The online newsletter of our Global Studies program featured some reflections from the new chair, who remarks on the value of gathering for joy and study in this time where "our communal and personal worlds are turned upside down by cruel and reckless policies and events that challenge established vocabularies," adding a reflection on how recent events have made some of her earlier work about how genocide might better conceptualized and so prevented seem "both quixotic and presumptuous." "As we witness several genocides being waged across the world," she writes, "even critically engaged concepts seem lacking in the bluntness and compassion necessary to describe the loss."
The newsletter ends with a poem by the indispensable Mary Oliver:
I haven't read this poem before but it is characteristically lovely and true. And it is so apt for the work we are called to do at a time when it seems that there is "nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split, dropped by the gulls..." Could this really be "like a schoolhouse"?
I think of our students, who have never known things whole or shut.
