My first two years at the University of Washington often felt like a race to finally find a place that I fit in. With each class I took, I entered hoping to finally, maybe, find my focus, find my major. With each class, I felt engaged, no doubt, classes were always interesting, but I also found myself never feeling completely satisfied. Each class felt like it was providing a piece of a puzzle, so to speak, but I was craving something that looked at the whole, and embraced the messiness of the issues that we were talking about.
In these two years, I clung to the potential of finding a discipline, a promise of certainty, a clear direction and course for my educational path, and my post-graduation future. I didn’t find one. I took courses throughout the humanities - sociology, anthropology, political science - and I enjoyed them, but with each course came a new question of whether I would find the right fit. I did not have a clear, conscious idea of what I was looking for, but with each class I found myself confused again, returning to a time schedule with endless options that I was excited to take, but no department that felt like home.
At some point within these two years I found the Community, Environment, and Planning (CEP) program. I applied, still searching for a focus, for a passion, for a field of study that felt right to jump into. I wrote my application essay about urban agriculture and education, both of which had played a large role in my pre-college life in high school, but both of which felt like foci I was clinging to, trying to find a sense of comfort in the familiar. I knew deep down that I was grasping for a clear cut focus. Afraid to say that I deep down I really had no idea what I was doing, afraid of ambiguity, I constructed a picture in my mind of what a successful educational career might look like. I still felt confused (and still do, today, but I’ll return to this later), unsure.
In the summer of 2015, after being admitted to the CEP program, I studied abroad for a month and a half in Lima, Peru on a program with the Comparative History of Ideas department. This program was a moment of rupture within my educational path.
About a quarter before, when I had seriously begun to consider studying abroad, I stumbled across a program in Lima, Peru. The program was centered around the intersection of art, culture, and politics in contemporary Peru. I was intrigued. The program was out of my norm enough to be an opportunity for the challenge and rupture that I had long been searching for in my educational journey, but also seemed to encapsulate the collaborative environment that I had come to appreciate over the two prior years, something that initially drew me to CEP. I was also really interested in exploring creative responses to political and societal struggle, broadly. I had seen how groups that I had been a part of in my hometown, San Francisco, had responded to rising rates of food insecurity and gentrification through community gardens, and creating alternative food systems. Working outside the system, at least in part, was a way to creatively respond to societal injustices. I saw how these processes met needs, but were also a form of visible resistance, and almost therapy. Working in the garden was a form of expression, a form of healing, and a form of making one’s voice heard. This program felt like it could be a way to further explore the relationship between healing, resistance, and creativity.
While in Lima, we worked with artists, Indigenous activists, and social justice leaders. We focused on societal inequalities, questions of citizenship and belonging, the lingering effects of the two decade long internal conflict and authoritarianism within Peru, and the ways in which creative endeavors are a vessel with which to respond to civil Peru’s violent past and to the lingering violence of the present moment. Through all of this, we investigated the role art plays in keeping a conversation alive about inequality and injustice in a climate in which “progress” and moving forward are prioritized.
The program was rigorous. Rigorous both academically, and personally. Rigorous because while studying abroad it was necessary, and important, to think carefully about our very presence in most situations, and navigate feelings of voyeurism, bringing our personal identities into the classroom. Rigorous because of the deeply emotional and personal subject matter we were dealing with, and rigorous because we, or at least I, was unsure of how to grapple with the fact that I was hearing about horrible realities while very removed from the day to day experience of these realities. I was unsure of how to feel, whether it was appropriate to feel, how to act, and how to engage. Throughout this process, I started to see the problematic underpinning of seeing the world in black and white, in right and wrong, and in approaching a situation striving for “rational” explanations.
This program changed my educational focus, my sense of self, and my conception of how I move through the world, and engage with the world around me. While abroad, I completed a final project, where I spent time observing the nature of the everyday at two intersections in Lima. I spent time doing participant, ethnographic observations, and writing about them - thinking through the nature of these spaces, and how energy circulated throughout them. I was pushed to think about matter in these spaces broadly, to consider the presence of non-human material, and how it shaped interactions between bodies moving through these intersections.
This experience has directly influenced my focus within CEP. Throughout my coursework, capstone project, and out of class work, I have studied the materiality of everyday urban spaces - how meaning is produced through the everyday. From Art History classes, to Landscape Architecture classes, to CHID classes, I have studied how individuals relate to the everyday, and how meaning is produced through the mundane reality of everyday life and lived experience.
This focus is still broad, but it feels right. The broad nature of this focus has let my educational experience be truly interdisciplinary - through each class I have explored the nature of the everyday from a different perspective. Now, as I graduate, I have come to see this interdisciplinarity as a strength of my education, and element of my CEP experience that I am so grateful for.
In the following pages, if you click on "ISP" I breakdown this coursework and how it has played a role in my educational experience. Within my "Portfolio" section, I highlight significant work within my college career. If you click on my "Reflection" page, you'll find a personal reflection on my time at the University of Wsshington, and in CEP more specifically. If you click on my “Capstone” page, you’ll see a breakdown of my capstone research, and how this experience in Lima has carried through.
Thank you for reading!