Items

• 2020

  Dystopian utopia

  During covid I almost failed high school. Quarantine occurred during the end of my sophomore year and all of my junior year. These years are exactly the middle years of highschool and it being online felt dystopian yet sort of utopian. Sophomore year online classes were my best grades in highschool. When they were just figuring out how to manage online classes, the workload was much easier than in person classes and the teachers were more understanding due to the circumstances. Junior year started and the longer that zoom classes continued, the less I felt the need to keep up with work. Having online classes didnt feel like being in class and skipping/sleeping through class came easier when I was already doing classes in bed. Especially when learning that a whole year of my highschool time was going to be remote, it made me lose motivation for grades. It was more so that grades felt like something that doesn’t really exist. I was here at home, locked inside because of a global crisis, and I had these FaceTime calls as class. Socialization was the main factor that motivated me to go to school in the first place. I prioritized socializing online over grades since I’m an extremely extraverted person who relies on socialization to feel energized. This led me to the most chronically online time of my life. I became practically nocturnal, staying up all night to play games or FaceTime with my friends. I met a lot of people online as well, people I am still friends with. Towards the end of the school year, I was failing all my classes. During Covid they had this policy that students couldn’t really fail, or that teachers had to provide more assistance to students who were failing. I didn’t really know what policy it was, I only heard about it, but it definitely worked in my favor. Last week or two of classes I had to complete a shortened list of assignments and if I completed them I would get a passing grade which wouldn’t affect my gpa. I completed them and then it was summer when we started getting used to going outside again. Quarantine time felt definitely dystopian, with toilet paper wars and a global lockdown. Throughout that, it brought a new perspective on what we really have and having reduced responsibilities, knowing that the world had enough resources for us to not have to work for a year but instead be provided for by the government, felt utopian. It felt like, for many, that we have been on a grind mindset for so long when we are a developed and advanced society. We have abundance to share, nationally, and are past the point of just survival. All in all, covid was an eye-opening, very weird time.
• 
  2020-09-17

  The Hands of Our Mothers: The Survival of Black Motherhood Through COVID-19 & the Uprisings

  My project sought to examine and understand the historical resilience of Black motherhood and its relation to the life altering pandemic, COVID-19 and racially driven uprisings against systematic oppression; How Black motherhood and resistance through Black motherhood adapted, how it’s changed and what new radical resistance through motherhood was conjured in face of the pandemic and race clarity. As an autoethnographic account this research project was centered around my experience of motherhood and communal connections, as well as the experiences of Black mothers and birth workers. The political positioning of Black mothers was considered through essays and poetry written, as well as photos during the lockdowns in relation to the concepts of birth and death, the idea of radical mothering and activism, and the umbrella term of community.