I enjoyed writing an essay on one of my communities for this assignment. I start my essay by talking about my reaction of the reading from Casey Plett, which was easy because I had already accidentally written a blog post on “on community” by Plett. I took some of the ideas and thoughts that I wrote about in my blog post and integrated that into my essay. Even in the blog post I talked about DRUM, so I knew that for my essay, I wanted to focus on DRUM as it is the largest community that I am closely part of, and even while I was reading Plett’s work, I was thinking about DRUM and the similarities in the nuances about community Plett described and DRUM. I jotted down some ideas that I wanted to talk about in my essay on the train ride home when I found out I was gonna be writing an essay on community. I was really inspired by the way Plett described the spectrum of different types of people in the same community, I don’t exactly remember how it went but I know it was very frank and felt like a rant. I knew I wanted something like that in my essay and came up with the part in my essay where I talked about conservative Muslims and liberal queers fighting for their interests using DRUM.

The instructions for the essay was pretty straightforward, and while I didn’t answer all of the questions that were prompted to help us write the essay, I did really lean into some of them. I answered what actions my community take the most and how it divides us but also displays our strengths. Another major part of my essay was how I would define DRUM and the nuances within the DRUM community regarding people’s ideology. Thinking about these questions really helped me write the bulk of the essay. I knew I wanted to put my definition of community at the beginning of my essay, but when I initially wrote out my definition of community as a group or gathering where people share common interests or backgrounds, I felt like the definition would contradict with the nuances that I would talk about regarding DRUM. That got me thinking weather DRUM was even a community, I thought maybe I should write about the fact that DRUM isn’t a community. I scrapped that idea; something didn’t sit right with that thought, I have been part of DRUM long enough to know that it is a community. That’s when i decided to change my definition of community as not only a gathering of people that have similar interests or ideas, but also a safe space where people can express their wants and needs. In this way, I could still call DRUM a community. The rest of the essay came pretty easily to me on my train ride home and back to school. I wrote out my essay in Word while in the train and proof read it before submitting it on bright-space. I did not make very many edits on my essay for re-revision, particularly because I don’t do well with revisions without having a second person look at my work but I did what I felt was necessary to improve flow and better my ideas.

This is a photo of DRUM advocating for community safety act in front of city hall. I wanted to highlight a photo that just shows DRUM and the different types of people in it fighting for what matters to them. I believe this is an old photo, I don’t have any new ones of actions I was a part of but it still just shows what DRUM stands for and so I chose it.

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