This last week has involved a lot of thinking, and less of tangible products.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the way I want to carry out my writing this quarter, the kinds of stories I want to work on. I’ve had a lot of little ideas, a lot of things that I can start working on.
I expect that I will be able to be posting short pieces on this project website very soon.
I’ve really loved and enjoyed the opportunity to allow myself to follow my ideas and attribute time and effort into thinking about and following my own writing.
In addition to thinking about my forthcoming fictional pieces, formulating idea and pieces of story, and thinking about writing and story telling itself, I’ve been doing a lot of preparation and beginning prep work on my research project.
A lot of the thinking on my research project was around topic narrowing and topic framework. Moving from the vague idea of sex education, the effectiveness of comprehensive sex education, and social justice to a more concrete framework of how does comprehensive sex education contribute or relate to social justice work? There’s still a lot of narrowing that will happen when I begin to find the types of resources that are available and the kinds of conversations that are being had in various parts of the interconnected communities.
I’m thinking that I can begin with the connections of sex education with teaching acceptance and inclusiveness around LGBTQIA+ communities, there should be connections between comprehensive sex education and inclusion can reach personal and community health and health care aspects. Healthcare and having the ability to get the medical and mental help you need has connections to social justice. Looking at the way communities and understanding around sexuality, orientation, and sex work around education and schools is another aspect. There is advocacy work being done around sex work and sex workers, and I’m sure there are connections to sex education within those conversations as well. There are a lot of ways that the broad topic I’ve started with could be narrowed down to a really in depth study. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get a broader look at the many ways I can imagine comprehensive sex education being connected pretty directly to social justice work that’s already being worked on. I hope to provide a look at what further research can be done and what use it could be to furthering progress, inclusive, and equality for related work.
I’m looking forward into getting past preliminary research and finding the connections and conversations being had across the subject, and I’m hoping to start that process this week.
The last piece of my projects this week has been preparation for attending the Power of One Conference this weekend that’s sponsored by the Geoduck Student Union, and the Trans and Queer Center, as well as a couple other donors. This conference will take up much of my time this coming week, and I anticipate it will lead to a lot more thinking and resources to check out.
I’ve been having conversations with a couple of students who do a lot of work on projects with the TQC about what kind of sex education events we could be working on for the Trans and Queer week coming up. I think that I will be following up some of these discussions by emailing around to some organizations in this area or the Seattle area to get more information about whether there are program/events that any of the local organizations regularly put on and what they need to put on those events, to see if there’s a possibility to bring in some educators to work with us to put on some events. I’m not sure whether those emails and followups will lead to anything concrete, but I do think they will lead to whatever the next step may be, and will definitely help me learn about the process behind putting on events and programming.
I will be talking with my supervisor at the TQC again before the conference about some other specific projects I will be working on after my participation in the conference this weekend. I’m hoping that they will have more information about what some of those projects may be, I know last week they were waiting on information from other areas to know how they were moving forward. Whether or not I will come away from the conversation with my supervisor with exact times and places and projects or more information about how things are progressing and moving forward, I think there will be a lot of interesting things I can learn from those conversations as well.