I went to The Power of Music workshop led by Mr. Sailor in the first session and Civil Liberties Abroad led by Matteo and Avery in the second session. Mr. Sailor’s workshop focused on how music at different time period reflects social justice issues and historical events. The workshop involves Mr. Sailor explaining songs but most of the time it is a class discussion. The atmosphere was amazing and every student is really engaged. We also talked about the phenomenon that song lyrics of songs are getting more and including more inappropriate information. This raises the problem that whether there should be censorship or age restrictions on songs that have inappropriate lyrics. But because there was too much discussion all the time, the progress went a little bit slow and we weren't able to finish all the topics that were provided. I like to listen to classical music and I don't have too much experience in modern pop culture. This workshop definitely raises my awareness of how we should look at music as an influential media.
In the second section, I attended to Avery and Matteo’s workshop. Their workshop is about Civil Liberties Abroad but they only focused on the Civil Liberties in the middle east region, and it is a little disappointing. They included a good amount of information on the region and spent most of the time introducing the struggle between Palestine and Israel. But most of the information they talked about I already learned in different Global Studies events. In the end, the workshop is divided into groups and each group needs to make up a country and states the important right that should be included. From the group discussion, I learned about other people’s opinion and focus on different rights. It was all in all very good, but I wish they could include other countries so we can have a more comprehensive understanding of global Civil Liberties.
