Drowning and Rethinking – Week 6/7
Somewhere amidst finishing my assessment for Exclusion and Inequality, starting the pre-intensive period for Migration and Forced Displacement, and juggling an onslaught of group projects, I began questioning the feasibility of my intended final project (I guess that’s why we’re encouraged to attempt to incorporate our final project idea into this essay? To give ourselves a chance to play with the concepts before we have money on the table). Looking at just one legislative body was not that hard until I tried to look at the kind of decision that body was trying to make under the label of “climate change.” You probably have to look beyond just the people within the body to where they’re getting their information. And in the case of democracies, where they’re getting their campaign money and their votes. Maryam kind of pointed this out in a comment to my last post when she brought up the topic of private consortiums in the new energy/environmental preservation sphere. (I’m still barely getting to all the great links Darcie gave me because it’s been that kind of week). I still want to build something interactive like a simulation and I’m still interested in examining those in power, but man, I’m waffling.
And the topic of migration has given me a welcome distraction, as it’s one I naturally circle back toward. I just find it absolutely fascinating that the decision to leave one’s country (whether forced or not) can immediately turn one into something potentially suspicious, a “could-be criminal” as it were (because one form of “irregular migrant” is one that has overstayed their visa, that means a lapse of a visa renewal is what stands between all legal migrants and criminalization, which is something to think about the next time you forget to renew your passport or driver’s license without such repercussions).
Then there is Interdisciplinary Futures with its obsession with disciplines. I think a lot of my classmates have found ways to come to peace with this class’s constant emphasis on placing knowledge and the people that produce it into boxes. But I just keep bumping heads with the limitations imposed by the language of disciplines (I, admittedly, had this same problem in j-school when they kept trying to get us to commit to ‘a beat’ which is what journalists call a niche or specialty—there is so much information out there, how do people commit to one little corner of it and why can’t I? I love it all… Information is magic). Why do we need to categorize ourselves in order to reach out to work with others or play with new points of view we hadn’t previously considered?
“Then there is Interdisciplinary Futures with its obsession with disciplines.” YYYEEEESSS!!! It makes me laugh because it seems to reflect the academic world — really the only place where disciplines are so clearly defined. I can’t think of any work I’ve done that wasn’t a jumble of disciplines and expertise coming together to re-imagine, re-invent, re-define to address real world problems. Real world problems have no idea what a discipline is, so they don’t conform. That course spends a lot of time promoting an idea that so natural and required in the applied world that I don’t think about it as an optional technique. That said, I have found it useful to explicitly think about the way I think and what information, experience or past “discipline” of mine moves me in any one direction or another in my project or in group projects. Which are so numerous that I have plenty of opportunity to think about this. Ha! Okay, commiserating aside, I think you’re quite smart to think about scale at this stage. A small something that is achievable and powerful is likely to contribute more than a massive something that you never really get a handle on — and tips you from sanity to some other state.
BTW, I often thought about my experience as an immigrant (or “expat” as is the case for a privileged person) in comparison with the refugees I served in Germany. We had a few times over the 5 years where paperwork was delayed or whatever wasn’t lined up and I had zero fear. I knew that my husband’s company shielded us from being kicked out or being any version of suspicious. Meanwhile, trying to activate a public transportation pass for the refugees set off an s-storm of inquiries and documentation checks, involving whatever the highest layer of management available to confirm that young women who could barely stay warm or full weren’t stealing a seat or oxygen on public transportation.