What new ideas, challenges, or other issues have you encountered with regard to your project (this might include data collection, information that contradicts your assumptions or the assertions of others, materials that have enriched your understanding of the topic or led you to change your project, etc.)?
As the scope of my project has narrowed, I have had an increasingly difficult time finding both primary and secondary sources directly related to my topic. I am grateful, however, for my personal librarian, with whom I have been working to gain a more robust grounding in the current scholarship of my specific area. With my research topic becoming more niche, I have become increasingly excited about its potential and how I can make a distinct contribution. At the same time, I have become more overwhelmed about how I can do my project justice. I have a lot of ideas that only become more profuse the more I read, and I am struggling slightly to order and articulate them. My faculty mentor has provided me with more direction to make my research as productive as possible and aligned with my interests.
How have these ideas or challenges shaped the bigger picture of your research? Has the scope or focus of your topic changed since you began this project? If so, how?
From my readings, I have gained a better understanding of the biases I was not aware I had coming into my research, and how to responsibly address them. Rather than defining prison writing as a genre, I am now exploring the political significance of personal prison letters by incarcerated activists in the 1960s and '70s. This topic both greatly interests me and adresses a less-talked-about aspect of the discourse. The revolutionaries I am studying, such as George Jackson and Eldridge Cleaver, are known for their radical activism, political beliefs, and contentious personalities. Instead of tracing these more front-facing parts of their lives, I want to explore how the political is reflected in, as my faculty mentor aptly described it, a Tuesday morning letter to their mother. I am curious about these love letters from both political and personal standpoints, and, importantly, how the political and personal intersect and overlap.
Now that you’ve engaged in Part II of the Leadership Retreat, reflect on a learning point that remains with you as a new way to understand leadership, and to incorporate into your own engagement, in the future.
I now understand leadership as a multifaceted set of behaviors that are all required to embody a true leader. In the future, I aim to exemplify the different traits and adjust depending on the circumstances. I particularly want to work on being a better leader beside, since I think I tend to focus on the other three far more and find it difficult to share work evenly in a manner that is fulfilling and reasonable for both parties. I also understand that leadership is not always demonstrated in the loudest or most front-facing person but exists in the work behind the scenes as well.