People's assembly, Policing a Nation

This post is dedicated to my final Action Project for my Winter term Humanities course called A Nations Argument. The third unit focused on the 1960’s and we focused on civil rights and the bill of rights. I learned about Dialectics and how they connect to argument. In one of my last classes for this course, my classmates and I attended an online Yale lecture. We also attended two other lectures in the previous units. In this specific lecture, the lectern was Professor Jonathan Holloway. He discussed the civil rights era and events within 1964-1966. I think this is my favorite lecture so far.

KS, DS, Policing Assembly, 2019

We started the unit off with our Action project. My classmates and I hosted a people’s assembly with the help of a Regina Holloway, a senior program manager for the NYU School of Law Policing Project. To prepare, my class divided into 3 teams, people research, topic research, and agenda managers. I was apart of the people research team. We invited Regina, 2 other community activist and a Police Sergeant, who’s taking apart of the Policing Projects pilot. We used this as an opportunity to discuss what we researched and ultimately get different perspectives in our community of Chicago.

There was really helpful conversation. I wish that we had more time and my classmates and I got to share more of our opinions and experiences but it was very informative. We started off with the conversation of policing in schools and here’s where you’ll see how I put my skills of dialectics to the test and break down one of the arguments used in our discussion.

Amending the Test

For my Winter 2019 humanities course, Argument we studied the constitution. Within that, we focused on the amendments and bill of rights, my classmates and I studied different cases . We also learned how to set up a proper argument in unit one. We went to 2 different field experiences, the first one was going to the  Citizenship and Naturalization Court downtown and towards the end of the term we had a great experience at a City Council meeting on Public Charge. Determining if you're liable to become a Public Charge is when you are likely to be dependent on the government for things such as food stamps or section eight, it denies immigrants citizenship because they would be a charge to the United States. This was an interesting field experience, we got to hear from a citizen called George Blakemore and he is an activist in Chicago.

Wasserman, Immigration Cartoon, 2019

I'm a fan of political comics, I think that this is relevant with the government and people who are very ignorant towards the immigration process so I think this is a good representation on how we need to change the immigration system.
For this Action project, I amended the naturalization test. The current test has 100 question with many opportunities to be right or wrong, meaning the questions weren't the most airtight and had a lot of options of answers. What I did was make my own test. I took questions off of the test and amended them, I chose the ones that I felt are the most important and tried to make them more frank.I also added a few scenario's about american citizenship that covers some of the question on the naturalization test but it makes it more practical to your everyday life.

Here are the four questions that I chose and how I amended them in bold.

Before: In what month do we vote for President?
             What is the name of the President of the United States now?

After: What is the name of the President of the United States now? When were they voted in?

Before: 13. Name one branch or part of the government.

After: Name all 3 branches of government?  What is one thing that each of them exclusively do?

Before: There are four amendments to the Constitution about who can vote. Describe one of them.

After: Describe the requirements for voting, according to the constitution.

Before: What is the economic system in the United States?

After: What is the economic system in the United States? What does that mean?

Here is my Argument.
        Knowing something without context is useless.
        Explanation is a good way to learn context.
        The test should have more question that asks for explanation.

I think that this unit was very thought provoking and challenging. I had to use empathy and my knowledge of the US laws to create this test. There were many times that I felt under-qualified to make this and even intrusive because I know many people who are greatly affected by US immigration laws, I had to use different perspectives. My main inspiration for what I did was my teachers and I used my past experience on taking tests. I think that it was a useful project nonetheless.

I Declare Anthropology!

Below, you can see my declaration for independent study. This is my first Action project for my Humanities course called A Nations Argument. During this course my classmates and I learned the framework of an argument and what makes a successful argument. We had a great opportunity to be guests at the Cook County Courthouse for a black history program and were able to see the opening statements of a live trial following an interactive panel of successful black workers who have a career in law. We also focused on the declaration of independence and that's what really led us up to this project. Inside of the declaration we saw a good example of a successful argument. What my job was for the Action Project was to make a declaration of my own for independent study. 

I chose to do someting that has to deal with human behavior and observing it. Human behavior and observation by themselves are very broad subjects to study. I had to narrow it down in order to create an airtight argument. With the help of my teacher, we came to the decision that what I was looking for was the subject of Anthropology. That STILL being a very broad subject, I did some research and was finally able to narrow it down to Structural Anthropology. Structural Anthropology is a subject inside of Anthropology, some know it as socialism. It is based off of the idea developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss.