Winter

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From my Developmental Readiness Survey results and personal reflection, I have determined that the component of my leadership that I would like to develop is my leadership self-confidence. While the test did not show me to be significantly lower in this category compared to the rest of the class, I find it to be an area that would best benefit my leadership potential if developed. Because of this, my goals are centered largely around my interactions with people in various areas of the campus community. I believe that becoming more comfortable in different areas of the campus community and practicing involvement will be key in developing my leadership confidence.

My overarching goal is to become more involved in the campus community. Because it is broad, I have several specific sub goals that I think will help me achieve this goal in various separate parts of my life. Some examples of these goals are: 

--- In the classroom community, my goal is to become more of a discussion leader by contributing more to the dialogue of the classroom, contributing new ideas and encouraging stronger discussions with my classmates. 

--- In the Greek community, I want to become more involved and form stronger relationships and connections with people outside of my house specifically.

--- In my sorority, my goal is to become a leader that people believe they can go to for assistance and support. I also wish to create stronger relationships with the girls in my chapter.

--- On campus, my goal is to find a student organization to become involved in. Specifically, I would like to join an RSO that allows me to explore further into something that I am interested. Also, I would like to look-into an RSO that would give me the chance to take on a leadership role.

--- In my major, my goal is to increase my confidence utilizing the resources and attending the events that Foster offers.

Each of these specific goals will require a different plan of action. In the following bullet points, I will outline the first steps I plan to take in working towards these goals and the methods I will use to track my progress and hold myself accountable.

--- In order to become more of a discussion leader in my classroom community I first plan to increase my participation in classroom discussions. To best be able to contribute in discussions, I need to make sure I am fully prepared to comment on the material. Beyond simply doing the readings, I am going to start writing out a couple key ideas that I can use as talking points. If I have these prepared ahead of time I will feel more comfortable jumping in on conversations. Once I become fully comfortable contributing to conversations, I want to be able to build off of things that other classmates say and attempt to answer questions that they may have. To hold myself accountable for this goal I will include a task in my to do list that says “contribute to an in-class discussion ___ times.” 

--- To form stronger relationships with other people in the Greek community I plan to apply to the Greek Community Project’s spring break retreat. Not only would this give me the opportunity to get to know other people in the community who are also interested in leadership, but it would allow me to learn how I can best be a representative of the Greek community. If I am not accepted to the retreat, I will then consider other organizations in the Greek community where I can expand my network of peers and form new relationships.

--- In my sorority, I will use my position, Director of Membership Enrichment, to organize events that will allow the women in our chapter to get to know each other better and become more comfortable relying on each other. One event I plan to hold is a game night between various grade levels so that new members can develop relationships with the women who have been in the house longer. I will make sure I follow through on this event by adding it to our event calendar and getting my friends excited about it. The more people that know about my event, the more motivated I will be to make sure it is successful.

--- The first step I will take in accomplishing my goal of joining an RSO on campus is to go online to the catalogue of student organizations and look for a few that are related to my interests. When I have looked in the past I have come up short because there is not a lot of information regarding when clubs have meetings. This time, instead of giving up, I will try and email the people associated with the club or go to the RSO office in the HUB directly and ask for advice. 

--- To develop leadership self-confidence in my major, first I want to be aware of all the resources available to me. To begin with, I want to set up and meeting with a Foster Academic Advisor to get advice on various resources I should be taking advantage of. Next, I will look at the Foster event calendar and identify three upcoming events of interest to me and attend at least one. In order to hold myself accountable I will find a friend to attend the event with me. Also, I will keep any events or meeting written in my planner so I am reminded of them every day leading up. ​​​​​​​

