First Day of J-Term

       Today was our first day of J-Term in our Margins of the Law course. We learned a lot about what we will be doing in the next three weeks and we are all very excited. We also discussed several of the speakers that will be coming to talk with us during the later weeks of our course about various topics including gender, race, disability, and indigenous rights. After our brief overview, we jumped right in to reading chapters from The Alchemy of Race and Rights. We all found this book to be very interesting as well as an easier read than we had anticipated. It was a helpful introduction into what we will be discussing and learning about in the future during this course. We learned that the book was also unique because the way it is written is different than a lot of other law texts due to its basis on stories and narratives, which actually made it a lot easier to understand. Once we were finished reading, we had an engaging discussion on what we read and learned, and then we headed out into the museum district for an activity about recognizing biases. This helped to start opening our eyes to the biases that are everywhere around us. To finish off our day, we watched some videos on systemic racism to get us thinking about it and the differences between systemic and systematic biases.
       I think that the activity we did outside today demonstrates Activity and Learning Outcome 4:  Show commitment to and perseverance in a fieldwork experience. We were very unsure about what we were doing at first, but after working at it a while, we started to have more fun and be more clear on our task.