Social Justice Event: HER Workshop

I chose the HER Workshop event that took place Wednesday, March 6th. I chose this workshop because it seemed like it was going to be fun and interesting. Basically the event consisted of having the option to choose between five different workshops that were all centered around women. The workshops consisted of things like leadership skills, what messages social media gives us, domestic violence, career development and something else that I honestly can't remember. The workshop that spoke to me the most was social media workshop. In this workshop, we talked about the different kinds of messages that images form social media give us. We were asked to look at a series photos and then write on sticky notes what kind of message we extract from it. There were pictures of Indian Actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas on the cover of Vogue magazine, one of the messages we took from this picture is instead of talking about things liker her amazing career, they only focus on her wedding to Nick Jonas from the Jonas Brothers. Another image was of Kristen Bell on a magazine cover for 'middle aged woman' and the message we extracted from that is that when all middle aged woman are supposed to look liker her in the photo. We talked about a lot of other different pictures that gave us similar messages. She told us to write the topics body image, socioeconomic status, gender, race/ethnicity, sports/recreation and childhood and match up the sticky notes to which topic we thought they belonged too. To end the workshop, the presenter told us ways that we could become activities and showed us pictures of what magazines covers should look like and the messages they should send to us. At about 1:15 we had to go back to the conference room for the keynote speaker from a non-profit non-violence organization and a performance from a RIC Alum. I'm happy that I decided to go to this workshop event because it really empowered me to do more and be more like my mom always did before she had passed.