Thinking About Culture

In this project, Students explore culture(s) they're part of and times in which their culture might have been misunderstood.

ellen

"A lot of my childhood and exposure to new cultures was on my bus ride home. My neighbors and I would play korean games, even though most of them were of different ethnicity. We’d talk about strange things about our culture like what we eat, celebrate, and even some controversial things. I’m not really tied to Korean culture, my parents are very Americanized, so I don’t really associate with the typical Korean things."

ucman

MOE

"I would get comments like this all the time before i cut my hair and started wearing braids and straining my hair"

Jamie

"You’d be amazed what people think of the quiet kid in the back"

Marloe

"This year i’ve been nagitivation my role as a student. I wanted to focus on the culture of youth and everything that comes alone during that weird time in life."

Mabel

Laila

"I don’t know why but this felt really relevant when thinking about my own culture. My grandma would always cornrow my hair for me and I also feel like the issue of hair has been huge when speaking and debating about culture. I live on Long Island and my grandma lives in queens so she doesn’t braid my hair as much anymore, but getting my hair braided by her when I was younger made me feel really connected to Jamaican culture, which is a feeling that I miss a lot."

Anastasia

"I suppose i’m in a study culture- specifically a studying Japanese culture. Often times people brush off my passion for learning Japanese (and Japan’s culture) as something I do because I “like to watch anime”. This has caused me not to watch anime because I don’t want to be percived as a weeabo (a person so obssed with Japanese culture that they fetishize it and think they are Japanese with the connotation that they only know about Japanese culture through watching anime).

It makes me feel hurt that people downplay my love for Japan as something trivial.

My friends in middle school were what got me into it."