Name: Yaritza

Year: Senior

Major(s): Latino/Latina Studies

Minor(s): Environment Policy and Culture

CFS Concentration: Field Studies in Civic Engagement

I didn’t begin to understand the complexity of the term ‘civic engagement’ until this quarter when I enrolled in the Chicago Field Studies class. In our class discussions, we have broken up the term into different components and examined it from those different perspectives. For instance, we have attempted to define ‘community’, ‘community at a workplace’, and ‘citizenship’ in the effort to link them back to the thematic concept of ‘civic engagement’. One particular reading assigned that I found influential was “Citizen: An American Lyric” by Claudia Rankine. In her work, Rankine describes how race and class inform the reality of who a citizen is imagined to be or not to be, and therefore, impacting the potential of some citizens to civically engage.

The discussion of this book and other articles has been critical in my understanding how civic engagement not only operates in society but also in places such as my internship site. Consequently, I am actively observing how my internship site (the Illinois Attorney General’s Office) is ‘civically engaging’ with the city of Chicago and how that complicates or aligns with the definitions we have drafted during class discussions. This class has pushed me to examine how I am ‘civically engaging’ through my involvement with this program and at my internship every week.