Throughout my time in university, I have worked to develop and hone my ability to think both critically and creatively. While all of the work I have done has served that purpose, I believe that two artifacts in particular help to demonstrate how my ability to think both critically and creatively has developed since I began my university career.
The first artifact that demonstrates my early ability to think critically is Trumpism: The Rise and Fall (?) of American Fascism. This project, which was assigned as the final project in my first course on Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University, is a strong demonstration of my ability to think critically about the world around me. In this assignment, we were asked to look at the election that was taking place and write a research paper about what had gotten us to this place. As the title states, I chose to look at the fascist rhetoric spewed by the man running for reelection and think about its origins within the American Political context. Writing this paper was a struggle, not only because it was my first time doing in-depth research, but because it forced me to challenge my preconceived notions of the world in a way that I wasn’t used to. In order to excel on this assignment, I had to think about how what I was learning reenforced or challenged things that I had learned in my k-12 career, which was something that I was not used to doing.
My second artifact is my senior thesis, which I am currently working on (note: the actual writing will not be complete for a while, however I will have a presentation that I will use as the artifact on this website in two weeks, after I share it at the Student Academic Showcase). For my senior thesis, I am working closely with Dr. Julie Shayne, a social movement theorist and professor at UWB, to examine the Harris campaign and apply how it played out to social movement theory. This project has forced me to think both critically and creatively in ways which I would have not been able to do just five years ago. Using the knowledge that I have gained about social movements during my university career, I a being challenged to think creatively about the trajectory of the Harris campaign not just as a political campaign but as a social movement. I am also being challenged to critically think about the ways in which the Harris campaign was talked about in academic and popular spaces and how the theories that I have learned about may apply to these discourses. Conducting this research has allowed me to discover the ways in which theory applies to the real world.
Leiney Gamache 