Bui 1
Thuy Vy Bui Nguyen
Professor Koning
English 113B
May 04th 2014
Author Statement
For the first 2 semesters of my freshman year in university, I have been learning on how
to research and write essays in English 113A and English 113B. I used to be a self taught young
artist who has no interest in reading and writing since I only pay attention in drawing. However
as time pass, I was able to do many challenging task like reading short to long texts then to do
research papers and to write many different type of writing I start love to read and write more. I
realized that writing and reading also help me expanding my creativity in art. This semester, we
continued covering the topic of “consumerism” and we were also working on the topic of “social
class”. I am glad that I have the professor and classmate because these topics that we are
learning are so interesting that the more we discuss about it the more we want to expand it. My
professor, Kelan Koning, taught us many different ways to research and to essays.
First is the space project which the class is divided in different groups and each group
chose a place which could show the act of consumerism. My group’s name is “Team Turned Up”
because we enjoy doing our tasks before time. We chose Americana Mall as our space to write
about. From doing this project I realized that I had never notice the purpose of a shopping mall
before. I learned a lot about “consumerism” in class English 113A and this project help me to go
outside to see everything more detail. Even though shopping is what I always do, I am a part of
consumerism, however as a part of the project I got to do survey of other customers at the mall,
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to notice carefully the consumerism in reality around me. We used the data that we found from
our trip and the resource from our research to make a presentation in class and to write a=our
project space essays.
Second is the project text which the divided group continued to work together to research
and to understand bell hook text “Where We Stand: Class Matter” about social class. Even
though the text focus mainly about social class but it also cover the topic of consumerism. Team
Turn Up chooses to research and learn about living simply, caring and sharing. This topic
reminded me a lot about Bea Johnson from Garbology written by Edward Humes that I learn in
class English 113A. Bea and her family started living simply, living sharing and caring giving
hope to everyone that they can start living the same way too. However, different than before, I
chose to write how it is hard to live simply, live caring and sharing buy supporting bell hook’s
ideas of material longing, the hedonistic consumerism and also the possession mentioned “The
System of Collecting” written by Jean Baudrillard.
Finally is the project media which is different than other essays that I had worked on, it is
a visual essays with a project statement. From this project, I was about to work with images/
photograph that I found in order to tell my ideas. The ideas that I chose is how children’s social
class affect the successful which talked about the inequality between different children in
different class. This shows that not everyone has the opportunity to change their class stage.
From working on this project I was able notice the reality that happened around the world from
looking at other artist’s photographs.
After two semesters learning about consumerism and social class I realize how much
consumerism have affect our live and how lucky I am to be in a good higher classes. The topic
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about consumerism has been the biggest concern to me that keep appearing in my mind. As a
student who follow art and design major, I chose consumerism to draw a triptych of the cycle of
trash that we release from consuming.