Harney-Davila 1

Isabel Harney-Davila
Inter 5001
Dr. Durst
November 30, 2017

Reflection

I have chosen the topic of race and how race is involved in the interactions of social media. At

first, I was thinking of writing a 20-22-page term paper but since I had to include 2 of my minors and Ive

taken a web authoring course, I figured I would do an e-portfolio-more specifically a website.

I enjoyed the process and challenges that I faced in building a website and wanted to use the skills I

acquired in the course to display, in a professional manner, the information of how racial social

movements are brought to the forefront through social media.

It wasnt until I took contemporary sociological issues at UC in 2015 with Dr. Michael

Loadenthal that I became impassioned with sociology and thus declared one of my minors required of the

Liberal Arts degree. Learning about how the political, economical, forces interact within society to impact

policies and ideals. I did not know about the professional writing track until I was registering for Fall

2017 courses by my professor Laura Wilson, and since a majority of my English minor classes also

counted as professional writing I decided, since I enjoyed those courses, to declare another minor and

include RPW into my capstone.

My generation is heavily reliant on social media and businesses are following suit in creating a presence

on social media. I came up with race and social media out of my social movements class with Dr.

Loadenthal and my rhetoric of social media course with Wilson.

My academic work is represented in my project through my extensive use of citations and

backing my claims with factual and academic evidence in which with my English studies taught by

professor Hennessey, came in handy in how to structure and organize my information in terms of my

claim, my analysis, and then evidence backing my analysis. The most critical ideas or evidence, I would

say, comes from numerous media outlets like the Washington Post, The New Yorker, and academic,
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sociological journals. Because the movement take place on social media and changes so rapidly I found

myself using news outlets more so as they could relatively match the speed of change in social media.

My primary audience was for my academic professor with my secondary audience being white

men who may be passive and/or neutral in the racial tension of America. They are not deeply rooted in

any racist echo chambers but of course that does not mean they understand why people of color are angry

and thus protests. The biggest challenge that I had in my project was narrowing my scope as I initially had

over 6 movements I wanted to focus on but as I got down to working my project I realized I was really

just providing generalizations and not providing thorough analysis. So, it was then that I decided to pick

two movements and analyze what and why they were protesting and how did social media provided a

platform for those movements to gain such spotlights. I have to say that designing the illustrations, the

infographic, and the website was the most fun part of the entire project because it gave me the opportunity

to illustrate and create works of art.

I will be pursuing a masters degree in public health administration and policy. I wanted to enter

this field to make a change and challenge the institutional racisms because although some staff members

may not be personally racist, or they may be, they are in a position of power to create policies that reflect

the potential racist and/or ignorant groupthink. Using my own platform of privilege, I would be able to

internally educate staff and possibly create better socioeconomic policies that normally ignore and/or

dismiss the low socioeconomic, minority communities.