REFLECTIVE WRITING II
The following piece of writing
reflects upon my experience in the CLSY500; ‘Culture and Society’ paper over
this past semester. It taught me a lot of things and had brought me to
understand issues and concepts from a different perspective. It allowed me to
re-evaluate where I stand in relation to these concepts and helped shape how I
view them now. In this piece I will provide a summary of my viewpoints of the
concepts and issues we explored and how it related to me and society as a whole.
I will also discuss my own identity and values and beliefs and how concepts
learnt in this paper has helped shape my perspective of them. I will also speak
upon how this paper has helped me broaden and strengthen my perspective of how
I perceive other people and how I am able to understand other people’s opinions
and beliefs.
For the group project aspect of
this paper my group and I chose to tackle the issue of depression and the
stigma in relation to it in today’s society. As a group we chose to look upon
this issue is because we as a group felt this was an issue faced by society
most people choose not to discuss or turn a blind eye towards how it results in
other forms of societal issues. Also before we even began research I assumed
that depression was feeling down and unhappy for long periods of time due to
certain situations in one’s life. However, once I started researching, I came
to find out the depression was actually persistent and intense feelings of
unhappiness even when situations leading to this improve but the feelings of
unhappiness do not (Is this depression, n.d.). A concept we linked the issue
back to was human rights. We found out that depression does lead to
homelessness and according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
Article 25; “everyone has the right to a standard of living and adequate for
the health and well-being of himself and of his family. If someone were to seek
help, they have the right to be treated and social services should be
available.” Upon further research we came to realize a concept that plays a
large role in the stigma behind depression is popular culture. Mass media
portrayals of sports people, especially the All Blacks and their idolization in
New Zealand society leads to this image of an ideal kiwi who are strong, both
mentally and physically. Due to this people, especially men avoid speaking
about dealing with depression and turning a blind eye towards it. Through
evaluation of mine and other people’s work and opinions in the Culture and
Society paper I have come to believe that we must be weary of how we choose to
understand popular culture as all that we see and are influenced by are not as
it seems.
I feel as my own values and
beliefs are largely influenced by popular culture. However, before taking part
in this paper I had always defined popular culture as trends and ideologies set
by media forms such as music, television, internet and news media and by the
personnel who have influence over this media. The academic definition as per
Dahlgren and Sparks (1992), is “Popular culture has emerged as one of the main
sites of investigation within contemporary mass communication research and
cultural studies. Most of that work is concerned with fiction, particularly in
television, and with ‘entertainment.’” Through the duration of this paper I
came to realize that popular culture has both negative and positive
connotations in a person’s life and their views and beliefs and identity. It all comes down to how they choose to
perceive popular culture and whether they indulge in it for positive or
negative reasons entirely depends on the individual. Learning more about
popular culture has strengthened my belief that popular culture plays a large
role in people each individuals lives, as it does in mine, especially in this
day and age and there are forms of media around us at all times.
The concept of human rights before
taking part in the culture and society paper was somewhat of a blur to me as I
did not know very much about it. I just assumed it had to with the very basic
needs in today’s society such as food & water, shelter, and security.
Though once I started to learn more about this concept I realized how much more
complicated and how much more broad it is than just a few basic necessities.
After reading through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights I found myself
agreeing to a lot of the articles within them. They matched my values and
ideals of which I thought were necessary for people to live by, however I did
not realize they were also considered human rights. These were ideals such as
racial and gender equality. Growing up a dark brown skinned Indian in a
multi-cultural society I was highly racially abused. Things going as far to me
being labelled as ‘black disease’ in primary school. Up until taking part in
this paper I did not realize my rights were being abused. I just assumed all
that time that racial profiling and racial abuse where just forms of oppression
upon people who were different. Through this paper I came to learn so much more
about human rights and found these learnings extremely helpful. They
strengthened my perspective of equality and diversity and also showed me that
standing up against bigotry and oppression is my right. This idea was shared
around the class by many people and more light was shed on this by others. This
allowed me to understand other people’s perspective and reasoning’s behind
their opinions and I was able to comprehend where they were coming from.
In conclusion I have found most
of the concepts we have looked at in culture and society to be enlightening. It
helped me realize how much of an important role these concepts play in our
everyday lives. We use these concepts to make well thought and wise decisions
but we also subconsciously we use these concepts to make day to day decisions
without realizing. These concepts are somethings we already somewhat knew off
but just did not understand them as well as we should. However, after spending
a semester taking part in this paper I better understand these concepts. I
found that this paper was a huge learning curve for me. It helped me grow as a
person and I feel as if I am more of a critical thinker now than I ever was. I
am not only able to evaluate my own but also other people’s perspectives on
certain issues and better understand what I am saying and what they are.
Therefore, for me, the skill of critical thinking and being able to better understand
issues has been by far the most significant point of learning for me in Culture
and Society.
REFERENCES
Dahlgren,
P., & Sparks, C. (1992). Journalism and popular culture. London:
SAGE Publications.
Depression and Dysthymia. Retrieved from
http://caprihospital.co.nz/Mental-Health-Treatment/Illness/Depression-Dysthymia.html
Is this Depression? (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.depression.org.nz/depression
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights | United Nations. (n.d.).
Retrieved from http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
