I was in Paris last week. Well I was in Brussels for three days, then Paris for four, then Barcelona for five. It was hands down, one of the best weeks of my life.
I saw breath-taking views, ate amazing food, and spent time with some incredible people, but throughout the ten days of traveling I think I did a lot of self-reflection. Why am I compelled to visit all these places? Am I recognizing that my privilege is an extremely rare one? What do I do with all of the new knowledge and perspectives I have? What do I care about?
I was out in the Gothic Quarter in Barcelona when I heard about the bombings in Paris. A couple of my friends as well as our course instructor were at a small bar around the corner from where we had dinner (at 22:30) and one of us had just happened to look at our phone for the time, when we saw the headline in the news. None of us understood the scale of the event at the time, because how could you at 3am after a few drinks in Barcelona?, so it wasn’t until next morning that we saw the impact the incident had on a global scale.
Since coming back to Copenhagen on Sunday, I’ve had many conversations about the bombings in Paris, Beirut, and Baghdad with my host family, in my Danish and Philosophy classes, with friends, on social media… it’s interesting because they’re similar conversations all around, but the nuances of the things that are said are different depending on context.
In my Philosophy class which is called “The Thinking Lab: From Kant and Nietzsche to Surveillance after 9/11” the topic for the day was knowledge, education, and the Enlightenment. We focused on the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and his most famous work The Postmodern Condition within which takes a critical look at the state of education in contemporary society, and how the Enlightenment shapes how we have come to perceive “truth” and “knowledge” today.
Although The Postmodern Condition was first published in 1979, I found a lot of what Lyotard had to say directly relatable to recent inquiries and dilemmas I’ve had about the education I’m receiving, both at Wellesley and here with DIS in Copenhagen. Here is an excerpt from chapter 12, titled Education and its Legitimation through Performativity.
“The transmission of knowledge is no longer designed to train an elite capable of guiding the nation towards its emancipation, but to supply the system with players capable of acceptably fulfilling their roles at the pragmatic posts required by institutions”
My personal dilemma with choosing a major or career path stems directly from my resistance to this idea of using higher education to just supply a flawed system, to try and fit in to pragmatic posts that don’t necessarily make me happy or make the world a better place. I think that’s why it was so easy for me to switch from a pre-med Biology major to a Women’s and Gender Studies Major because WGST is an interdisciplinary field that aims to examine and analyze the world from critical perspectives. and hopefully change it for the better in the end. The way I think about this past week’s events and my reactions to them are a result of having studied with an intersectional perspective for the past two and a half years. I’m grateful that I’ve been exposed to such a variety of opinions concerning many things in the past several months, that have allowed me to be reflective throughout my travels in Europe.
It’s bizarre to think that I only have a month left of “study abroad” (in quotes because, well, Wellesley is abroad for me too). I have a trip to Istanbul coming up, and then I finish off the semester in Copenhagen, then a quick visit to Amsterdam before heading back to Tokyo for New Years.
I’m so excited to be home and with my mom but honestly, this semester has made me realize I want to be traveling for the rest of my life. I think the nomadic lifestyle suits me pretty well.
