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Reflection

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Last Wednesday, Maureen and I delivered our final presentation of our website. We both felt pleased with the final site and our experiences throughout the semester.

At a point in the semester when I’m looking back on all of my classes (and paying the bill for the next set), I think it’s useful to reflect on what I’ve learned. While we have covered a great deal in this course, my two biggest takeaways are improved digital skills and new connections to LEF and its members.

This course was my capstone project for my digital studies minor. Through it, I learned how to participate in a course online through Zoom and Slack, strengthened my skills in website design and audio publishing, and learned how to use Google My Maps and TimelineJS. I’m particularly looking forward to exploring how Google My Maps can be useful for other projects and personal interests.

The other aspect of the project I feel most grateful for was the opportunity to visit LEF and meet its members. Maureen and I share a passion for sustainability, and it was eye-opening to meet a community of people who fully devote themselves to that ideal and manage to live fairly comfortably. Being involved with environmental activism in Virginia, it was refreshing and hopeful to learn about a different possible approach to the climate crisis.

LEF Visit

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This past weekend, we finally got a chance to visit the Living Energy Farm. Getting there was challenging, from finding the right address to walking the half-mile path from the end of the driveway to the main building.

The half-mile walking path to LEF.

When we first arrived, we found two young adults sitting in a warm living room with four kids running around and playing happily with toys. The two young people turned out to be visiting for a couple of weeks through a national tour of different intentional communities. Then we met Debbie Piesen and Alexis Zeigler, who showed us around the Farm and talked to us about our project.

On the tour, I was struck by the amount of powerful and simple technology that LEF members made from scratch. One example I particularly admired was the heating system, which collects hot air from the roof and blows it underneath the house using a solar powered pump.

While I was somewhat concerned by the possibility that the members of LEF might view a website as an unnecessary extension of the industrial world, Alexis seemed excited by the idea that our project might help outsiders better understand the mission of the Farm.

LEF’s Social Analysis

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Browsing through Youtube for LEF-related videos, I found this footage of LEF cofounder Alexis Zeigler talking about the mission of the Farm. This was clarifying for me, since much of the information on the LEF website is heavy with technical jargon and analyses of different sustainability practices. Zeigler’s straightforward statements make clear the social analysis behind the project. For LEF members, the entirety of current American mainstream culture is unsustainable, not just our energy sources but the scale and decadence of our homes, transportation methods, and consumption.

This makes me wonder about the place of a digital archive in LEF’s ideal world. On one hand, such an archive might seem unnecessary and even harmful in terms of its presence on the Internet, a big part of American consumerism. However, Zeigler articulates that the challenge of their movement is the difficulty in convincing everyday people to live more simply. The goal of LEF is to serve as a demonstration of that possibility, so an archive will hopefully serve as a useful platform.

VSEC Reflections

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For my post this week I thought I’d talk a little more in depth about the Virginia Student Environmental Coalition and how it connects to the communities we’re studying. Our class discussions feel important to me because of their relevance to the challenges VSEC faces with its own community.

VSEC is a statewide group of youth activists who mobilize around climate justice. Throughout the year, the Coalition has a house where four to six full-time organizers live and work together. For the past two summers, we’ve hosted a Summer Organizing Program at the house with around twelve people each year. These people put a tremendous amount of work into relational work, direct action organizing, and outreach. Here is VSEC’s theory behind collective living:

Volunteer organizing and collective movement living has been at the heart of social change as far back as our tradition of organizing goes. For the civil rights movement, churches and Freedom Houses spread throughout the Deep South supported young organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The ability to live and work together grew the nonviolent movement of sit-ins and moral confrontation that forced the segregated system to its end and won a right to vote for the Black community. Gandhi’s Ashram housed the commitment of the Indian Independence movement and launched the Great Salt March. Collective movement centers have served as incubators for resistance and sparks for building the new world we are fighting for. Collective living provides our foundation of trust, unity, and commitment to each other, as we build social movements rooted in the love of people.

I have not been a full member of the Summer Organizing Program or lived at the house for an extended period of time, but I definitely consider myself a part of the community. The house is a home I know I can return to; the people who live there are my family, the people I trust most deeply. I would strongly consider living there after I graduate. So the effort toward collective living is one that feels very near to my heart, and I want to understand how such a community can be sustained long-term.

-Sarah

Reflections: Our Community

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Our community for this course is unique in that it is decentralized from any one campus. We are able to maintain order through digital connection, so far mostly through Zoom calls, email, hypothes.is, and Slack. We meet on Mondays and Wednesdays for an hour and fifteen minutes and discuss progress on readings and our projects. This is the structure or framework within which it is possible to have a community.

In terms of feeling a sense of “community” within the group, group dynamics are important to consider. I still feel like I don’t really know the students from other campuses. I know their names but have not connected with them on a personal level. This would be true for “in-person” classmates in a large lecture class. As an English major, though, I’m used to discussion-based classes in which I get a strong sense of the personalities of classmates.

On the other hand, Maureen and I are close friends. We were roommates last semester. I feel a strong connection with her, and part of my motivation for the class comes from wanting to build a strong project with her. This is maybe what brings the strongest sense of community to the course for me.

I’m glad Dr. Schleef is physically present at UMW. Otherwise I think it would be easy to feel detached from the course. There’s a sense of accountability from having a UMW professor teaching the course, a knowledge that my performance and input will be remembered past the end of the semester. These are my reflections on our community so far.

-Sarah

Week 2 Reflection

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What type of community do I want to study, and how? What have I learned so far?

Reading about various intentional communities in Virginia with Maureen has made me reflect a lot on what I value about the Virginia Student Environmental Coalition. Our coalition has a consciousness around creating a space that challenges the prevailing social norms of individualism and competition. Not just for fun and unity, this is a deeply challenging political endeavor. There’s a lot of pain and difficulty that comes with unlearning and relearning the way we relate to one another. Members must constantly strive for honesty, harmony, and self-improvement.

I think that in many ways, most if not all intentional communities are undertaking this sort of work. I would like to study a group that is conscious of the political nature of such a task and shapes their decisions and structure around it. Maureen and I also discussed possibly studying an urban group, since we are less familiar with how these might function. We definitely want to study a community that we can visit here in Virginia.

When we decide on a community to study, one thing I would like to look at is the group’s conflict resolution structure. This work seems really important in such constant group spaces, and I can probably learn a lot from how seasoned community members handle and process day-to-day conflict.