Lecture Reflection
The idea of reflecting on these first weeks of lectures has proved difficult to imagine in terms of structuring a response without simply delivering a point of view that I have already expressed and investigated in the past without the need for stimulation. If I was being tasked with writing 500 words on why I feel disenfranchised with institutionalised care for issues that face the world we live in, I could do so (begrudgingly) with some efficiency. Therefore, I feel its necessary to explain my conclusion as soon as possible as I subjected myself to as much lecturing stimulus as I could, before realising UAL wasn’t quite going to affect my belief that our tutors were preaching to the converted or the uninterested.
The phrase ‘Post-Growth’ was brought up in our ‘Introduction to social responsibility’, and stuck with me as something that someone of an older generation would definitely understand to be the case, no doubt due to the huge technological and economic advancements of the recent decades. However, I think this only tells half the story as not only has our western culture reached a point of such enormous growth that we are in a state of shock and disarray, we have been able to completely acknowledge the damage this has caused to all walks of life, be it mental or physical health and damage to the environment itself. For me this has gone past Post-Growth into Post-Fuck Up. Unfortunately we have been brought up into over-consumption, probably under no fault of those around us, but as always by the corporation owners who have never cared about the individual. (The Straight white male devil that the art school community has been conditioned to demonise regardless of context.)
In fact, the only lectures that I felt spoke to the obvious need to kill consumer culture before its too late were the ones one might disregard as unrelated to the problem of how to tackle institutionalised non-sustainability and discrimination. A student who has chosen to study at the London College of fashion for their love of the Fashion industry is likely to see that the need to be genuinely wild in our human identities and that as adults we can have the agency to cry if we want to, is positive for our mental state or physical well-being but isn’t going to bring themselves to a point of comfortability with their materialistic practise in a world that’s so heavily compromised by these issues.
To me, this means there are those in the room who are raring to reach positions of influence in which to put positively responsible actions into place if they are not already, because as I mentioned we are Post- Fuck Up. Yet, there are those who’s love for what consumerism brings them hasn’t effected their lives enough just yet. To be dictated to as a whole unit of this mixture feels quite frustrating.