Reflective Writing Piece 1.

When I was first told to create a photo board that represented my culture, identity, my view on human rights and a historical influence that is still relevant today I thought it would be a piece of cake. However, my previous knowledge was very brief and so not only did I learn a lot about the aspects that needed to be represented but I also learnt a lot about myself.

When thinking about culture I initially tried to think about a religious culture that I held but I didn’t think that I belonged to a specific culture. I went to other student’s photo board’s for inspiration however most of them represented themselves with their religious cultures and expressed it through pictures of traditional dress or food.

 I thought a bit harder about myself as a person. And I considered culture as behaviours, values, beliefs and norms. One of my values is my family, from there I realised after reading ‘Cultural Studies: A practical Introduction (Ryan., Jan 22, 2010.) that culture can be groups and interests, and values. This led me to a photo of my parents and myself in our motorbike gear because this is an important part of our culture as it is something we all enjoy and participate in together.

When I thought of Identity a secret spy who had a couple of ‘identities’ came to mind, but after gaining more knowledge. I realised we’re all secret spies but we show our identities differently. After reading Steph Lawler’s Introduction to Identity (Lawler, 2008) I realised I identify myself differently in situations that I am in but at the ‘root’ of all these identities are my families core values and beliefs that I have picked up, creating multiple traits that have shaped my identity. Seeing other students work challenged me into thinking about the other aspects of identity like gender, star signs, hobbies, and religions.

Human rights was definitely a challenge for me as I viewed other students work before I thought about what I was going to write. Other students were focusing on specific human rights that related to and were important to them in terms of gender, or sex or race. I thought about me being a white female brought up in a family and country where my rights were handed to me. I began to feel angry when I thought about this because so many people are deprived of their rights. I then took a personal approach to my human rights picture because it is something I think should highlighted because aren’t human rights universal?

When I thought of New Zealand history and my own gender I instantly thought of Kate Sheppard. The flag referendum was also running at the time and this made me think a little bit harder and a bit more personally about why I chose to use Kate Sheppard. As I am a female New Zealander Kate Sheppard won woman the right to vote and this is still relevant today as woman still have the same rights to vote as men. Kate Sheppard’s actions also inspired me today, because of the amazing things Kate Sheppard did, I am influenced and know I have the same amount of power and rights as men, and in the future I will strive to show I can be more and no less than men. After seeing that quite a lot of other people had used Kate Sheppard I thought that maybe I should change my picture because it was so common however I believed that my example was quite personal and so it was different from everyone else’s and I didn’t feel like I had copied them in anyway.

The Photo Board assignment really challenged me especially when looking at other student’s photos, it really made me think outside the box to the many opinions and perspectives there are and I had to really dig deep to find my own. Along with learning a lot about the many different culture types, and identities and human rights perspectives and historical influences I definitely learned a lot about myself too.

References

Lawler, S. (2008). Introduction: identity as a question. Identity: Sociological Perspective., 1-9.

Ryan., M. (Jan 22, 2010.). Cultural Studies: A Practical Introduction. Hoboken.: Wiley.