Challenging Conventions: C Period

1. I am choosing to study the subculture of Shield & Dragon. I am a tour guide for Shield & Dragon. 2. I am interested in studying Shield & Dragon as my subculture because there are a variety of people that are within the group with many different personalities and backgrounds. 3. I will interview executive committee members (Ben Tauber) and different people within the group along with observing them while the give a tour. I will also give my personal take on giving tours if I am giving the opportunity. I will also look into the background of what it means to be apart of Shield & Dragon and what it means to KO.

Subculture: KO News  1. Explain your involvement in the subculture you plan to study.  I have been writing for the KO News for a little over a year now and I'm one of the associate editors for the arts section. 2. Why are you interested in studying this subculture?  I've enjoyed writing for the KO News since the start and writing (in general) has been something that I've been extremely passionate about all my life. I just love doing it!  3. Who will you interview? Who will you observe? What other research or field work could you conduct?  I will interview Ms. Schieffelin (the faculty advisor), Hannah Bash (editor-in-chief), Apara Kashyap (managing editor of news, sports, and investigative journalism), and Gabby Ruban ( managing editor of arts, opinions, and features.) If I have to interview anyone else then I probably will interview any of the head editors for the sections and other associates. I'll observe why the KO News started, how and when it s...

Web Developer Subculture 1. Explain your involvement in the subculture you plan to study. I've been freelancing for around 3ish years now and I feel I'm relatively competent in this field. 2. Why are you interested in studying this subculture? It's always enjoyable recieving money for doing stuff you enjoy, and the problem solving involved in both the frontend and backend portions of websites is always fun. I also enjoy thread-bashing bad developers. 3. Who will you interview? Who will you observe? What other research or field work could you conduct? I have a couple of people I have in mind, one of my friends works as a wordpress developer for a startup, so I may contact him. But I also have some contacts who own their own development companies. I might have a look at some other developer portfolios and freelancer forums and get some general interactions to document. This page in code ;) <link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?fa...

Aca-pella 1. The subculture I am choosing is aca-pella. I am in the aca-pella group at school, Oxfordians. 2. I am interested in this particular subculture because the larger culture of music has always been a part of my life, aca-pella only enter a couple years ago. I find it interesting how people can make music without instruments. 3. I will interview the director of my group, Steve Mitchell and some members of the group. I will also research topics such as who created aca-pella, where it originated from, how it grew in popularity, and how prevalent it is in the music culture today.

Subculture: PC gaming 1. I am a very active member of this subculture (probably too active), playing games in almost all of my free time. 2. I am interested in studying this subculture because it is my favorite pastime and I have been a part of it for quite a while. 3. There are a lot of other people at school who play games on PC and there is a room in the school dedicated to it, with four gaming PCs, so it will not be hard to find somebody to interview. I will observe other people online and people in the gaming room. Other “field work” I could conduct is simply playing online with other people.

After taking the surfing lesson with the Saint, Heller writes, “We walked up the sidewalk crowded with spring break tourists and young surfers carrying boards and I felt like a king. I belonged. All the surf kitsch--the surfboards in the windows of beachwear stores, the boards hanging over the fronts of restaurants, the surf-scene prints on the shirts of the passing visitors--I saw it all and thought, Yeah, that’s the culture everybody wants to be a part of. My culture. Cuz I’m a surfer now” (37). What is it that makes Heller feel like he belongs to this culture? Do you agree that he truly belongs as a member of the surfing culture at this point in the book? Why or why not?

What are some specific kinds of tacit knowledge that Heller attempts to gain in this reading by going to surf school? What are some of the essential skills for surfers that can only be acquired by practice and experience? How easy or difficult is it to acquire these skills? What does that tell you about the barrier to entry for surfing culture--how easy or difficult is it for newcomers to join the community?

In the first few pages of Kook , Heller describes what it’s like to learn something new and to try to join a community of experts even though he himself is just a “kook.” What are some of the things he has to learn? What specialized knowledge does he need? What norms does he encounter that he has to adjust to? What does this tell you about the complexity of this world of surfing?

While this text is about surfing, it also reveals a lot about the person who wrote it. What does this reading tell you about Peter Heller? Why is he so fascinated with surfing? What does his approach to depicting surfing reveal about who he is as a person?

Describe the allure or draw of surf culture, as expressed in Kook. What do people find appealing about it? What does Heller specifically find appealing about it? Do you find surf culture alluring? Why or why not?

How would you characterize surfing culture, as expressed in Kook? What is unique about this culture? What do you have to know to be fully a part of this culture? (Vocabulary? Gear? Techniques? Implicit knowledge?)

