View of New Orleans. Photo by Ewa Protasiuk.
The following post was contributed by Ewa Protasiuk ’15, a Biology major and PCON minor. Ewa recently used her AMS Grant to attend the International Studies Association conference in New Orleans. Along the way, she reflected on the synergies of travel and the promise of academic inquiry.
This is a post about a trip that almost didn’t happen. (Thank you, February 2015 weather!) But luckily, it did.
After two canceled flights and a delay, I made it to New Orleans for the International Studies Association’s Annual Convention. This conference brought together scholars from the discipline of International Relations. This is not my discipline; but as a Peace and Conflict Studies minor with an interest in how (or perhaps whether?) academic scholarship can be anti-oppressive on a variety of fronts, several presentations and discussions interested me. They covered themes such as feminist takes on militarism, “Queering/Querying Global Political Economy” (as one roundtable discussion was titled), the relationship between silence and agency, and how collages (yes, as in the art form) can open up different ways of thinking about political science. (Check out Saara Särmä’s dissertation collages if this intrigues you.) I also attended talks with my advisor in Peace and Conflict Studies, Susan Thomson, and met several of her colleagues, friends, and fellow Canadians.
While the discussions formally organized by the conference were certainly thought-provoking, I also thought a lot about the conference itself–as an entity with its own culture, set of power dynamics, and materialities. I’ve also been thinking about the meaning of my travel between New York State and New Orleans, and many different dynamics I saw at play just in those few days. A few scattered anecdotes:
- While flying to the conference, delayed in Charlotte, I sat down at my gate among a number of people–apparently strangers, apparently white–who were sharing a conversation about their military experiences. The tone of the conversation was overwhelmingly positive.
- While at the conference, held predominantly in a Hilton hotel on the riverfront of New Orleans, not far from the famed French Quarter, I heard only one panelist acknowledge that we are on Native American land.
- While flying back to New York, sitting at the gate, delayed yet again, I got into conversation with a woman who used to live in New Orleans but who, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, moved to Central New York. She has traveled back to New Orleans as often as she could over the past ten years with devotion.
Pieces of the what scholars talk about during academic conferences are evident in the everyday—things with big names like militarism, environmental racism, and settler colonialism. What do conferences have to do with resistance to these things? I am a big-time, largely unapologetic nerd. I love school. I love research. I say this even as a second-semester senior with a matter of weeks left at Colgate. But there is some disconnect between the world I find at the conference, and the world I find at the airport. One I want to explore further.