As a graduating senior now I found this alerting as I fear that my graduation may be postponed or something; but I found this meme to be really funny,as many Drs now are trying to switch to online teaching due to the spread of Coronavirus. I never would’ve thought that my senior year in college would be like that and in a matter of minutes many peoples’ lives are turn upside down due to the spread of the virus.
I am a 22 years old Egyptian Muslim woman. I am also a student at AUC, majoring in Economics. Being a woman definitely influences how I behave in the world and how I carry myself. I face many struggles with the different elements of my identity, because a lot of people assume things about me and I feel like I constantly have to prove myself to others. As an Aucian, people usually assume that I am spoiled and that I don’t have to work hard for my degree, while that is truly not the case.Travelling outside of Egypt, makes me connect more with the fact that I belong to the Arab/Middle Eastern culture; I feel that I only notice this when I am in a foreign country and I find that I connect more with an arab, in regards of language, religion and culture.However, being in Egypt makes me more mindful of the differences that are between the Egyptian culture and the cultures of the other Arab countries. In my opinion, it is a matter of perspective and the kind of situation that I am exposed to, as I find that I connect to different parts of my identity depending on the place, time and the people that I am surrounded with. Moreover, I feel like no one has one solid identity that they are able to portray to every single one they meet. So as I am proud of being an economics student at the AUC, when applying to jobs, meanwhile, when I meet someone from a different social class I might hide the fact that I study at AUC to avoid having my character being judged based on that fact solely.
I have learned a lot about different aspects of my identity and my biases through the class discussions and the articles that I have read. “ I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another… I cannot manage without another, I cannot become myself without another ” (Bakhtin, 1981,p. 287) I believe that this is very accurate and to the point in explaining how we are personally affected by the existence of other/different people. Furthermore, I found the article “How ‘African’ is Northern Africa?” to be very enlightening regarding a fact that we sometimes forget to analyse or question; and that is are we considered Africans and do we view ourselves as that or do we assume we are different because we are from Northern Africa so we don’t belong to Africa as much as other countries there and also because of many other reasons such as religion and race.I began to question a lot of things after reading this article and I feel like I started to analyse more what people around me think regarding this topic. “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, “secondly.”(Mourid Barghouti) I became more conscious of how sometimes I take things for granted and assume that I know the whole story of someone while no matter what I know, I still do not qualify to share his story or discuss it ,as I only know one perspective and one of the many sides of the story.
The first quiz I chose was the Gender-Career IAT, and the results I found were that my responses suggested a moderate automatic association for Male with Career and Female with Family.I expected this result while answering this quiz, as I thought that my answers were leaning towards this association more. I expected that my result would be affected by the fact that my mother did not work while i was young, however she started working later on and now she spends more time working than my father does; I thought that this would have a great influence in my answers but I guess not.
The second quiz was the Fat-Thin IAT and my results showed that I have a slight automatic preference for Thin people over Fat people.I thought this quiz would be interesting because I feel like in my circle of friends very few of them would be considered overweight and I never thought about it and about whether weight would be something that I care about or not.Meanwhile, while i was growing up , my father would always talk to me about the negative effect of being overweight as he tried to help me maintain a healthy weight unlike my older sister who was more on the overweight side. I think that I have built this image of having fat as bad due to how I was brought up in my home and not because of how my community or friends were.So overall, I kind of expected this result.
Some of the biases that I find in my daily life are biases against lower-income classes,as a lot of people tend to judged based on what someone is wearing, what car they own, which school they went to and they would reach a conclusion which is simply that this person is not good enough to be associated with them.Also, a lot of the people i meet with everyday are biased towards races other than theirs;especially now with the coronavirus, and how when someone sees an asian person around they would usually comment about them and in certain situations they would even abuse that person.
At a very young age, I used to be biased against people who are different, and that would include people of different gender, color, and religion. At this age, I couldn’t grasp the idea of being different and I always thought that my religion is the right one and i didnt understand why someone would make such a decision, of choosing a religion other than Islam. As bizarre as this sounds to me now but, these biases extremely affected my behaviour while I was young, as i tried to avoid boys and would hate to play with someone with a darker complexion than me. By time and knowledge, I grew past these biases and learned to accept differences more and I can’t deny that meeting more people of different races and religions and interacting with them has helped me understand that I can have more things in common with an atheist than with a person from my own religion.
References
http://dialogic.blogspot.com/2009/11/mikhail-bakhtin-dialogic-nature-of.html
The article about the differences between digital skills and digital literacies was truly enlightening and informative. I really enjoyed reading it, as it was straightforward and full of examples that helped me grasp the idea thoroughly. Following this, with what I was exposed to in the event, has helped learn even more about different terms and their meanings, like learning what digital citizenship means and so on. The activities in the beginning were quite interesting as you could see that a lot of people wanted to learn the same skills and so I could relate to many of the things that were written. I only wish that there was more emphasis on digital citizenship, like explaining it and using more examples in the activity or in the talk after, as i feel some of the comments were repeated in both digital literacies and citizenship. What was more eye-opening for me was the talk and the comments that people made at the end of the event. I really connected with many of the comments, including for example: that social media magnifies our negative aspects and that the blame shouldn’t be on social media solely, but we should look closer and realise that this bully on Instagram was a bully in his school before this application was invented but now he is exposed to more people and his bullying is sort of magnified; and I truly think that this is true but I havent had the chance to think about it in this way before. There were many topics that were opened and managed to grab my attention immediately, like: the impact of social media on the brain,and the psychological wellbeing, which I wish was discussed more. Moreover, how posting on social media is helping your stalkers know exactly where you are and when do you leave your child/house unattended and how this might cause extremely dangerous situations for you and your family and this point was contradicted when someone shared the opinion of their students, which is that they believe their privacy is not that important since they are not a public figure and that they don’t care; this left me in quite a dilemma as I can relate to both opinions. Lastly, the most topic that undeniably took me by surprise was the fact that search engines are not neutral, that was quite news for me because I never heard or even questioned this possibility. Knowing that search engines are biased and that they help you find out what you want to find exactly, I immediately started to recall all the times that I searched for diagnosis on google and for random facts about topics that were interesting to me and i even remember the many times were I found contradicting information after digging deep in different websites. After that, I felt that this information really connected with something that i do every single day, which is googling any thought that comes to mind, and I plan on changing that habit to start thinking on my own first and judging critically the information that i find out instead of believing it right away.
The Digital confidence profile was an adequate reflection of what skills and information I have, that was like a reality to check on which levels am I at concerning technological skills, information and digital literacies. I like that there are ways on which we can advance our level in certain aspects.I feel like most of the questions I was neutral about expect communication, and that makes sense as my major doesn’t help me explore that much creativity in creating content and learning about different technological tools and how to use them.
Knowing the Difference Between Digital Skills and Digital Literacies, and Teaching Both. (2020). Retrieved 24 February 2020, from https://literacyworldwide.org/blog/literacy-daily/2016/02/03/knowing-the-difference-between-digital-skills-and-digital-literacies-and-teaching-both
Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.
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