Having grown up in a small, predominantly white, middle-lower class town in rural Wisconsin, social justice issues were not usually discussed. I was fortunate enough to have wonderfully open-minded parents whom imposed values onto me of equality and justice. Growing up, I always loved crime shows and, even more, so crime novels. Not because of the gore or because that was the same genre my mom loved, but because I admired and looked up to the main characters and the work they did to better society. For a couple of years while I was a teenager, I wanted to work in the FBI, but alas I grew older and knew that wasn’t the field for me (too much physical exercise, the idea of running even a mile terrifies me to this day). Still wanting to take after the characters in my books, law became my new field of interest. I realize now that my idea of what consisted of working the field of law was slightly naïve, but at the time it was something I was passionate about.
This dream brought me to Hamline, where I learned more about the field of law and how much it really wasn’t the right field for me. I realized that while the assailants needed to be prosecuted, I wanted to focus on prevention, and this meant looking at sexual assault and violent crimes on a larger scale, that being society as a whole. Along with this, there were so many social problems that I wanted to fight for. I had strong support for, and was fairly vocal about, some social problems going into college, such as LGBTQ rights and racism, but I realized that I had so far to go, and wanted to fight for so many more issues. Importantly, I wanted to learn more about the social problems I was already fighting for along with the many other social problems that occur in our society and in the world. This is when I decided to become a Social Justice major.
With the various courses I have taken, I have gained more knowledge and experience on many different social problems such as racism, misogyny, lgbtq+ rights, equity, mental health, disability, and more, but I have still had a large focus on sexual violence and other forms of violence. I have also learned more about the problem of lack of access to sexual health resources, especially for women and minority peoples, and how this can even relate to sexual violence. While I will always fight for every social issue that I can, and will continue to learn more about the many other social issues that I do not know enough about, in my heart I know that my future career, or at least part of my future career, needs to be focused on changing the culture around sexual violence and on helping create a better environment for women and minority peoples to have access to sexual health resources and education. And I want to do this through art.
As I learned and grew through my social justice courses, I found a unique concentration that I wanted to focus on: how art could be used to create social change. After college, I want to work on making social change with art. I have had the opportunity to start working on this a bit through college, but want to expand my role through my future career. In the course that sparked my desire to focus on art and social change, I created a children’s book with a message about mental health and our current culture that surrounds it. In a later course, I completed a research project which included a community art piece that I carried out and studied. This art piece is something that I am most proud of, and is of course explained more further on this website. The art project was about rape culture, and consisted of different mannequin pieces that were put on a table in our student center along with bins of various materials and supplies, such as markers, fabric, tacks, etc. The goal was to have people passing by add to the mannequin pieces with these materials, with only one request: that the addition was connected to what they had heard personally or through the media about rape victims. These pieces were then put into a display case where the public can see how badly our society can influence sexual violence and how it can harm the victims further.
While I love creating art, in the future I want my career to be more community engagement. I want to work with either one or multiple (may depend on where I am in my career) non-profits and with artists in the community to create art projects and displays that will create consciousness raising in the community. In my next, and final semester of college, I will be doing a study away program (in Minneapolis) that focuses on just that. I cannot be more thrilled and excited for what the courses and provided internship will teach me and how they will propel me further into my future of creating social change through art.
This dream brought me to Hamline, where I learned more about the field of law and how much it really wasn’t the right field for me. I realized that while the assailants needed to be prosecuted, I wanted to focus on prevention, and this meant looking at sexual assault and violent crimes on a larger scale, that being society as a whole. Along with this, there were so many social problems that I wanted to fight for. I had strong support for, and was fairly vocal about, some social problems going into college, such as LGBTQ rights and racism, but I realized that I had so far to go, and wanted to fight for so many more issues. Importantly, I wanted to learn more about the social problems I was already fighting for along with the many other social problems that occur in our society and in the world. This is when I decided to become a Social Justice major.
With the various courses I have taken, I have gained more knowledge and experience on many different social problems such as racism, misogyny, lgbtq+ rights, equity, mental health, disability, and more, but I have still had a large focus on sexual violence and other forms of violence. I have also learned more about the problem of lack of access to sexual health resources, especially for women and minority peoples, and how this can even relate to sexual violence. While I will always fight for every social issue that I can, and will continue to learn more about the many other social issues that I do not know enough about, in my heart I know that my future career, or at least part of my future career, needs to be focused on changing the culture around sexual violence and on helping create a better environment for women and minority peoples to have access to sexual health resources and education. And I want to do this through art.
As I learned and grew through my social justice courses, I found a unique concentration that I wanted to focus on: how art could be used to create social change. After college, I want to work on making social change with art. I have had the opportunity to start working on this a bit through college, but want to expand my role through my future career. In the course that sparked my desire to focus on art and social change, I created a children’s book with a message about mental health and our current culture that surrounds it. In a later course, I completed a research project which included a community art piece that I carried out and studied. This art piece is something that I am most proud of, and is of course explained more further on this website. The art project was about rape culture, and consisted of different mannequin pieces that were put on a table in our student center along with bins of various materials and supplies, such as markers, fabric, tacks, etc. The goal was to have people passing by add to the mannequin pieces with these materials, with only one request: that the addition was connected to what they had heard personally or through the media about rape victims. These pieces were then put into a display case where the public can see how badly our society can influence sexual violence and how it can harm the victims further.
While I love creating art, in the future I want my career to be more community engagement. I want to work with either one or multiple (may depend on where I am in my career) non-profits and with artists in the community to create art projects and displays that will create consciousness raising in the community. In my next, and final semester of college, I will be doing a study away program (in Minneapolis) that focuses on just that. I cannot be more thrilled and excited for what the courses and provided internship will teach me and how they will propel me further into my future of creating social change through art.