This paper was my final project for my Honors Yoga class. The assignment was to choose a piece of media and analyze the influences of yoga and yogic culture on that piece of media. I chose Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of my longstanding favorite TV shows. Throughout the quarter, the information I was learning had reminded me of Avatar, and I was excited to finally assemble and verbalize the connections I'd been considering. This essay was also significant because I completed it in the last week of our quarter, when protests against police brutality across the nation were shaking our society to its core and causing white people like me to reconsider our positionality and privilege and what we could do to listen, learn, and make change. This assignment was actually made optional in the light of these events, but I felt like it was my duty to complete it because as a white person I didn't feel it was right to use others' trauma as an excuse not to complete my own work. I submitted my paper, then used the time afterwards to educate myself further on the oppression and trauma facing Black people in the United States and across the world.
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This was one of two big projects we submitted for this entirely asynchronous class. We as students had to interview the people in our lives about their experiences with yoga and assemble a slideshow presentation with our findings. I crowdsourced interviewees from among my friends and family, as well as social media followers, and sent each a list of questions to answer and return. I then organized slides for each question and summarized the general consensus from my interviewees, including quotes from the write-ups they'd given me. This project allowed me to expand my view of yoga beyond just what I was learning in my class, and understand how outside perspectives on yoga differed from my purely academic experience.
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