Small Strokes Big Oaks

The tables have turned, and at the request of the lovely frau sally benz, I’m answering my own master’s thesis interview questions as a guest post for the lovely (you can see her answers to these questions here). Here’s a little teaser to pique your interest, but you’re going to have to hop over to her blog to read the whole thing!

Name: Ashley Lauren

Age: 25

Occupation: High School English Teacher, grad student, blogger

Race: Caucasian

Blog: https://smallstrokesbigoaks.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/samsanator

Interestingly, I began this literacy project because the only feminist community I had ever encountered was online.  That isn’t to say that I had never encountered feminists singularly, but they had never been as organized and bound together as they seemed to be through Twitter and their blogs.  Because the community of feminists online is solely based on literacy (reading, writing, comprehension) practices, I myself defined the online feminist blogging community as women who read, write, discuss, and share information about feminism online.

Since this project began, I have seen the onset of several, smaller, more defined communities from book clubs to women who help and work with technology.  These groups can really only help the feminist online community become stronger by opening up all sorts of different dialogues.

I started blogging in college as just a way to organize my thoughts and present them to the world.  More recently – about a year ago, actually – I deleted my Facebook account and started a personal blog as a way to update my friends and family on my life.  It wasn’t until I joined Twitter on a whim and saw the community of feminists there that I became interested in the feminist movement and began writing papers about feminism in graduate school.  It was then that I started my feminist-leaning blog and that has been growing ever since.

As I stated above, now I blog mostly about feminist issues, or about life issues through a feminist lens.  I changed from a more personal blog because I desperately wanted my blogging to have a purpose, and the more research I did on early feminists, the more I found about their writing and networking.  Now, I feel that I do have a purpose: to raise awareness about injustices and open important discussions about feminism.  Just making someone aware of the issues and ways people can help fix them really does make a difference in the world.