FInal Project Week

Hey guys,

I just got back from Tokyo last night after a very exhausting yet exciting week. This week was our final project week meaning that my whole team, Project Iridescent was working. The week started off with Maya and I going to Tokyo for Amazon Fashion Week Tokyo in order to meet people and interview creators from all around Asia for our magazine "Duende". We went to 4 fashion shows in total including "NerdUnit". We met fashion bloggers, model scouts, designers and singers who talked to us and told us about their marketing and designs techniques. During that time, we stayed in Yokohama. We would go to fashion shows in the morning and night and wake up very early to work on designing pages for our magazine and make sure the printing was going well. The themes for the 4th and most recent issue were justice, mental health, and gender equality. I worked on the mental health section. It was one of the most interesting issues to work on because we had a lot more creative ideas and decided to explore neon pop in terms of colors and photography.

Meanwhile, the audio team focuses on creating episodic podcasts on our SoundCloud account to tell stories related to gender equality and gender empowerment. We plan to host competitions in which people can write poems or songs based on the topics concerning gender, and feature the winners in our podcasts. We also aim to do interviews with special guests such as who activists fighting for gender equality.
 

The main part of our project week was our event that we hosted "Opening the discussion."The aim of this event was to have an open discussion about gender equality and women empowerment. During the event guests were able to listen to guest speakers such as Rena Suzuki, "co-founder of Lean In Tokyo" and Kathleen Krauth supervisor of the gender equality group SAGE and organizer of the annual "Women In Japan Conference". We also had two booths, one where guests could enjoy our podcasts and one where we sold our magazine "Duende". We had a fruitful panel discussion including the two guest speakers and Nikki Kai, a graduate student at ICU which I moderated. We talked about fighting for women with multiple marginalized identities (ex: immigrant women, women of color, mentally ill women...) and including men in the movement towards gender equality. Overall, the event went really well and I am very happy considering the hard work that we put into it.

Purple love,

Tiyi