Analysis Of Pipelines And Protests By Janet Fiskio

On Wednesday, February 22nd, a professor from Oberlin College named Janet Fiskio came to Salisbury to give a speech called “Pipelines and Protests.” The presentation was mostly about environmental protests all over the world and their use and impact. Calling upon her personal experiences and the experiences of other protesters, Fiskio analyzed this kind of activism and the real purpose it serves. She discussed protests and the issues that lead to protests in many different ways, and encouraged the audience to be active and participate in these demonstrations. As Fiskio covered a lot of topics and different ideas, her speech was hard to follow and understand, especially for members of the audience who were not in the Environmental Studies Department.

This was a very interesting way to start her speech, as Fiskio grabbed the audience’s attention with pop culture references and interesting images. She then discusses how these dystopian futures may exist and occur one day, but within protests and activism there are “ephemeral utopias.” According to her research, protest camps and other such activities are utopias in their own right, but they do not last long at all. She says that, even though they are short-lived and sometimes do not achieve their main goal, these protests are not failures. This concept was very fascinating, although Fiskio could have done a better job describing it and making it relevant. Despite this, she used good support and had appropriate

Fiskio herself was a good speaker -- she had a strong, conversational tone and used very intelligent language. She also had great articulation, pronunciation, pitch, volume, fluency, and projection. Although she paced slightly and used some hand gestures, they added to the presentation instead of detracting from it, and she kept good eye contact the entire time. Additionally, she was very confident, and she seemed poised and knowledgeable. She also used a lot of quotes and outside support, which gave her credibility and validity. Nonetheless, the presentation itself was lacking. The ideas seemed unorganized, and there was little to no explanation of their connections and relative importance to the average person. Despite its interesting beginning and ending, the body of the speech was confusing and not extremely engrossing. Even further, Fiskio’s PowerPoint was not very well done. The layout was passable, but it really only consisted of pictures slapped haphazardly on. The PowerPoint was not visually appealing and, though the pictures were good, it just seemed like it was lazily