After a year of attending LWYL webinars and listening to a variety of panelists discuss their work and impact on society, I have learned a lot about various types of injustice and how people are actively addressing these issues through different means. In this last webinar, the panelists discussed their art and how they hope to address societal issues through their work. While we have seen many artists who work with more physical mediums, such as printing, painting, and mixed media, one of the panelists this time is a dancer. It was really cool to see how she is able to express the story of the mush hole through dance. In addition, she added more visual elements to the performance in order to more clearly convey her story, which was really interesting to watch. Another panelist that really stood out to me was Julian Fisher, who is not only a neurologist but also a photojournalist. One point he mentioned is that we are flooded with information and photos from the internet, and scrolling through phones, tablets, and PCs only exacerbates the short attention span for photos and art. Many people simply glance through images but never really dwell on it for long. This happens not only for digital photos and art but also in museums. I realized that this applies a lot to me; when I visit art museums or other museums, there is always a feeling that I need to see more rather than just seeing a few and understanding those few pieces more deeply. Since Julian is also a neurologist, he mentioned how we could test how the human brain would respond when looking at art and how long people actually look at art. I think this would be interesting to see how the time spent “dwelling” on art could relate to brain activity levels. 

Overall, I learned a lot this semester about social inequalities and issues and the people that hope to shed light on these problems and address them. I think it was really valuable to be able to hear from different people and their perspectives on various topics, such as environmental inequality, housing inequality, and much more.