When I first heard this semester’s topic for AMST103 I was bit suspicious of how something as broad as an “Introduction to American Cultures,” could take place within the relatively narrow framework of Los Angeles. However, as the semester progressed I realized how the city encompassed, and often epitomized, many important trends and topics in the country’s history. Ultimately, I really enjoyed focusing on Los Angeles because it allowed us to observe broader themes in a smaller, more manageable context.

However, I found that the more we read about problems in Los Angeles the more unsatisfied I became. Like Christian, I also struggled with our distance from the people who’s stories we analyzed and picked apart. I spent a lot of time thinking about how privileged I was to be able to observe the problems in our country from the safety of a private liberal arts college and how this position of privilege played into the very issues we were discussing. I do believe that is incredibly important to critically study the past so we can better understand how to make effective change in the future and in this regard, the course was very helpful. It taught me how to piece together a variety of sources, from academic scholarship to popular music, to create an in depth picture of our culture and society. But I wish that we had more extensively explored the position from which we were surveying Los Angeles and if, or how, this affected our scholarship. The Los Angeles activity was definitely one of my favorite parts of the class because it encouraged involvement in the greater community. In this way I also found the Ruiz article that Kaitlin mentioned to be very interesting. Ruiz’s article offered an answer to my questions as to how a scholars can negotiate the space between themselves and what they “study” by arguing that “civic engagement should be an essential component of any American studies curriculum,”(17) and that the key ingredients for that engagement are “respect and collaboration”(13).

Looking back at the semester, I believe that one of the most valuable things that I will take away from the course are these questions because they are what will inspire me to continue investigating American studies and propel me to become more actively involved in the community. Equally important, this class gave me the tools to understand the importance of social justice work and explained the unique opportunity that American studies offers to combine academic scholarship with activism.