Finding faith in study abroad
Today is the last day of the study part of my time abroad. Not that I spent much time studying or that my classes were difficult, but, like all of you, I will be happy to finish another semester.
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Today is the last day of the study part of my time abroad. Not that I spent much time studying or that my classes were difficult, but, like all of you, I will be happy to finish another semester.
As soon as I said the word I knew I had made a mistake. I watched uneasily as formerly friendly faces morphed into more hardened countenances. As I frenetically struggled to explain myself, I silently cursed myself for being so careless. Because really, I knew better. Everyone who has ever taken a Spanish class knows better. It is such a convenient little cognate, though, so much more fitting and easier to say than the alternative, just a little –o at the end…
As any good college student does on a daily basis, I procrastinated the other day. While squandering untold precious hours of my quickly dwindling time in Argentina, I came across one of the most outrageous foreign political dramas I could possibly imagine.
My host dad has a penchant for conspiracy theories. Most are passed on to me at the dinner table and seem to come at just the right moment for me to nearly choke every time.
When choosing where to study abroad one must weigh the many options carefully. The plethora of cities, countries or regions in which to spend a summer, semester or perhaps a year abroad affords us — as students at the greatest university ever — the privilege to be choosy.
When I awoke this morning to the screeching banshee howl of a cat named Betty, I knew that I was not at home.
UNC graduate students used the unconventional subjects of hunters, clay boxes, beds and submerged speaking in an exhibition that marks the culmination of their two-year Master of Fine Arts degree program.
One dollar won’t buy a soft drink from a vending machine. But the Carolina Union Activities Board is putting on a concert series at venues around campus throughout the next month for exactly that amount.
The art at the Ackland Art Museum is going out tonight.An exhibition of photographs depicting daily life in Kibera, Kenya, one of Africa’s largest and poorest slums, will be displayed from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. tonight on the museum’s lawn.The exhibit, titled “Kibera Illuminated: Lives in East Africa’s Largest Slum,” was organized by Carolina for Kibera, Students for CFK, Student Friends of the Ackland and Ackland Art Museum.The photographs of Kibera were taken by young girls living in the slum. The girls were given cameras by the CFK program “Binti Pamoja” which means “Daughters United” in Swahili.Alex Loizias, the Kibera Illuminated program coordinator who spent the summer interning for CFK in the slum, was involved in the project from the beginning. She said giving cameras to locals rather than visitors grants a different perspective.“The goal is to really turn the idea of travel photography on its head,” she said.Hundreds of girls who had no formal training in photography participated in the program over the course of several years.Displayed on a brick wall in front of Ackland, the eight photos are presented in large boxes that are illuminated from within and resemble television screens. The images depict local women and children living in poverty-stricken situations.Nic Brown, the director of communications for the Ackland, said this is the first time in at least three years that there has been an entire exhibition outdoors.“This is unlike anything that we’ve done in recent memory. We’re very excited about the possibility of putting this amazing exhibition on display,” he said.Ashley Hedges, a first-year graduate student who attended Thursday’s opening, said she was interested by the insider’s perspective of the artwork.“It is heart-wrenching and a really neat idea. When there’s such terrible things like this and you can illuminate them, it’s amazing,” she said.Contact the Arts Editor at artsdesk@unc.edu.
Correction (March 1 11:49 p.m.): Due to a reporting error, an earlier version of this story failed to include UNC student Emily Satterfield, one of the winners of the student stand up competition. The story has been changed to reflect the correction. The Daily Tar Heel apologizes for the error.
Gaming expert Jesper Juul posed an unexpected question: “Can video games make you cry?” in his speech Friday afternoon in the Union auditorium.He answered it with a slide of a South Korean man tearfully mourning his loss in StarCraft, an example of the potential emotional investment involved with competitive gaming.Juul delivered his speech “Gaming and the Future of the Arts and Humanities” as part of the Collaborations: Humanities, Arts & Technology festival.Juul’s 90-minute lecture focused on the changing role of video games in society and the seriousness with which academics should approach them.“Video games are now the norm,” Juul said.He said that thanks in part to new distribution methods such as the cell phone, more then 50 percent of the population plays video games.Juul described an ongoing “Cambrian explosion of game forms,” meaning the current rapid evolution of game styles is similar to the diversity of life that developed during the geological era.Juul profiled the changing place of video games in culture, citing Pac-Man’s lasting influence in pop culture.He also noted the surprising lack of correlation between high graphics power and high sales. He credited the rise of casual gaming and new motion-sensitive controllers.He discussed the way that game presentation has changed, from two-dimensional to three-dimensional to the current games involving player interaction in the real world with consoles like the Wii.Though gaming has grown in popular culture, academic study has not kept pace, Juul said.Juul is focused primarily on the way gaming is viewed academically, as a technology-based experience. He pointed out the link between multi-player gaming and social status among friends.“Meaningful social interactions enter the game,” Juul said, emphasizing that an important part of studying games is the social context.He discussed the intensely personal nature of games as a self-evaluation of skill that can bring out a wide range of emotions, ranging from depression to elation.Unlike novels or films where emotions are felt secondhand through characters, gaming provides first-person experiences.Juul outlined the evolving methods that video games use to convey storylines and the growing importance of the game’s plot rather than the action.Senior information science major Tanner Allison, who plays video games, agreed with Juul.“Videos games have grown as a storytelling form,” Allison said, adding that improved graphics have made games more realistic.Juul closed with a discussion on the focus of the humanities. “Humanities focus inside the box,” he said, referring to the novels, films and other media that are traditional objects of academic study.“It is time to break out of the box.”Contact the Arts Editor at artsdesk@unc.edu.
The minds behind “Stuff White People Like” and “This Week in Blackness,” entertained a packed Great Hall with their comedic ways, including a full-length rap on brunch and readings on the social value of scarves and being friends with black people.The speakers of the self-proclaimed “Post-Racial Comedy Tour,” Christian Lander and Elon James White combined their disparaging humor with a serious emphasis on the state of race in America.White, a comedian from Brooklyn whose blog “This Week in Blackness” explores the perceptions of blacks by society, opened the event.White compared the level of fantasy in gangster rap to Harry Potter novels while pointing out serious flaws with the attitudes that are prevalent in a country that claims to be post-racial due to the election of a black president.He debunked a popular claim of those trying to be politically correct —“I don’t see color” — by stating the issue is not with seeing the color.“The problem is not that you see color, but the thought you get after you see it,” White said.He asserted that “racism cannot be overcome in a moment,” in reference to the election of Barack Obama, despite contrary claims by the media post-election.Lander spoke less about race and more on the process of becoming a published writer. He turned his blog into a New York Times bestselling book.He detailed his own meteoric rise from obscurity to Internet fame in the span of two months. He said his blog’s first views were people searching for “organic fair-trade coffee.” “Stuff White People Like” soon evolved into a blog with more than 60 million views, which led to the book deal.He credited his rise to his honest writing and a simple, relatable concept.While his emphasis was on his own rise to fame, he still found time to address race. He said that many of the traits that he documented in his blog were the result of “white privilege.” He said many people are free to pursue their trendy lifestyles because they are free from having to provide for themselves. Both writers addressed the volume of criticism they receive for their supposed racism, which both wrote off as ignorance and a failure to understand their intentions. The speakers closed with the epistle to “confront race head-on and to simply discuss it.”The pair were crowd-pleasers.“Awesome, because you attack serious issues through humor and you can say things that you wouldn’t normally say,” said Katelyn DeBerardinis, a sociology and women’s studies major, of the event. Contact the Arts Editor at artsdesk@unc.edu.