Week Five:
What new skills and/or knowledge have you gained from your summer experience? Have you met anyone who has been instrumental in shaping/helping you conduct your project? Briefly, how has this person impacted you? What have you learned about leadership from this individual, and how might it influence your actions, work, and self in the future?

I learned a lot from my supervisor, as the senior site work manager, they were really inciteful about what it means to be a leader and activist in a community that's not your own. Through working on different projects that were community-based and location specific, I learned about best practices for supporting communities and their ability to create programming and services that address issues in them. Throughout the summer, we started to build a resource that collected information from existing organizations that addressed the over-punitive policies in probation and parole. A big part of this project involved respecting already existing community-based organizations and their ability to understand and address problems in their community. Within the context of my fellowship at the Justice Lab and as a Laidlaw fellow, this guidance was really important to me as I struggled at first with understanding how I, as a non-community member, could contribute to these community based efforts without reproducing some of the violent and harmful rhetoric and ideas that often come with field work. A lot of these communities know what the problems are, they just need access to the resources that can help address them in sustainable ways. 

Week Six:
For your final post, upload a video presentation or create a written or photographic narrative in which you discuss your project: why did you become interested in this project, what was the goal of the project, what was its significance or impact (real or potential). How did the project evolve or change over the course of these six weeks? Finally, please consider how your understanding of leadership (curiosity, empathy, teamwork, resilience, etc.) has informed your work or been deepened by your work.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KApPvcbbIM4iGN9eySqKlQUyhc5hvU-Fx/view?usp=sharing

Week One:

As you set out on your research or community engagement project, do you find yourself experiencing any worries or insecurities about saying something that’s already been said? How do we as researchers and/or volunteers learn to address or set aside those insecurities or, better yet, to use them to our advantage?

If your project this summer differs from your project last summer, has last summer’s project influenced your project this year, and if so how?  If your project is different, what tools have you developed to help you work on this project?

For my project this summer, I am working with the Anthropology department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, focusing on sociolinguistic studies and how culture can be conserved through language. Though this project is in a different discipline than my work on the American Diva project last summer, which focused on gender and sexuality, they both aim to emphasize the importance of linguistics in our own perceptions of culture; my experience last summer has given me the tools to more critically investigate seemingly innocuous uses of language and putting media into a broader sociopolitical context. It also allowed me to discover the ways that language and media can influence our daily lives and how important my own lived experiences can to take into account when conducting research; it is through my own lived experiences that I have observed how instrumental the internet can be for linguistic and cultural preservation. To answer the first question as well, I think that the desire to be completely original is one that can be dangerous when conducting research--nothing that we say or write is in a vacuum and we must acknowledge the work of those who come before us as we enter the conversation. Especially when considering fields like anthropology or gender studies, our own lived experiences can often be the motivation for research and it's important to acknowledge how and why these experiences have become a driving force. This personal motivation is something I consider to be a great advantage when conducting research as it allows for a nuanced perspective and great interest in the subject.

Week Five:

Q: What new skills and/or knowledge have you gained from your summer experience? Have you met anyone who has been instrumental in shaping/helping you conduct your project? Briefly, how has this person impacted you? What have you learned about leadership from this individual, and how might it influence your actions, work, and self in the future?

A: As someone whose primary interest is in literary studies, I had many enduring concerns about my work’s contribution to the “public good,” as it is formulated by the Laidlaw Foundation. This summer, under the instruction of so many seminal literary scholars, I’ve arrived at a better understanding of the (ethical, social, political) “value” of literary studies in the 21st century.

In addition to my project commitments, I’ve been attending many seminars and lectures in the Faculty of English in my own time. In one of these talks, visiting Professor Kevin Quashie lectured on contemporary Black literary criticism in a world-context structured by insurgency, disaster, and crisis. As Professor Quashie remarked, we think of aesthetics as antagonistic to—in the case of Black literary arts—racial matters, as if aesthetic discourse were in conflict with the political contexts of these works. Although my project is more outwardly 'humanitarian' this summer, throughout the Laidlaw program I've been thinking a lot about what my interest in literary studies means more generally for the kind of work I'm interested in pursuing—about what it means to attend to sentences in times of global crisis. There are no easy answers to this question, of course, but part of what I've valued so deeply about my time in Oxford is that I'm coming away with a more comprehensive understanding of literary studies as something entangled with, attentive to, and compatible with the public good.

