To be Seen is to be Heard
By Miriam Alrahil
As I continue to develop my project and head towards its final stages, my excitement towards the President’s showcase is only growing. As someone whose future career aims lie journalism and higher education, specifically around diaspora and minority communities, there is something so fulfilling and elating to be taking those first steps now. I am genuinely so impassioned and impacted by the interviews I collected, and I am very eager to be able to share these stories and perspectives.
In my presentation at the President’s showcase, I hope to be able to convey a wide range of messages from which people from an array of disciplines may be able to glean something of interest or importance to them. One of the most prominent messages I want to represent would be that of climate change and the multiple different facets of its manifestation such as environmental degradation, social stratification, and economic decay. I will demonstrate that climate change is more interrelated to the other parts of human life than commonly thought or represented, and that it is not solely an environmental issue but also includes the political, social, and economic facets of life. I aim to present how confronting it includes all of us academics, scientists, poets, activists, gardeners, you name it. I want to break preconceived notions of not only whom should be concerned with climate change (because simply as a human being it is a cause of concern) but also who should be tasked with helping alleviate it.
Whether extremely clear or not, any person of every profession can help combat climate change and its overarching impacts in some way, and I desire to enlighten and empower others to do so from the examples of those in my documentary. Secondly, I hope to use my project as a springboard to address the issue I’d archival silences in academic institutions, and the importance of ensuring that we have comprehensively diverse curriculums and information systems. Whether from the standpoint of the lack of access to Indigenous voices or female voices, etc, there remains much to be done within most educational institutions as a whole in terms of academic equity and equal representation in this regard. I endeavor to demonstrate how there is more diversity of thought and interdisciplinary interaction in areas perhaps viewed as more monolithic (i.e. climate change being solely scientific). I am interested to see how people, students, researchers, and professors of varying disciplines who will be attending the showcase will react to my project, as each of their conclusions and opinions will both be inherently unique as well as an insight as to how differently view and approach our current climate change crisis.
Overall, to have and provide this space in which to share voices of those who deserved to be heard is a privilege I am both grateful and extremely excited for, and I am interested to see its overall reversion by the FSU community.