Hutchins Portfolio
Hayley Palk
Unlearning my American biases
My introductory text in Hutchins was Plato's Allegory of the Cave. In this story, a group of people have been manipulated their entire lives into believing a fabricated reality, and they become erratic once they find out that a world exists beyond the cave. I was then prompted to read James Lowen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, and suddenly I empathized with the cave dwellers. I realized that I had been persuaded into a particular worldview from the first time I entered a classroom. Reading Lowen shattered that worldview, thus beginning my lifelong journey of deconstructing my American biases. In my response paper I verged on two concepts that I would later learn have actual names, and are deeply embedded in the politics of our nation: white fragility and echo chambers.
LIBS 101: THE HUMAN ENIGMA
LIBS 102: IN SEARCH OF SELF
While reading An Indigenous People's History of the United States, I started to notice a pattern: greed was repeatedly the underlying motive for all exploitation. Growing up, I was often told that money is the root of all evil. However, the real problem is the system by which we distribute that money. Though I didn't specify capitalism as an issue in my papers until my second year, my response to the film "Happy" is the earliest documentation of my pushback against it. This was the first time that I wondered what life would be like if 'money' was not such a pervasive component of everyday life.
I chose my area of concentration in Visual and Performing Arts. One of the courses I took to fulfill this was Theatre of the World, which focused specifically on Latinx theatre works. We discussed the key components of neoliberal policy, as well as the United States' role in imposing it in Mexico after NAFTA was enacted in the 90's. I learned how U.S. subsidies made it impossible for Indigenous Mexican corn farmers to reap the benefits of their labor. As corn is a staple in Mexico, many protested NAFTA with the slogan "sin maíz no hay país". Taking this course opened my eyes to the fact that the United States takes egrigious advantage of multiple nations across the world. For my midterm, I answered questions about three plays that we studied. Neoliberalism was a theme throughout each one.
THAR 374: THEATRE OF THE WORLD
Reading Assata Shakur's autobiography my first semester was my very first introduction to the Black Panther party. Prior, I had never heard of them or their work. This is because liberation movements are condensed in American history textbooks, and the people involved are tokenized. There is no depth in their characterization. In k-12 I obviously learned about Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. But Martin did so much more than give his "I Have a Dream Speech", and Rosa did more than sit in the back of a bus. We are taught that these people were peaceful, that they protested "the correct way". But the Civil Rights Movement was extremely violent and strenuous. In this course, I was further enlightened on the Panthers, as well as the intense labor that Black people expended in the 20th century to gain basic liberties. My favorite writings are in response to The Eyes On the Prize Civil Rights Reader, and clips of speeches by Malcolm X.
LIBS 320A: CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT TO #BLM
