Week 3 Reflections: Reaching for the core
A recap of last week’s topic:
Welcome back! In last week’s blog, I reflected on soft skills assessments, self-awareness and much of what happens in my internal environment. I finished off with a thought on creative constraints- you can revisit this concept in Aadil Vora’s Ted talk here.
Questions don’t always have answers
This week’s reflection focusses on my external environment, in particular the intensives that we engaged with at the beginning of the week. The intensives were a great way to dig deep into concepts regarding inequality: their several entry points, the mechanisms through which they travel and how they manifest as well as their causes and their consequences. I enjoyed the use of flip learning to stimulate deep intellectual discussions from multiple angles and left with more questions than answers.
One key takeaway for me was the need to specify… from the problem that you are looking to solve, to what your choice of language actually means, asking the questions of what, why, how, who and when multiple times over provides a sound foundation to build upon in a topic that is so diverse in its reach, scale and manifestations.
Projecting my thoughts whilst searching for a project idea
Now onto my final project ideas…my brain is still figuring this out and the more I feed it, the more excited (or confused) it gets. My hope is to embrace the journey and for now, try and pinpoint similarities in the different ideas that pop in to my mind. One thing I’ve noticed about working during the night is that whilst my brain isn’t the most productive, my thoughts become a little bit more creative and somewhat erratic. If by some miracle I am able to organise these, I think it could turn out to be a good thing! For now, I will follow the path of those who introduced an idea before the idea in our cohort meeting last week.
I need to give some more thought as to how I’d like to deliver my project, but in terms of general ideas, here’s what I have so far:
- Exploring inequalities from the lens of its victims and how the mechanism through which agency can or can’t be built. How do different people in society react to the way victims try to protect themselves from the inequalities they face? How does this help or hinder the situation?
- Taking a deeper look at measures of inequality and their role in informing or misinforming strategy or policy. This may be best developed working with a partner organisation
- Applications of my learning to the start-up I am currently building, specifically focussing on inclusive strategy applications from data considerations to global supply chain management
A final note/food for thought
The other day I had a light bulb moment. I always thought that my reading preferences weren’t of a specific genre, but during the intensive sessions I could see parallels with the concepts and areas we were discussing with many of my favourite books. I realised that the cross-cutting theme was that they shared perspectives of lived experience, and show diverse manifestations of others’ decisions on individuals. Many of them are fictional (but based on real life stories). Sometimes they’re the best books because it is easier to be empathetic.
In case you’re interested, here are some titles:
- A little life
- In the nights’ circus
- Rich dad poor dad
- Prisoners of geography
- The book of negroes
- The Hate U Give
- Corruptible: who gets power and how it changes us
I’ll close with this week’s food for thought. During the intensives earlier this week, it became clear that power dynamics are a key mechanism through which inequalities flow and grow. In the blurb of Corruptible, there are some interesting questions that may be worth pondering on so I will leave you with this: “Does power corrupt, or are corrupt people drawn to power? Are tyrants made or born? Are entrepreneurs who embezzle and cops who kill the result of poorly designed systems or are they just bad people? If you were suddenly thrust into a position of power, would you be able to resist the temptation to line your pockets or seek revenge against your enemies?”
Loads to digest in here Maryam, reading your blogs is really enjoyable 🙂 I too enjoyed the flip learning model and how we were able to have a deep discussion with everyone. Props to you and everyone else that did the session in the middle of the night, that was extreme ‘intensive’ lol.
Any of the project ideas you’ve come up with will be really interesting to pursue. From our brief encounters and reading your blogs, it seems like you have some big time commitments at the moment, would aligning the project and your start-up help you maximise your time and share inputs across both? Just a thought – I’m always looking to try and minimise what I call ‘context shifting’ but for some people they need the variety. Not sure how best you work?
I loved your reading list, it’s nice to see a lot of similarities with mine as I also sometimes feel my choices are a little erratic. Thinking about as lived experiences and the impact of decisions on others is a nice way to put it. A little life had me in TEARS, I honestly don’t know how Hanya Yanagihara writes so beautifully but still manages to destroy me emotionally every time!
Thank you so much Rhi, I love reading your blog posts too. Great to hear that you benefited from the flip learning model too and I agree, Hanya’s writing is transformative in such a beautiful way.
That’s a really good point. I think there will definitely be some benefit in focusing in on the start-up itself but I am also doing a lot of this alongside the programme. In some ways, I feel like the nature of the start up and what it aims to do also could benefit from the other research topics. A bit of a non-answer at the moment but definitely something I’ll give proper consideration to. Thank you so much!
I’d love to learn more about your startup. As a person who embraces the ‘and’ rather than the ‘or’, I have been wondering what it would look like to analyse an issue closely entangled with your startup, through the lens of BOTH a) what are the categories and measures of inequality that have traditionally been used to understand that issue, and b) what are the consequences of the resulting policy/strategy decisions from the perspective of lived experience of people marginalised in the process?
This could be a really interesting way of using qualitative data (people’s experiences, accessed through interviews? participant observation? ethnography? creative collaborative methods?) to pinpoint and speak back to ‘structures of exclusion’ that are bolstered by certain ways of measuring and understanding inequality, which don’t take people’s experiences into account.
So yes, it would be great to know more about what you’re working on, and whether a deep and multi-sided analysis of this sort would be helpful in the journey AND in the destination.
Thanks Juli, this has given me quite a bit to think about, and I look forward to sharing my reflections at this weeks DIS supervision. I think there will be benefit in keeping line of sight of both the journey and the destination. My start-up aims to enable people to utilise their privileges (the resources they already have whether that be time, skill, money etc.,) to solve global challenges. The idea is to empower a community of global change-makers at all levels of society so the key foundations are built upon concepts of agency and community. I’m thinking that it may be worth looking into epistemology problems of perception and how these feed into the entry points of inequality- whether that’s in reaching definitive measures for inequality, adding to inequalities through our reactions to the reactions of victims regarding the inequalities they face (often taking place in rooms where they are absent whether through online platforms or homes/workplaces), or in being blind sighted such that subtle inequality mechanisms in supply chains are ignored. Thanks again!