For Field Experience, our class visited the Chicago Council on Global Affairs: Global Chicago. We listened to three representatives talk about their mission and how they function to connect Chicago globally. The purpose of this field experience was to learn about local organizations that build global connections. Global Chicago takes on this task by establishing that they are an independent, non-partisan organization. They bring task forces together but they don’t express any agendas on the work. This organization works to give Chicago a global voice — a lot of East Coast cities and Washington D.C have that voice to communicate with the rest of the world. Chicago is viewed as a city that attracts foreigners, so the organization has the purpose of connecting Chicago with the rest of world. Global Chicago sees that cities, especially in the Midwest, are not as isolated as they may think they are. Changes from somewhere distant can eventually come to have an effect on a city like Chicago. This is why Global Chicago works hard to provide a platform to talk about issues of worldwide importance.
This field experience was unique in activating ideas from my course work because I learned more about taking oneself out of the equation. When one the speakers mentioned this, I had a quick flashback of the movie, Tron — the scene where Kevin Flynn said that Quorra took herself out the equation by protecting someone without thinking of her own safety. Global Chicago does this in way too; they protect the value of global connections without putting any personal agendas forward. I think that this could be useful in writing my Tokyo crime-fiction story for Crimes Against Humanity. In our last class, we talked about steps writers could take to challenge their readers — stepping back from one’s work and reading it with the acceptance that not everyone thinks the same. In this way, a step to writing crime fiction is taking oneself out of the equation. I think this strategy develops a crime fiction story because a crime can be as unsettling as breathing if the writer doesn’t attempt to challenge the readers thinking. My crime fiction story will hopefully be improved with this idea that I heard.