Reflecting on Your HumCore Journey

Reflection

As you finalize your research paper and come to an end in your research journey (at least for now), reflect on the process as a whole. What have you learned about writing a Humanities Core research paper that you would like to share with future students? How have the lectures by Professors Jeon, Gamber, and Long made you think differently about the possibilities of scholarly research connected to the Environment | Encounter | Entanglement theme? What understanding of the environmental humanities have you critically and creatively constructed over this quarter and this year as a whole? And, considering what you wrote in your Learning Encounters site at the beginning of the year, what have you learned about yourself as a writer, researcher, and thinker?

This whole year in Humanities as been really eye-opening for me and has exposed me to a lot of things I would've never intended on focusing on, being a tech guy. I thought I could simply just focus on advancing my career, but now I feel a bit motivated to do more. 

The research paper in particular was really fun to work on. I was able to choose a primary source that I enjoyed and take it deeper and apply the things that I learned from this year. Being able to make connections got me more and more invested in my research. I was able to talk to Dr. Long about my ideas of using Minamata Studies in my essay, which really helped me understand her arguments more clearly. 

I'm also really happy how Ben emphasized us to use our voice. I didn't really have to worry about perfect grammar and complex sentences, so it helped me communicate my words better. 

One of the things that I started to feel during the middle of the year was pessimism of how flawed society was. Dr. Gamber talking about how Indigenous people have already been living in a porous way and outlasted an apocalypse gave me some hope. Additionally, Dr. Long talking about the Minamata victims that also outlasted the institutions and continued to eat the fish was also hopeful. Changing capitalism is pretty radical, but when communities are formed and resist together, slowly changes are made. Dr. Jeun's lecture's about spectacle really opened me to how much potential films had to educate us. As a game design student, I see the potential in video games as a means to immerse people in experiences where they can learn through interaction. 

Overall, one of the main things I learned this year is to never really judge a thing by first glance. That kind of flattens the argument of HumCore, but its really a thing that people don't do enough. From now on when I look at something, I can't just treat it as something that exists in isolation. Its important to learn about how things have come to be from history and how its entangled with so many invisible things. Starting this year, I thought I was just going to learn a lot about climate change, but now I've learned that the problem is way way bigger than using reusable bags. 

It's still a little hard for me to articulate exactly what I've learned from HumCore, but I do intend on returning to my notes and to humanities courses so that I can really pinpoint some things. I'm glad that I knocked down my GEs, but I'm even more glad that I did it through HumCore.