Monday, 9 December 2024
Hello, welcome to the blog and reflections of Christin Yu. I am a Lecturer of Cultural Studies at Central Saint Martins, teaching on the Jewellery, Textiles and Fashion programme, as well as in the MA Fashion Histories & Theories course. I am also an Associate Fellow of the Transnational Art, Identity and Nation Research Centre, and the Secretary of the British Association of Korean Studies.
Not sure if it’s helpful to list all these credentials, the practice of writing this blog feels like I am positioned in an overlapping space between performing a public persona and reflecting upon private matters. A few weeks ago, our team delivered a module about Web 1.0 transitioning into Web 2.0, and I was reminded of platforms such as livejournal. This blogging platform was a precursor to the public lives that Instagram, and TikTok have now produced, but there was a seemingly ‘authentic’ vulnerability in those posts. I think maybe it helped that we were not posting our images, but our thoughts – it was an embodied versus solely visual practice. Anyway, I find it difficult to mediate between what I should be writing as an earnest reflection of my thoughts, or as a performative profile of myself. Do I write to an audience or as I did in my adolescent diaries? I write this interjection in a space of privacy, which lends itself to a personal reflectivity that I did not feel comfortable accessing in a classroom yesterday. Perhaps this speaks to accessibility and temporality in learning…
My pedagogical practices are informed by decolonial feminist aims that include seminar-led discussions, and collaborative writing practices to imagine and re-exist toward an otherwise. I am a design historian, and material cultural specialist that is interested in the non-visual world, and embodied practices of being, alongside generative practices of knowledge making that privilege communal and polyphonic stories.
As I embark on this PgCert course, I look forward to generating strategies and practices that can inform my teaching as we move through an increasingly polarised world. My difficulties of experience thus far have included questions about how to mediate controversial worldviews (although these instances have been few and far between). I hope to learn more strategies toward my own resilience, as I teach a student body undoubtedly afflicted by anxieties, and perhaps worse, an apathetic worldview. As a marginalised person in a position of power, I want to undo the historical relations of authority, while also maintaining some protection over my own integrity.