This is a portfolio of the work I've written for both classes and extra-cirricular activities in the Social Justice Studies major. On the left you'll find the work divided by category. These categories are based on a model of justice that I've developed through my research and personal experience--the model is shown below in my introductory narrative to the written work portfolio. Each category is collapsible; for example, if you want the essay titles under the heading "Mindfulness and Daily Justice" to appear, simply click on the heading.

Social Justice Studies: A Personal and Academic Narrative
            My journey with social justice during my time at St. Olaf has raised more questions than it has answered, and I have recently begun to think that this never-ending cycle of questions, answers, and more questions is a good thing.  My journey has also taken a somewhat cyclical form. I began formulating a major called “The Writing of Social Change” my sophomore year, and had planned to study the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and sexuality from historical, sociological, religious, and political perspectives.  From this knowledge, I would engage in my own writing of social change, which I thought would take the form of essays and poetry.  However, I was not quite sure how to get from the research aspect of my major to the creative part of my major.  In determining my senior project at the beginning of this year, I thought it would be easiest to focus on theory and write a paper on feminist theological ethics.  Because I had not figured out how to hone my passion for social justice into creativity, I decided to stick to theory.  I changed my major name to Social Justice Studies and constructed a dense, theoretically-focused senior project.
            As I began reading feminist philosophical theory, however, I found myself yearning for a more creative way to express the ideas I encountered.  Referring to Parker J. Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak, a book I read during my Lilly grant-funded service learning and vocational trip to Honduras, I explored the idea of vocation and service in my life and in my senior project.  Palmer encourages his readers to listen to the voice of vocation in their journey toward justice, emphasizing the plurality of talents and perspectives that each person brings to the world: “The movements that transform us, our relations, and our world emerge from the lives of people who decide to care for their authentic selfhood” (31).  I made the decision to care for my authentic selfhood with my senior project, turning to the form of an artist’s book to explore the concepts I had researched.  I continued to read essays on feminist philosophy, but sought out new texts that paid attention to spiritual and experiential aspects of justice.  I found myself drawn to such writers as Thich Nhat Hanh, bell hooks, and liberation theologians, and I read widely in the field of self-expression for justice.  At the suggestion of Professor LeBlanc, I fed my own creative energy by attending readings, speeches, and performances by artists and activists who focused on social justice.
            Looking back on the essays and papers I have written during my classes in the Social Justice Studies major (and outside the major), I notice this journey playing itself out in my exploration of academic subjects.  Almost every class in my major has produced written work that represents part of my growth as it relates to social justice (and if a class does not have written work represented in this portfolio, its significance in the major will be shown with theories and citations in this introductory narrative).  Looking at the writing I have done my senior year, I see a turn toward a journalistic style and an attempt to reach a different audience.  It has been important for me with my artist’s books, presentation, and written work during my senior year to bridge the gap between complex theories and the ways we live them out in our daily lives.
            I now see the application and operation of social justice in my own life following a cyclical model: it begins with ideals and theories, and moves to mindfulness and an integration of vocational reflection into daily life, then to a praxis and expression of justice, then to action rooted in community.  If all these actions create social change, then the cycle is repeated, with social change creating new theories and ideals that lead to more reflection and mindfulness, and so on.  A diagram elucidates this theory:

I have organized my portfolio into categories based on this model: Mindfulness and Daily Justice: Bodily, Spiritual, Communal; Justice and the Right to Self-Expression; Justice, Praxis, and Social Location; Visions of Community Justice; and Theoretical Justice and Deconstructing Social Norms.  The second half of the portfolio includes the journalistic work I have done, mostly during my senior year, that addresses the subjects above in a new and more widely read form.