She goes by many names but serves one function: The presence of a queen bee–the domineering, self-serving, and manipulative female character who, cunning as she is beautiful, uses her elevated social status to rule over and maltreat her peers with little consequence–is a defining characteristic of many novels and films detailing the lives and times of teens. She’s rich and attractive and therefore popular, or popular by way of attractiveness, which makes others assume she is rich. This larger-than-life presence is usually supported by a loyal group of lackeys who stick behind the Queen not because of kinship, but for protection from her vitriol and safety from her warpath. Such is the nature of the friendship between Regina George, Gretchen Weiners, Karen Smith, the Plastics, and their newest initiate, Cady Heron in the cult classic 2000s film Mean Girls –a dynamic that is closely mirrored by the friendship between Ruth, Tommy D. and Kathy H. According to the Mean Girls wiki page...

Amelia Margaret Francis Duffy Boardman Mrs. Schieffelin NLMG Connection                                                                      Cloning Wallflowers Every teen novel has that one overly emotional character. As our class has exhaustively discussed, Tommy embodies that character in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go . He was known as a child for his temper tantrums and as he grew older, was targeted for his emotional and sexual conflicts. Similarly, Charlie from Stephen Chbosky's novel The Perks of Being A Wallflower  has no idea where he is going with his life. He is emotionally conflicted and struggling with depression. When he begins high school, he finds himself without a friend group or support system. By chance, he falls in with a group who call themselves the "wallflowers". This group...

Elán James Stadelmann 5th Esq. Ms. Schieffelin NLMG Connection Connecting a Tragic Book About Teenagers to Another Tragic Book About Teenagers As we were reading Never Let Me Go, I had a distinct feeling that I had witnessed some common tropes of the plot before. The first thing that came to my mind when reading this book was a different book Unwind by Neal Shusterman. Unwind is a tragic book about teenagers dealing with an inevitable fate. In the book, a bill of life is passed in the united states. This outlaws abortion, but allows for a child to be "aborted after birth" through the years 13 to 18. When this occurs, imagine every single donor in Never Let Me Go has every single donation happen all at once, up to and including the brain.  The only major difference that I noticed between these processes is that in Unwind, the patients are conscious but feel no pain during the procedure. This text plays with the questioning of ethics similar to Never Let Me Go, and I ...

The Neighborhood - Afraid (Explicit) When I wake up I’m afraid, somebody else might take my place When I wake up I’m afraid, somebody else might take my place Make that money, fake that bunny, ache my tummy On the fence, all the time Paint young honey, face so sunny, ain’t that funny All my friends always lie to me I know they’re thinking You’re too mean, I don’t like you, fuck you anyway You make me wanna scream at the top of my lungs It hurts but I won’t fight you You suck anyway You make me wanna die, right when I When I wake up I’m afraid, somebody else might take my place When I wake up I’m afraid, somebody else might take my place When I wake up I’m afraid, somebody else might take my place When I wake up I’m afraid, somebody else might end up being me Keep on dreaming, don’t stop giving, fight those demons Sell your soul, not your whole self If they see you when you’re sleeping, make them leav...

This book might seem like it is so far out there as people are being cloned or basically grown for their organs, but actually the book isn't that far fetched. According to the facts from here , on average every ten minutes someone is added to the national transplant waiting list, and 20 people die each day. So is it so crazy to assume that someone in today's society, someone either with intentions to save lives or simply make money, would clone humans? Science today can do more than in years prior and with new technology, cloning is possible, and maybe the reason cloning was created in the first place was for a way to harvest organs. There are places in the world, including the United States, where people sell their organs for large sums of money. So it is possible that people would consider cloning humans to make a buck in a society today that is so focused on money and material possessions. According to the facts from here , in 2010 alone 11,000 organs were obtained from t...

Never Let Me Go V.S. Blade Runner Never Let me Go is a book that is based in a world where clones are vital to Health. The clones are grown from birth to adulthood, until their vital organs are harvested to be used by humans who are sick and in need of transplants. In the Blade Runner universe, there are clones called replicants that are used by society for manual labor. However one of the main things the movie covers is humanity. In the first movie, some replicants are rebelling and a "blade runner," the person whose job it is to hunt down and kill rogue replicants, tries to complete his job. In Blade Runner 2049, humanity of replicants is an even bigger issue, when one is said to have given birth, as replicants are sterile, this is a miracle. In NLMG Kathy is dancing to her favorite song Never Let Me Go, which she believes is about someone who is sterile becoming pregnant, and celebrating the miracle. The number of connections between the two universes is mind-blowing....

In many ways, I can compare the novel "Never Let Me Go" to the latest Star Wars film, "Rogue One" because both main characters are in a situation where they are sucked into a life that decides their fate and are forced to live it.  In the film, the main character, Jyn Erso is recruited by the Rebellion to steal the Death Star plans; in return, she will not be punished for her previous actions in crime (so if she turns the offer down, she will be arrested), most likely induced by the fact that her tech-savvy father was taken when she was young so he could make the plans for the Death Star.  In Never Let Me Go, Hailsham students like Kathy are born into a life where they are essentially science experiments and donate their organs to die.   Furthermore, t hey both know they will die in their ultimate fates; Jyn in Star Wars is on a suicide mission to save the chances of the Rebellion against the Empire and Kathy is faced with the fact that her organs will be taken ...

