This week was really good. Besides class I also had a Chinese speech competition on Sunday and I ended up taking silver, so next fall I’ll be studying abroad at Nanjing University in China. I haven’t been back to China in a while, so I’m really happy about this opportunity.
I also really enjoyed my office hours meeting with PTJ and found the advice really helpful. One of my biggest challenges in the class has been feeling like there’s a lot that I just don’t know about, or don’t know enough about, and as a result I often feel like I lack the means to contribute to class conversations in a meaningful way. Much of my knowledge is limited to my own interests and personal background, and consequently much of my input is centered around those things. Moving forward I plan on focusing on these three things:
By excluding people from national policy, the implicit meaning is that they are not a part of that national consituency and are thus part of the “other”. This goes back to Tuesday’s discussion of “self” and “other”, as well as Hsia’s article on Taiwan. Miranda in her response to my Week Ten Blog brought up a lot of good points about the formation of national identity and how that has shaped American policy over time. She talked about America’s “defensive policy”, which got me thinking constructively about why, historically, that would be such a popular choice. (My main takeaway was that British colonialism and the victory of the American Revolution endowed in the US a deep reverence for “personal freedoms” which came to be synonymous with “American”; a defensive strategy is necessary to protect “freedom” and therefore protect “America”.) Truthfully, in the past, although I’ve thought race and gender studies are really interesting, I never really considered it as something that people actually do and get practical jobs from. Being in this class however, I find myself readily reaching for the constructivist approach, especially as it relates to some of my other classes and experiences. Moving forward I think it would be interesting to use constructivism to try and understand the formation of other countries, specifically in countries that were imperialized/colonized. On to Week Eleven!
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KateHi, I'm Kate! I'm from Madison, WI and am planning on majoring in SIS focusing on East-Asia China. I like practicing kung fu, listening to music, and drinking bubble tea. Archives
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