Reaction to James Parris Guest Speaker

I really enjoyed James Parris’s talk today, and how a lot of our discussion stayed within the vein of social justice through animation. His film “Pink and Blue” was interesting to watch, as a lot of the message about relearning behavior is stuff and I’ve been relearning these past few years. Hearing James talk about it so openly and honestly made me excited and hopeful as the sigma is these ideas are only popular with the younger generation. When we opened it to discussion, I was expecting for us to talk more about the industry, and the challenges within it. However, we continued to talk about gender roles, and our own experiences growing up with those expectations. It was interesting to hear how so many of my peers have had similar experiences with gender roles, and how they felt at the time and now about those experiences. I liked how James was always excited to hear what we had to say, and engaged in the content we were talking about, as well as adding his own experiences to it. I feel like the overall talk went very well, and pleasantly surprised me. I feel that when we have people from the industry come in, we can feel pressured to only talk about animation. I’m happy that it wasn’t the case for this talk, and excited to hear this type of discussion taking place across generations.