Agency

We've been learning a bit about the emerging study of history of various marginalized groups in HIS102, and one of the big key words is agency. Basically the idea is that "women's history" (and history of other marginalized groups) gives those groups agency. The idea of agency is that you can be an active part of history, causing changes upon other things, and playing a real part.

This thought occurred to me just recently when I was thinking of the best way to execute a web comic. One idea I have had was to get photos of my friends doing various things and put captions on them. Unfortunately, what I noticed is that there are a lot of situations I would want to put on this web comic that I'm also a part of. Other than using a tripod, or having someone else take the pictures, I couldn't think of a good way to do it with my camera.

That made me think about how in this school year, I've become a much more active player in my own life. In high school especially, I would've been able to assemble a great photo-web-comic based purely on images I'd taken of other people. Here at the university, I'm a pretty big part of most of the shenanigans my friends and I perform.

It's interesting to see that transition, and definitely an interesting realization ot make. Especially since it's even more difficult to document my life with photos, since I'm now a big part of it.

Also, I'm sorry this blog entry was late -- last night I had to do homework and spend time with Megan, and by the time she left and I was almost done, it was 11:30 and because of my weekend novel-reading spree, which didn't end until 3 a.m. on Monday, I was unable to actually stay awake by 11 last night.