Jenna Blocher Ms. Schieffelin MLMG Connection                                                           Thalidomide vs. Cloning In the novel Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, the entire plot is based off of human clones. Later in the book, readers hear about the Morningdale Scandal. Miss Emily tells Tommy and Kathy, "He carried on his work in a remote part of Scotland, where I suppose he thought he'd attract less attention. What he wanted was to offer people the possibility of having children with enhanced characteristics... but a generation of created children who'd take their place in society. Children demonstrably superior to the rest of us? Oh no. That frightened people. they recoiled from that." (p.264). In the outside world, there was a situation that had some similarities to this. Throughout the Holocaust, the drug Thalidomide wa...

Throughout Never Let Me Go, we constantly debated the topic of whether it is okay or not for Kathy and her friends to have their organs harvested in this dystopian setting. Although we know that this is simply a story and nothing more, this is a serious issue in the real world today. In this article by Dale Archer,   he discusses the serious issue of organ harvesting throughout the black market globally. Archer explains the various issues in regards to organ harvesting, such as young children and teenagers suddenly dying because of organ harvesting. He states that many of the "clients" that needs these organs are wealthy, greedy, middle age men in need of an instantaneous transplant. Archer also notes that this organ harvesting process can have ties to human and sex trafficking. The demand for such organs relates to nearly the entire concept of Never Let Me Go mainly because Kathy and her friends don't have a choice that their organs are being taken and they are essential...

Connecting NLMG to Trix You been Trix'd By: Will One of my favorite meals is breakfast, and I particularly enjoy cereal. Cereal brands are often marketed through the means of entertaining animated characters in commercials. These adverts usually contain a protagonist and a distinct villain. The villain usually wishes to indulge in the coveted cereal but is then stopped by the protagonists. For example, within the Trix cereal franchise, the villain is a rabbit. The rabbit always attempts to obtain the cereal but then is inevitably stopped by a group of children who chant, "Trix are for kids". This pattern follows through all of the different iterations of the commercial. The rabbit despite his freewill to create different plans to obtain the cereal, his fate will always be to fail in his plans and be foiled by the children. In this advert, the rabbit is waiting outside, painting an image of the Trix cereal, he then is lured by the scent of the voluptuous ...

The song Lean On Me by Bill Withers talks about the kind of friendship that Tommy and Kathy have. The some of the lyrics are "lean on me, when you're not strong, and i'll be your friend, i'll help you carry on." Kathy helps him carry on physically and literally. She is his carer and his true love. She is his friend when they were at hailsham and stays a constant friend later in life. She was the one who was always there for him and understood what he was going through. This connects to another set of lyrics in the song 'I just might have a problem that you'll understand" He literally leans on her when she is his carer. She takes care of him when he is recovering and prepares him for the next donation. The song's lyrics really explain the connection that Tommy and Kathy have.

One of my favorite podcasts is called Radiolab. Radiolab investigates interesting stories that often have a connection to something in the scientific field and I highly recommend it. They have a really interesting episode about  CRISPR  and ever since I heard about it I feel that it has been in the news quite often. CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, and it is basically a newly developed way to precisely and inexpensively edit a genome. Scientists have already been able to create mosquitoes that cannot carry malaria, corn that resists drought, extremely muscular beagles, and change the color of a butterfly's wings. In the next few years they believe that they will be able to cure blood diseases like leukemia and lymphoma. Scientists also anticipate that pigs will soon be developed that will be able to host human organs to be used for transplants. CRISPR can even be used at an embryonic stage when parents would be able to choose desira...

Never Let Me Go is similar to the movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas because certain people were being treated inhuman and like animals. Although the settings are drastically different where one group is being fed and nurtured, while the other group is being forced to work while being starved and punished, the people around the situation do not do anything about what is going on and watch as if there is nothing wrong. The teachers at Hailsham watch as the children grow up and plan their lives when they know the truth is they are only useful for their organs, and the surrounding families of the soldiers know what is going on and they keep living their lives as if everything is normal.

In this video , aging is explained and it also talks about ways to suppress the effects of aging and also how to possibly extend the lifetime of a person, by taking important substances or objects from one person and giving it to another. This is like a real world version of the donations, but it would not kill the donor, due to the body's ability to produce them. NLMG has the extreme version of this where instead of trying to heal people's vital organs or other body parts, they are simply replaced. The methods that are explained in the video would not be able to cure as wide of a range of issues that replacing organs could, but theoretically would be able to subdue some.