intersectionality or big oof [elijah matthews]

Elijah Matthews

Untitled 1 & 2

Lauren Clorite

Can You Achieve the American Dream?

This project appears to be a self-documentation of my daily life as a teenager in suburban life. It includes actions/activities that I do routinely. The documentation will show how at every step, I am working towards quintessential “success”. I seek to utilize the combination of audio conversations and visuals in order to convey my personal limitations and how who I am, ultimately makes the “American Dream” inaccessible to me. The “American Dream”, as stated in this video is, “the ideal that every U.S. citizen should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative”. With today’s inequalities in society, being a middle-class Chinese-American woman limits my opportunities, thus limiting my odds at achieving the “American Dream”.

India Wolterstorff

Hesitation/Vulnerability

I wanted to explore the idea of vulnerability in my video, specifically how I feel vulnerable when I am trying to express certain ideas eloquently or how people avoid and embrace it.

Stella Martone

Professional Development

The American public education system ignores the current issues in today’s media. It creates an unfair disadvantage for students in these schools. There has been a wall built up between students and teachers. This barrier makes students like myself feel weak and belittled by schools and their efforts to continue treating students as unimportant. It also makes us feel dissatisfied and angry that we can’t have any communication with teachers or peers about topics crucial in understanding today’s cultural and political climates. We’re left feeling constantly confused and questioning without other’s input on the relevance of these topics. This project reflects the frustration expressed by American students in response to today’s curriculum.

The first element of stacking books and allowing them to repeatedly fall represents the failure in education. The more effort students put into building their own knowledge, the more difficult it becomes to see value in public school classes and create intellectual connections with teachers and the world. The other aspect of the video is the split screen monitor playing three seperate videos. The first is a repeated clip of books being violently slammed onto the ground. The second is every page of The Grapes of Wrath being crumpled up in a ball, and the third clip is the physical process of tearing those pages out. There is an emphasis on anger and raw outrage in these clips, utilizing damage and destruction to express the frustration words cannot.