The obstacle I will most likely encounter in carrying out my plan of action is the unwillingness to leave my comfort zone. If I feel myself falling back into this familiar pattern, the first thing I will do to solve this is consult my trio. I feel that when I vocalize my goals around people who have a similar focus and goal for leadership development I am further inspired to follow through myself.  If this is not successful I plan to consult people I consider to be a part of my support system. The sociogram activity from lab helped me come up with the people that I consider to be part of my support system. One branch of my sociogram was my family, another my college friends and the third was my high school friends. The article Three Types of Friendships, which was an optional reading for the class, would define me as a compartmentalizer of my social relationships. While this is true, it also means I have three distinct groups to go to for advice. For motivation, I would most likely go to my college friends for help because of how motivated they are, and how I can rely on them for advice on new ways to get involved in the campus community. My high school friends and family are the people I would more likely go to for more personal support because they have known me much longer and understand my tendencies and would be capable of providing me with more personal advice. It is important for me to ask others for help because people come from different backgrounds and experiences that have provided each of us with different skill sets, knowledge, and contacts. By reaching out to others for help, the amount of resources available to you increases immensely. Besides increasing my leadership self-confidence, I also thing that these goals will expand my involvement in each of these communities and hopefully expand the number of people in my support system. In the article, How Diversity Makes Us Smarter, the importance of diversity in your relationships is discussed. By having more variety in your relationships, you will have access to more perspectives that can increase creativity.

In order to follow through on my goal of developing my leadership self-confidence I must hold myself accountable. For me, the best way to do so is going to be through self-reflection. In my journal, I plan to evaluate my progress towards each of my specific goals by writing about what I have done to get closer to achieving each one at the end of any given week. I enjoy self-reflection, and looking back and feeling as though I accomplished something towards my goal will motivate me greatly. 

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Orientalism is one of the ways by which we make assumptions about the people of the Middle East, their cultures and their background based on the color of their skin, religious beliefs or ancestral home. However, one clarification must be made. Orientalism is a social construct. While its foundation is the Western world’s observations of the Middle East, these observations are not an accurate representation of the diverse populations the term Orientalism refers to. Rather than providing the Western world with an accurate depiction and understanding of people that live in this region, Orientalism is responsible for the perspective that the Middle East is a rigid, culturally static and radical society. Furthermore, this characterization is at the heart of the conflicts between the Middle East and Western world.

To understand the implications of the term Orientalism, it is necessary to first understand what the Orient is. Historically, the Orient was used primarily in reference to the Middle East but now is occasionally used to refer to the continent of Asia in general. This suggests one of the first problems with the concept of Orientalism. The region that it refers to is poorly defined. This is problematic in that a single term is being used to describe a people belonging to many different cultures, religions, levels of religiosity and countries as if they are one. In his book Covering Islam,Edward Said discusses the component of ‘Islam” in the Islamic world. “‘Islam’ defines a relatively small proportion of what actually takes place in the Islamic world, which numbers a billion people, and includes dozens of countries, societies, traditions, languages, and, of course, an infinite number of different experiences. (Said, xvi)” In Orientalism, observations made regarding the actions of a small sample from this region are then applied to the attitude towards the Orient as a whole, regardless of whether or not the selection was a good representation of the entire population. 

Beyond the great discrepancy in how the region of the Orient is defined geographically, it is necessary to consider how the region is defined in its time period. A general definition of Orientalism would not specify what time period the concept refers to. This is because it does not intend to reflect a particular period. However, it is evident that Orientalism has not developed over time. It reflects a society that is culturally and intellectually static.  In the documentary Edward Said on Orientalism, connections are drawn between the way the Orient has been represented in film and text over time. Each depiction follows a similar storyline emphasizing Middle Eastern stereotypes of violence, extreme Islamist beliefs and oppression of women. Not only do the stereotypes provide an inaccurate generalization of the Middle East, but their reoccurrence, without development over time, suggest the Middle East is fixed in the past. 

