Blog 4-Peer Review
For my final blog, I chose to peer review Elanka Jiang’s second blog on her reflection of the Better Lives themes titled “Blog 2: Diversity During a Pandemic”. I specifically chose Elanka’s because she wrote some interesting and well thought of points, as well as this, I also thought of a few things she could improve on for a more balanced peer review.
At the beginning of her blog Elanka talks about the current global crisis we are facing and mentions how this is a time where people should be uniting however there are still many differences in the world today that tear us apart as a society. I like the idea that she is relating to what is currently happening in the world and using it to tell the reader that the world still requires many changes.
Elanka then begins to mention that the better Lives theme that relates the most to her is diversity and starts to talk about her background which I think is an excellent approach when beginning to talk about this topic. She writes about how she has never been ashamed of her ethnicity being a Canadian-Chinese student however realises that although fashion media is making vast improvements to broaden their diversity within the industry, there are still unnecessary underlying attitudes towards Asian minorities in the western world. She gives a few examples from her recent times in London, expressing that she receives subtle racist comments to getting strange looks which I think is appalling.
Elanka asks “So what can I do about all of this” and asking a rhetorical question like this really engages with the reader making them think about the current topic she is talking about. Throughout her third paragraph a few certain words stood out to me that high lights the situation we are facing in the world today, “uncertainty”, “insignificance” and “confusion”.
Finally, looking at Elanka Jiang’s final paragraph, she talks about her future practice as a fashion illustrator. Whilst reading through this paragraph I could sense a lot of passion and emotion that went through Elanka’s writing. I think her drive to make the fashion industry a much more diverse and inclusive place is admirable; it’s truly needed everywhere. Although Elanka has written about diversity extremely well, I think she could have included some points and had spoken about the other two themes of the Better Lives unit (sustainability and social responsibility) within her blog. However, overall Elanka has written a well thought through second blog and I very much enjoyed reading it.