The Lists that Govern my Life

The Other and Another: Learning to Recognize and Embrace Difference From Paige Payne I was introduced to the term Othering as an undergraduate in a history class. Ironically, I can’t remember which history class, but I was obsessed with the concept. Did I learn about Othering while discussing Japanese internment camps as a freshman and visiting one in Delta, Utah? Or was it looking at pictures of Huns and noticing how subhuman they looked? Was it talking about Jewish pogroms throughout Europe? About the Holocaust? About the physically and mentally disabled who were sterilized and killed under the rise of Nazis? Was it learning about slavery? Was it learning about colonialism?  Othering refers to marking an individual or group as irreconcilably different and then perceiving and treating them as inferior or as an outsider. Othering is what drew me to classes about American slavery and Modern African history as I struggled to make sense of how people could have...

I did a reflective post after each of my first two years of grad school ( Year One Done and Year Two Through ), so even if I'm a little late, I thought I'd document a Year Three, in Love as Could Be . I've included some journal quotes for your enjoyment, marked in quotes. After spending last summer in Utah teaching a German term course at BYU ( which I LOVED ) and trying to get over a difficult breakup ( which SUCKED ), I returned to Indiana not sure what to expect for this third year in Bloomington. A lot of what happened this year was shaped by an encounter with a new IU graduate student. I showed up to church on the first Sunday in September and after seeing this new guy, I introduced myself. His name was Dallin (which he told me was a very Mormon name, and for the first time in my life I realized Dallin was indeed a pretty Mormon name). We spent the next two and half hours making bad puns, talking about how we were both Ravenclaws, talking about our grad programs in...