What has Changed Since My First Post--

Berlin loves Obama!I wanted to keep more of these, I really did! In any case, I guess I’ll use my compulsory “Free Blog” to discuss some of my feelings about the kind of research on societal deviance I’d like to be doing in Berlin, most likely in two to three years, and how it has shifted throughout the span of this class. Also, please note I couldn’t find an especially relevant picture for this blog post so I chose this one which really makes me excited as it represents how I perhaps may not have to defend myself as the “stupid American” abroad! I know it was weeks ago, but I’m still so excited and hopeful about Obama’s coming 4 years.

Let’s talk about the bad first:
As I discussed in my first post, one of my goals for this trip is to start exploring the ways in which Turkish racialization/racial formation is occurring in Germany, especially based on gendered and sexualized lines. I’ve been finding many stumbling blocks in this work already, yes, before I have even started: I feel that my assumptions are limitless and I do not know how to approach a culture, let alone a culture within a culture without feeling as though I’m somehow committing a type of violence against the inhabitants. I would prefer to do this work as a German, at the very least, in order to work properly. I find myself feeling scared and inadequate about how I’m going to approach questions without some type of colonial gaze. While I’d like to, obviously, successfully represent how Turks are being represented, what the costs of representation are, and how specific resistances are being enacted within the nation-state, I’ll have to learn that I’m not playing by the same rules, as it were, as would be otherwise if I were to be conducting this research on the grounds of the U.S.
Also, I’m sick.

Now for the good stuff:
I’ve kind of learned to care a little bit less about the situation that I’m going to walk into when I get to Berlin. I feel like I might be putting too much pressure on myself to get a jumpstart on some type of research that may never even get done, or may already be underway. While I’m deeply interested in comparative studies of racial formation, it’s possible that my anxieties are legitimate. That is, maybe I’m entitled to feel that my education is a little lacking at the moment and that, with time, I will be able to more successfully accomplish learning about other culture through ethnographies.
And besides all this academia stuff, I’M GOING TO BERLIN! That’s just so exciting to me. I’ll actually be living outside the country and be able to see all that I’ve been writing about for the past couple of weeks in ways radically different than I might have otherwise been able to. I love the idea of just dismissing “the authentic” as “the pretentious” the more I think about it: I have the freedom to have fun in the ways that I want to have fun. I’ll be able to actually listen to the music first hand, good or bad. And, I’ll even be able to search the city of Berlin up and down for the best vegetarian meal since, as it seems, there are so few of those as options anyhow. I know I’ll leave a different person than when I arrived, and I hope that this blog as well as the blog I’ll be keeping next semester for Steve’s Art of Travel class help me document the growth I undergo, my findings, and help a new group of students who plan on studying abroad.