognize—and, from what they have shared with us, the girls do, too—the importance of encouraging girls to speak out about their ideas and experiences. There is a line, though, between encouraging and forcing, asking and invading, crossing into territory of “eliciting young women’s voices” in a way that Harris suggests “constitutes a kind of surveillance” (11). I would not say that our project has crossed that line, but it definitely operates on the assumptions undergrounding it. As the girls’ reticence to respond to the ’zine may suggest, our project, while well-intentioned, requires serious revision before it effectively can address the issues of girls’ independent creativity we originally wanted to explore.
Reciprocity:
Most of what I have gained from this week and, indeed, from the entire project has centered around ways to improve this project for next semester. We began this term with expectations for how the girls would respond and what our finished products would be. These expectations were not fundamentally wrong, but they did create difficulties in our ability to reassess and make changes as the semester progressed. Now that the term is concluding and we have a complete picture of our project’s successes and failures, we can extensively reevaluate and redesign the project where needed. Primarily, we need to keep in mind that this reevaluation does not mean we have entirely failed. As this term has showed me, every project is a work-in-progress; success depends not on your original design, but on how willing you are to change and improve it where needed
Work Cited
Harris, Anita. Future Girl. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
[Word Count: 500]
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