Bonus content for week 3 as I had started this blog before writing my formal one.

The random picture above is one I took a few winters ago near the city I live in. You can see the Rocky Mountains off in the distance on the horizon. Winter is my favorite season and for some reason I have been thinking about snow and skiing this week even though I am still raking leaves!

It was exciting to get my University of Edinburgh ID card in the post this week. Although I am online and won’t really use it much in person in Scotland until I am able to visit, it certainly made me feel like a part of the EFI community. I think it will allow me to claim student status here at home for some benefits like library privileges at local universities, although not sure I can convince them to charge me student prices for admission anywhere LOL.

I had a few visits with friends this past week who I have not connected with in a while and some others who are new connections.  It was so exciting to talk to them about my studies, how interesting some of the articles were that I had read, and how engaging the intensive was this week. One of my friends commented that I was so happy and alive when I talked about school. This is exactly how I am feeling. This was the right decision for me to do at the right time in my life. Although its hard work and a lot of financial commitment, I am so happy to be part of the program and doing something I have wanted to do for so many years.

Some of the conversations I had led me to discussing the content of my readings and course work.

In a conversation with a female colleague who grew up in China, we were talking about forms of inequality specifically related to women, and she talked about the practice of foot-binding. Interestingly she observed that the reason she thought it eventually stopped was partly because of the colonization of China during the Opium Wars. She said Chinese people saw other women who seemed to have more physical freedom because their feet were not bound. They were running around, playing tennis, and chasing after their children. They realized that there was a lot that Chinese women could be missing out on because of their limited mobility. She mentioned a major earthquake in Taiwan where the women had trouble escaping buildings because some could hardly walk. She also recalled it was actually men who started speaking up about it and opposing it more broadly before it was banned. This had me thinking of the positive impacts of inequality (ie pressure from the colonizers who brought in new ways of thinking, one of which was a net positive for Chinese women in most people’s opinions)

I also talked to a UX Design colleague about some readings and about my project ideas and she mentioned some real-life examples in her own life of inequalities and academic experiences that related. It’s so nice to make connections with colleagues that are not just about work. I love the engaging conversations.

I hope you are finding this experience rewarding so far and finding a rhythm, just like the changing of the seasons.

Week 3: Bonus Content – Finding my rhythm / Knowledge Integration and Project Planning: Data, Inequality and Society (2022-2023) by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0