Penalty Blog

On-campus

I attended the Mina Nair speech that she gave at the Writer’s Voice. I found it thoroughly enjoying. Mina Nair was an insightful, interesting down to earth speaker. Her stories of her filmmaking were entertaining, and it was amazing to hear about all she’s seen and done throughout her life. I also really admire her for her open and powerful methods of breaking down walls, whether based on gender, race, class, or any other differentiating characteristic. She is definitely a powerful and confident woman who is full of life and love for the world around her. I particularly like that she gardened as a hobby. It’s nice to see that someone who has accomplished so much and who is an amazing creative and passionate individual still has relatively mundane hobbies, and can appreciate the calm of a garden. Mina Nair was all around awesome.

On-campus

This afternoon I attended a talk by the Whole Foods Market CEO, John Mackey. His Conscious Business plan is thought by many to be revolutionary because of it’s unusual strategies and it’s concern for individuals besides shareholders, including customers, employees, and suppliers. It was an interesting talk for me because while economics is an important part of political science, I don’t know nearly enough about it. I learned a great deal about the potentials of capitalism, which is a system that I typically find to be exploitative and greedy in nature, and the information given allowed me to expand alter, and reinforce various ideas that I have about the capitalist system. The potential Mackey highlighted was the ability of corporations to increase overall wealth for many varying groups and the idea that profits can be a means to the end of both helping others and increasing business success, instead of being ends themselves. I particularly appreciated and respected Mackey’s advocating of corporate philanthropy, and the Whole Foods program of micro-finance loans in poorer countries where they get many of their products. With that said, I did have a couple of problems with Mackey’s talk. First, many of his methods of implementing his business strategy are focused around love. I am all for compassionate capitalism, but his methods were a bit too cheesy for me to take seriously. If even I, a bleeding heart liberal, am unable to fully get on board with his strategies of love in the office, I doubt that many individuals in business, which is often a cutthroat and brutal profession, would be able, or would even want to follow Mackey’s strategies. I feel that he has a great business model, but his really great potential contributions to business, like helping others through philanthropy and other programs, could possibly lose credibility due to his extreme version of compassionate capitalism. Secondly, throughout the presentation, Mackey made two comments that I found somewhat offensive, involving both sexist and xenophobic content. The xenophobic comment may have been a joke, I couldn’t tell, but the sexist comment seemed completely genuine. He caught himself halfway through it, after his point was made clear, and then had the gall to say that he gets in trouble for “being honest.” As someone super interested in the feminist perspective of all areas of study, I have learned to develop a tough skin with sexism, and not get too easily offended. With that said, listening to Mackey preach about helping everyone through business, and then drop an offensively sexist comment was both shocking and saddening to me. Overall though, I enjoyed and learned a great deal from the lecture.

Off and On Campus Blog

Off-Campus

For my off-campus activity, I went to a healing workshop in Round Rock, I have been to multiple different types of meditation practices, and yoga-meditative workshops, but never anything involving healing. To be perfectly honest, it was a bit outside my preferences. It was a little more new-age-y than I’m used to and feel comfortable doing with enthusiasm. With that said, the meditation part was incredibly interesting and rewarding as it usually is. I did find though that my meditation patience was far less than it has been in the past; I think that in part, this is due to a stressful, but fun, year of change and growth. My life has not as of late held the time for extended periods of peace and serenity. In a way, I’ve really enjoyed the more hectic pace my life has been moving at, but at the same time, I do miss being able to sit in a meditation room for extended periods of time, and find that balance that has been missing lately. The one part of the healing workshop that I found particularly cheesy was the healing sessions where we all stood up around some people that were suffering from various ailments, and tried to heal them with our positive energy. I guess I’ve become a little to cynical to believe in the power of thoughts over medical care; I do believe positivity can greatly affect someone’s health but I think that it is more focused on the positive nature of the individual, rather than through healers.

On-campus

I attended a lecture held by the political science department, featuring political scientist Jack Goldstone. As a poli sci major, I found his talk incredibly enlightening and super relevant to the work I’m doing in all my classes, but most directly to my International Security class. The speech was focused around Democracies around the world, state stability, and a variety of other statistical measurements of the state. It was exciting to see the ‘scientist’ part of political scientist because most undergraduate political science work is focused on the general concepts rather than information, statistical findings, and subsequent political predictions. His talk focused around an index that he had developed with some of his colleagues which measured various factors of states to determine state stability, democracy measures, and a variety of other aspects of the state which allow him and others to draw conclusions and highlight patterns. One of the most interesting patterns that they highlighted was that since the end of the Cold War, intrastate wars (wars that happen within states, i.e. civil wars) have dramatically increased; this is due to the lack of the superpower control of their respective spheres. It was interesting that the overarching threat of a huge conflict kept in check a multitude of smaller conflict.

End of Semester Blog

This semester has been the beginning of a yearlong process to get myself ready for the real world. Because of this, I have not been able to experience, as fully as I would like, the intellectual ideas that I really enjoy exploring. Paideia has been incredibly helpful in filling that void. I’ve enjoyed thoroughly the varied topics of discussion, and continuing my liberal arts education even while I gear up to leave that process. I like that everyone in the group was able to offer something they find interesting, capstone-related or not, to the rest of us, and that we were almost always able to have meaningful discussions on a multitude of important issues. I don’t think I can really pinpoint a specific discussion that I enjoyed more than the rest. The spectrum of our topics, from feminism to introversion to animal cruelty, were all so interesting that I appreciated each one as much as the last. I definitely learned things that I didn’t know before, and was exposed to a variety of new opinions and perspectives.

As for my creative project, I have not yet really addressed it, nor will I until next semester and capstone. I have furthered my own academic progress in some exciting ways, including rediscovering my love for International Relations, and realizing that it is the branch of international relations that I am truly passionate about. It has reaffirmed my desire to go to grad school and continue the process of learning.