Hi everyone! Sorry for the late posts, I've been working at the Justice Lab on the Emerging Adult Justice Project.

Week One:
As you set out on your research or community engagement project, do you find yourself experiencing any worries or insecurities about saying something that’s already been said? How do we as researchers and/or volunteers learn to address or set aside those insecurities or, better yet, to use them to our advantage?

If your project this summer differs from your project last summer, has last summer’s project influenced your project this year, and if so how?  If your project is different, what tools have you developed to help you work on this project?

Starting out in any new project or job is very nerve-racking because its hard to know exactly what your role will be before you begin. It was especially hard this year because I've never worked in the criminal justice space before. Last year I worked in Public Health and this year I became interested in the Justice Lab because mass incarceration is a public health issue. The EAJ Project uses neuroscience and developmental psychology to demonstrate why young adults need to be treated differently in the justice system. Although my last summer and this summer are certainly different, the data analysis skills and especially the writing skills have been super valuable so far. Having a public health background also gave me a unique view of the project which has been helpful too.

Week Two:
If your project connects with your research from last summer, explain the ways in which it picks up on themes, issues, or questions that are important to you. How are you expanding on your project from last summer? How is your understanding of this topic evolving?

If you are doing a leadership-in-action or community engagement project, how do you interact with community members, and what kind of conversations are you having? How do you connect with this community of people, and what common cause do you find?

I have been meeting a lot of people working in the criminal justice space, many of whom are formerly incarcerated themselves. We have had some great conversations which helped me realize how broken the justice system is and gave me insight into the devastating powers that lawyers can have. We also had an event recently that brought together DAs, legal aid defenders, judges, non-profits, and many other stake-holders who all represented different sides and angles of the system. This kind of conversation is pretty rare since these aren't groups that tend to cooperate together but we were able to have great conversations together and everyone was able to find common ground. A common cause of everyone in this space is that they really care about their job and pursuing justice. Unfortunately, everyone goes about it in different ways that can have negative effects on people. 

Week Three:
What does a typical day look like this summer? Aside from a narrative description, upload a photo, video and/or other media submission!

I wake up and head to work. When I get there, I check my email and answer emails from Lael Chester, my boss, and anyone else. Then sometimes we have a check-in meeting with the internship supervisor and all the fellows share what they've been working on, so we can discuss and give feedback on each other's work. Depending on the day, I am asked to sit-in on Lael's meetings with different people. One day it was a public defender's office in Wyoming to consult on a case. Another day it's the Nebraska probation and parole department that we're helping implement developmentally appropriate policies for emerging adults. I look up facts they ask about during the meetings and also take notes and consolidate deliverables. When I am not in meetings I work on my other tasks. These include a paper I am writing on gang attraction for emerging adults, the monthly newsletter, updating the website, event planning, editing content, etc. Sometimes we also have field trips to meet different groups like the Center for Justice or the Reentry Theater Harlem. Recently we had an event at the Columbia Club that I helped plan and all the interns got to come and watch really interesting speakers. 

Week Four:
What challenges and/or difficulties have you encountered and how did you go about resolving them? Speak to a specific challenge you have encountered and some of the ways that you tackled the problem.

I have difficulty prioritizing when I have a lot of different tasks to do. For example, this week I have a ton of emails to answer, plane tickets to book for an event, and other short-term tasks while I am also behind on my longer-term tasks like my paper and the July newsletter. I try to time-block where I spend the morning completing as many small tasks as I can. Then, after lunch, I work on my paper/ newsletter. One hour before I end for the day, I go back to my email and respond to any new emails I have and write down the short-term tasks I need to do in the morning in order of importance.

Week Five:
What new skills and/or knowledge have you gained from your summer experience? Have you met anyone who has been instrumental in shaping/helping you conduct your project? Briefly, how has this person impacted you? What have you learned about leadership from this individual, and how might it influence your actions, work, and self in the future?

I have gained a lot more knowledge of the legal field and where I want my career to go. Lael Chester has been enormously helpful to me in this internship. She has insisted I sit in on every meeting so I meet as many people as possible in many different fields and see what aspects I like. She also shares with me about her vast career experience to help me see what is good and what is bad about each career option. She gives me plenty of different kinds of work which also help me gain several different skills. She has been a super kind and helpful leader which inspires me to behave the same way when I am in the position where people are working under me.