Reflection

In week three, we talked about why resources are important for social movements, the different types of resources, different terminology revolving around social movements and their impacts, as well as watching a very interesting video about a woman from Nigeria and her experiences and stories as an author. When you consider resources that are necessary for social movements, things such as time, money, skills, and willing participants are things that are vital for social movements to be successful. Something such as funding is a tangible type of resource, a clear way of how it aids in a movement. Something like time or commitments are intangible resources, things that you aren’t able to feel but are felt in the process of a movement by the assistance they provide. We talked about constituents and That there are conscience constituents in beneficiary constituents. Conscience constituents are people who join a particular movement because it is the right thing to do, not because there is a potential benefit for them while beneficiary constituents benefit from the movement in which they are participating. Something I found interesting is collective identity, in which a sense of shared experiences and values connect individuals to movements, such as African Americans connecting to the Black Lives Matter movement after numerous instances of police brutality or the me too movement becoming very relevant on twitter after numerous woman came forward to share their stories of sexual assault and misconduct. The second topic I wanted to mention was the story of Chimamanda Adichie given through a TedTalk. An author, Adichie grew up in Nigeria and that came with many negative connotations from people she interacted with outside of her home and even in her own life. Adichie says she had a friend who had a default position to people from African nations and that there was “no possibility” of Africans being human equals to European counterparts. Adichie wrote about people from her nation in a situation of doing well, which a professor of hers told her wasn’t realistic enough because the characters in her story were too much like him, doing well for themselves. The characters didn’t fit the stereotype that many people have against people from African nations, creating a single story. The idea of a single story was prominent in this talk as Adichie mentions the single story about all Africans, the single story she had about her family’s house boy Fide when she could only see his family as being poor, and the single story that kept people from fully embracing her writing. Once Adichie got out of the mindset that there had to be a single story for a group of people, she was able to include people like her in her writing, people from African nations that break the stereotype and don’t limit narratives of entire people. Coming from a minority background and having faced multiple instances of a single story, this idea of breaking the societal norms that are placed on a group of people from outside observers who only recognize stereotypes was a very powerful message.