The documentary Edward Said on Orientalism also explains theAmerican perspective on the Orient. Americans have a more indirect experience with the Orient than other Western countries because they never colonized the area. The accepting of Orientalism as a factual representation of the Middle East and the people from that region over time has given Western culture false and generalized opinions. It is inaccurate to make assumptions of Orientalist culture because the Orient is not a region that can be defined with one specific monolithic culture. Members of Western civilization are uneducated on the topic of the Middle East. As a country, we get many of our opinions on the Orient based on how it is portrayed in the media. As a business, the media reports on what will make the most money by drawing the largest audience. Often, fear is used as the selling point. When the media focus is on the sensational acts of terror conducted by few individuals, that is how Western civilization begins to view the Orient as a whole. An online journalist Peretz, is quoted in the article Citizenship Denied, expressing a very common sentiment towards Muslims. “But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims… there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need to honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse. (Selod, 2)” 

The characteristics now associated with the Orient have provoked a greater level of conflict between Western and Middle Eastern resulting in the clash of civilizations. In the article Citizenship Denied, the author mentions the primary ways Western Civilization feels threatened by Muslims, as well as the generalized population of people from the Middle East. First, Americans view Muslim males as a threat to national security. This stems from the stereotype that the Orient is a place of extreme violence and the assumption that all Muslims share extreme Islamist views and potential to commit acts of terror based on these views. The second threat that Americans sense is that the subservience of Muslim women to men is a threat to the progressive values of Western culture (Selod, 5-6). Both fears stem from the common way in which Muslims are portrayed in the media and throughout recent history. Men are portrayed as violent, religion-ruled terrorists and women are portrayed as if they are oppressed by both men and their religion. The uniting factor between both these threats is the assumption that Muslims, both men and women, embrace their Muslim identity to a greater extent than their Western counterparts. This assumption entirely abandons the concept of religiosity. It ignores that Islam, like Christianity which is practiced more commonly in the Western world, can be practiced to a lesser extent than the extreme portrayals. This is a result of the influence of Orientalism which is responsible for the assumption that all people from the Middle East hold extreme Islamist beliefs. 

The fears held by many Americans put Western civilization and Middle Eastern civilization in direct conflict with one another. Even though the fears are based on stereotypes of the Orient and the people that live there, they serve to make this believed conflict a reality. As Mohammed Samiei says in his peer-reviewed article Neo-Orientalism? The relationship between the West and Islam in Our Globalized World, “separating the West from the rest leads our world to a new barbarianism in which conflict, war and terror are legitimate means, because there is no institutionalized means to communicate peacefully for solving problems. (Samiei, 1146)” Samiei’s take on the issue shows how the expectation of a conflict can make it a reality. As American’s, if we expect people from the Middle East to harm Western values and civilization, then we will treat them like an enemy. An assumption of Orientalism is that people from the Middle East are violent, Islamist extremists that want to impose violence on Western civilization. If we treat all Arabs as rigid and intellectually undeveloped, then we are directly shutting down any means for discussion or problem solving due to the preconceived notion it will be unsuccessful. 

The inaccurate assumptions of Islam could have several repercussions in the future. Edward Said explains in his book Covering Islamhow Western civilizations false assumptions of Islam can further damage relations between those who identify as Middle Easterners and Americans. He expresses concern in “the mere use of the label ‘Islam,’ either to explain or indiscriminately condemn ‘Islam,’ actually ends up becoming a form of attack, which in turn provokes more hostility between self-appointed Muslim and Western spokespersons. (Said, xv-xvi)” Orientalism reduces societies to rigid, culturally static caricature and implies Western society is rational, flexible and superior. When one society clearly views itself as superior to another, common ground is nearly impossible to find.

Bibliography

Orientalism: An Interview with Edward Said. Dir. Sut Shaley. Perf. Edward Said. 1998. YouTube. 28 Oct. 2012. Web. 10 Jan. 2017

Said, Edward W. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Pantheon, 1981. Print.

Samiei, Mohammad. "Neo-Orientalism? The Relationship Between the West and Islam In Our Globalized World." Third World Quarterly 31.7 (2010): 1145-1160. Military & Government Collection. Web. 24 Jan. 2017.

Selod, Saher. 2015. "Citizenship Denied: The Racialization of Muslim American Men and Women Post-9/11." Critical Sociology41, no. 1 (2015): 77-95.

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