miércoles, 19 de junio de 2013
I am editing my previous posts
I'm editing and updating my previous blog posts a little so only the introductory post is available at the moment.
lunes, 29 de abril de 2013
The Dreaded First Post
El Otro Project-blog was born back in 2009 as a pre-Masters course attempt to write about allkindsofeverywhichthing related to displacement. At the time, I was getting ready to study Education and International Development at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, and one of the fields of study within International Development that appealed (and continues to appeal) to me the most was displacement. So I went rummaging through the internet for sources on internal displacement, refugees, taking in as much as I could, haphazardly documenting my findings on my blog. I was hungry for information. I was frantic in my desire to know and to understand. But I devoured statistics and drank in resources without much sense. Much of it ended up floating somewhere between my brain and the page, never really becoming my own, never really being much more than a reiteration of something that I had read or heard.
I was dissatisifed. One of the reasons why I was so interested in displacement was because I felt it could be my own. It was part of my past: my grandparents had fled their home in South-East Finland not once but twice in 1939 and 1944 because of the war. I had spent a good part of my childhood and teenage years living in North-West Pakistan, one of the refugee hubs of the world, with Afghan refugee camps scattered across the road from where we lived. And, on a very strange and egocentric level, I myself felt "internally displaced", having changed countries a number of times since the age of 7 (NOT unwillingly I must add), my identity cut and pasted across national and cultural boundaries. While to a large extent I felt Finnish, I had grown up largely in something of an Anglo-American bubble in the Indian subcontinent, after which my family had relocated to Finland, after which I had thought I would probably feel quite at home anywhere (which has proved to be only partly true).
So with a heritage of displacement, why was it so hard to I blog about it? El Otro Project - A Space for The Displaced - "el otro", the other, the one looking in from the outside, the one hovering between but never belonging - that's what I knew about. That's what I was about.
I then began to toy with the idea of focusing on the concept of "the other" that I had become so familiar with while studying English Literature, and post-colonial literature in particular. Maybe the blog could be about "the other". About those whose stories weren't considered so important, or weren't so mainstream. About asking the questions that I wanted to ask about otherness, about representation, about language, about belonging, about the boundaries we create, about the fears we have, about East and West, North and South, "developed" and "developing", about who dictates what is what, who puts us in our little categories and why. I could write about all sorts of displacement without restricting myself to analyses of graphs from the UNHCR or articles from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
These posts may be senseless musings. They may sometimes be naive, too Western, too rushed, too pointless, too obvious. Or they may be calculated pieces, painstakingly self-conscious pieces, funny, witty observations, or simply angry little rants.
This is a blog about other worlds. In other words.
In other words, on other worlds.
Other wor(l)ds.
I was dissatisifed. One of the reasons why I was so interested in displacement was because I felt it could be my own. It was part of my past: my grandparents had fled their home in South-East Finland not once but twice in 1939 and 1944 because of the war. I had spent a good part of my childhood and teenage years living in North-West Pakistan, one of the refugee hubs of the world, with Afghan refugee camps scattered across the road from where we lived. And, on a very strange and egocentric level, I myself felt "internally displaced", having changed countries a number of times since the age of 7 (NOT unwillingly I must add), my identity cut and pasted across national and cultural boundaries. While to a large extent I felt Finnish, I had grown up largely in something of an Anglo-American bubble in the Indian subcontinent, after which my family had relocated to Finland, after which I had thought I would probably feel quite at home anywhere (which has proved to be only partly true).
So with a heritage of displacement, why was it so hard to I blog about it? El Otro Project - A Space for The Displaced - "el otro", the other, the one looking in from the outside, the one hovering between but never belonging - that's what I knew about. That's what I was about.
I then began to toy with the idea of focusing on the concept of "the other" that I had become so familiar with while studying English Literature, and post-colonial literature in particular. Maybe the blog could be about "the other". About those whose stories weren't considered so important, or weren't so mainstream. About asking the questions that I wanted to ask about otherness, about representation, about language, about belonging, about the boundaries we create, about the fears we have, about East and West, North and South, "developed" and "developing", about who dictates what is what, who puts us in our little categories and why. I could write about all sorts of displacement without restricting myself to analyses of graphs from the UNHCR or articles from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
These posts may be senseless musings. They may sometimes be naive, too Western, too rushed, too pointless, too obvious. Or they may be calculated pieces, painstakingly self-conscious pieces, funny, witty observations, or simply angry little rants.
This is a blog about other worlds. In other words.
In other words, on other worlds.
Other wor(l)ds.
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