At the start of the semester, we watched Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk. During her speech she expressed how dangerous subscribing to a “single story” can be. In today’s world, we often come to hasty conclusions about issues, based solely on our own narrow experiences, without first first carefully examining other perspectives. Throughout this course, we have constantly challenged our perspective. Whether it be through reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, or Johnathan Kozol’s Amazing Grace, or Paul Loeb’s Soul of a Citizen, or watching Inequality for All, our ideas about how the world works have been shaken. In my final paper, I attempted to examine this idea of “a single story” through personal examples and through the texts we read this semester.
Erik Arney's Portfolio 