Cohort Seminar 27.02.23
TASK:
As a group, choose and read a text (20 mins). Explain the text as a group to the other group (5 mins each).
Our group selected the text ‘All About Love’ by Bell Hooks (2000) focusing on the preface and introduction to the book.
Link to text: https://wtf.tw/ref/hooks.pdf
Reflections
- Outdated, the context of love in society seems like it is not as relevant to love in society today.
- Seems to be a personal view of love / experience of love although is backed up by references to texts around the subject.
- She argues that love is a subject mainly written by men, I disagree with this. I would assume there is more texts around love written by women but perhaps from a more fictional setting.
- She does not mention self love – we decided that this was a much more widely accepted form of love nowadays. Things like meditation, yoga, mental health awareness are much widely accepted practices.
- In addition there is more attention given to non-romantic love – friend love (SATC, Girls, Dolly Alderton), perhaps more focussed on women friendships.
- In the book, she talks about how men and women love differently based on their gender. Categorising people by their sex seems outdated in todays cultural landscape where the boundaries of gender are less prevalent and given less importance.
- Is self love too selfish now? We practice self love but is this in a selfish way? How can we practice self love in a communally minded way?
- Love during the pandemic – how it changed us. We acted more communally, we expressed more compassion and made choices based on an understanding and love for others, has this now been lost?
- Love in education – can we encourage self love and sense of community. How do we instil compassion? We need to understand that love is individual – we all understand and express love based on our personal experiences of it.
Further reading: Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Wurtzel, Elizabeth
Reflection on activity:
- Collaboration
- Timed task with known discussion makes you focus and read the text in a different way, how would you explain it to others makes you take more notice of the text
- Different people react differently to same text, sparks an interesting discussion
- Reading quietly as a collective is a communal experience, sense of community, helps with keeping focus, less chance to distract yourself.
- The act of explaining something helps with the depth of your understanding and also helps retain information more easily.