Mindfulness and Daily Justice: Bodily, Spiritual, Communal
            Although I began studying mindfulness and the concept of daily justice my junior and senior year of college, I see inklings of the idea in my academic writing as early as my sophomore year at St. Olaf.  In the poetry explication of Lucille Clifton’s “cutting greens,” I identify Clifton’s use of everyday objects to portray the spiritual and the communal.  This concept echoes Thich Nhat Hanh’s assertion that what begins in the mind and in daily action can extend to a global scale.  In his book Creating True Peace, Nhat Hanh advocates mindfulness, which he describes as “the practice of stopping and becoming aware of what we are thinking and doing” (18), as the first step in creating peace in the world: “Shining the light of awareness on the roots of violence within our own hearts and thoughts, we can stop the war where it begins, in our minds.  Stopping the war in our minds and in our hearts, we will surely know how to stop the war outside” (12).  Clifton’s poem moves similarly from disconnection to inner reflection to a larger sense of community, finding this journey in the simple act of cutting greens.
            I moved my exploration of mindfulness and daily justice into the physical realm when I took the dance class “Advanced Body Moveable” with Professor Saterstrom.  My final essay on vitality for this class reflects the physical ways in which I learned to be mindfully aware, and I chose the subject of vitality in light of Nhat Hanh’s theory: if I begin with vitality in myself, it will extend into my interpersonal relations and into my communities.  I chose vitality as the subject of my final presentation because vitality was something I decidedly lacked that semester as a result of my struggle with depression.  Reading Parker Palmer’s essay on depression in his book Let Your Life Speak helped me place my mental health issues within my larger search for vocation and justice.  According to Palmer, depression can result from ignoring the voice of vocation and setting one’s expectations beyond his or her limits.  He describes “the underground” as “a dangerous but potentially life-giving place to which depression takes us; a place where we come to understand that the self is not set apart of special or superior but is a common mix of good and evil, darkness and light; a place where we can finally embrace the humanity we share with others” (69-70).  The concept of a complex self and a common yet pluralistic humanity has manifested itself in my writing about and in my daily experience of social justice.
            At the end of my study abroad program Term in the Middle East, I wrote a cumulative essay on whether or not my experience in the program resembled that of a pilgrimage.  The concept of a common yet pluralistic humanity arose once again, and I assert in the essay that honoring the deep and multi-faceted humanity in others is an essential part of spirituality and justice.

Justice and the Right to Self-Expression
            An integral part of my exploration of social justice has been self-expression, and it was not until I organized my portfolio that I realized how thoroughly I had analyzed the subject in my written work already.  I took Feminist Theology my sophomore year, and discovered a model for reconstructionist feminist theology.  This three-fold model follows an inward-to-outward trajectory: it begins with criticizing patriarchy and attending to the experiences of those who are oppressed by it, continues with bringing these experiences into dialogue, and moves outward with the development a liberating praxis (Clifford 35).  In my paper explicating the lyrics of Cris Williamson’s “Sister,” I analyze the ways in which artists and activists begin with self-expression and recognition of oppression and bring their experience into dialogue and praxis. 
            My essays in English and American Conversations classes have explored the ways in which literature illuminates self-expression and the social and historical factors that have inhibited it.  In Women’s Literature, I explored the ways in which the protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” experiences post-partum depression.  Although the protagonist is clearly mentally ill, Perkins Gilman makes clear that the social factors surrounding the protagonist (i.e. patriarchal family structure) make her unable to express herself and therefore drive her into mental illness.  Though my own journey with depression has taken place in a much different societal structure and in much less extremity, this story helped me illuminate social factors that may have been inhibiting my self-expression as it related to justice. 
            My essay “Angry Half-Truths of Identity in Quicksand and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” written for American Conversations, explores a similar concept in context of a racist society that prevents two protagonists from forming a full, expressive identity. Combined with a reading of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” these two novels helped me recognize the myriad of ways in which people are oppressed and prevented from finding self-expression and vocation, and the importance of social justice to work toward eliminating these oppressions.
            Margaret Fuller’s essay “The Great Lawsuit,” which I encountered both in American Conversations and in English 222 (English 222 essay included), begins to bridge the gap between the recognition of societal structures that prevent self-expression and the movement toward changing these structures.  By using Transcendentalist ideals to debunk the Cult of True Womanhood, Fuller moved toward her own self-expression and created theory that would allow women to experience the same. 
            The final essay in this section, an analysis of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior for American Racial and Multicultural Literature, explores the relationship between community and self-expression.  In order to truly live in community, alludes Kingston, one must claim a voice. 
Since the composition of these essays, my understanding of voice has evolved as I have learned more about social location and vocation.  I try to integrate these concepts into my own expressions of justice and keep them in the back of my mind as I explore others’ expressions of justice.  Attending performances of slam poets such as Ed Bok Lee and StacyAnn Chin and activist musicians such as Ellis has allowed me to experience a plurality of voices of justice, and has informed the way I think about my own expression.

Justice, Praxis, and Social Location
            Though my own practice of social justice has been lived out through civic engagement and community participation, I have tried to retain a sense of my own social location and they ways in which my race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality have affected my worldview and the ways in which I do justice.  Through my involvement this semester with the Cooperative Justice Honor House and with the Manitou Messenger student newspaper, and in my Lilly-funded service learning trip to Honduras, I have discussed the importance of cognizance of social location.  In American Conversations, I read Class Matters and wrote “Confessions of a Fraudulent Bobo in Paradise,” an essay on my own class position.  Though I analyze traits of my own social class, my view of class has expanded to include knowledge of global systems in which, as Ada María Isasi-Díaz says in her book Mujerista Theology, “the few oppress the many” (91).  I integrate these thoughts into my daily actions, returning to Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of mindfulness.
            I included an essay on patriarchy’s interpretation of Martha Nussbaum’s “universalism” theory because I have thought about the ways in which my activism might be interpreted by a patriarchal society.  In the 2008 production of The Vagina Monologues, I played the infamous “woman who loved to make vaginas happy,” also known as “the moaner.”  I struggled with the ways in which those with patriarchy ingrained in their thoughts would interpret the monologue; although it is meant to assert freedom and plurality in women’s sexual expression, it is often seen as too over-the-top and sexual to portray a profound feminist message.  With this in mind, I honed the monologue in a way that would reach a wide audience and emphasize not the display of sexuality, but the right of women to have sexual pleasure.  I continue to search for ways in which I might integrate social justice ideals into praxis.

Visions of Community and Justice
            My view of community and justice has evolved since I began the Social Justice Studies major.  In American Conversations 102, I wrote an essay titled “Free as a Communal Songbird: The Inescapable Separate Spheres of Nineteenth Century America,” which began with a poem I wrote as part of the assignment.  In this paper, I advocate forming communities of women in solidarity as a way out of patriarchal oppression.  Since encountering queer theory through Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, I have begun to think of community in more pluralistic and less gender binary-oriented terms.  Butler calls for “anti-foundational coalitions” that are not based on gender or identity, but on the very notion of change and conversation.  However, for many other feminists, such as bell hooks, the notion of community is central to an active and comprehensive understanding of feminism.  In my own life, I search for a balance between attachment to identity and community and anti-foundational coalitions.  In adhering to just one model, I risk excluding the experience of other groups’ realities.
            I also explore community as an antidote to the consumer culture often becomes the antithesis of social justice in my essay on the hot dish.  The “community and justice” section concludes with an essay on the linguistic concept of communities of practice.  I analyze Eckert and McConnell-Ginet’s “community of practice” in light of my own community interactions at St. Olaf.  According to the two linguists, the community of practice model “takes us away from a community defined by location or by a population.  Instead, it focuses on a community defined by social engagement” (490).  Eckert and McConnell-Ginet do not rely on the male/female binary to analyze language as  many other feminist linguists have done, but rather explore all the factors that play into social engagement.  Analyzing communities of practice in my own life allowed me to apply distant theories to daily life.

Theoretical Justice and Deconstructing Social Norms
            My engagement with queer theory in my Women’s Studies seminar (Third Wave Discourses) this semester has simultaneously resonated with and contradicted other theories of social justice I have encountered.  Butler’s de-emphasis on identity counters the concept of solidarity that is so important in liberation theology, but her concept of socially constructed realities supports the liberation theology idea that oppression is created by social constructions of inequality.  For the Third Wave Discourses seminar, each student has kept a blog with response papers to which other students in the class respond.  The papers focus on summary and analysis of the text read for class, and pose discussion questions to incite dialogue among classmates.  I have included my blog responses to the last third of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, which addresses queer theory, and to the beginning of R.W. Connell’s Masculinities, which discusses the body as both an object and an agent of social change. Queer theory and third wave discourses are exciting to me as I explore their application to daily life, which brings me back to the concept of mindfulness and justice in daily action. 

Journalistic Work
I conclude my written portfolio with articles I have written for Alive Magazine, The Manitou Messenger, Callings (Lilly Vocational publication), and for my class Art and Politics of the Book.  Although journalistic writing requires strict ethics and is sometimes seen as less reliable than academic writing, I have found it conducive to incorporating others’ direct experiences through the use of quotations. I have included stories from the Opinions and News sections that portray my understanding of social justice and others’ experience and community activism. I found my own journalistic voice through co-writing the “Sex on the Hill” column with Katherine Oyster, and I have included my columns as well as the process description that Katherine and I co-wrote in order to submit our column for consideration for the Viola Rossing prize in Women’s Studies.  It is my hope that this writing, inspired by mindfulness, reflection, action, and community engagement, will reach a broad audience and reflect the many theoretical and experiential aspects of social justice.