Event: Genocide in Rwanda (Smith Steeb Glass Classroom)

Date: September 12, 2019

The Genocide in Rwanda event, even though I had heard about the topic before, reinforced and brought the Rwandan genocide back to the forefront of my mind. I learned a few more things than I knew before about it. I thought it was interesting how one of the first questions to get us interacting was a question based on if anyone could identify two more genocides that are recognized widely across the world as having happened in America, but that the United States refuses to recognize themselves. The two other genocides that were talked about briefly were the genocides against native Americans and African Americans.

This event relates to the topic of international affairs because it’s important to know about things that have happened in other places outside of America. The genocide that happened in Rwanda is in itself a historical event that should be not only spoken about but taught about as well. As international scholars, we must be able to understand these relationships within larger cultural contexts outside of our own.

This event also relates to a concept I’ve learned in other coursework, specifically a class I’m taking currently, Rural Sociology. Rural sociology is based upon the concept of the sociological imagination. The sociological imagination is defined in the class as the intellectual ability to see relationships between individual behaviors and attitudes, and a larger societal context. It’s a type of critical thinking that allows people to think outside of their personal experiences. Our community acts as a filter between us and trends, issues, and events in the world. Applying it to the genocide in Rwanda, it happened in 1994 and consisted of a rapid mass killing over the timeframe of about 90 days. Not many people I know, even the ones who were alive at the time, know or have even heard about the genocide against the Tutsis that happened in Rwanda. This is related to our communities filtering how we perceive events. For example, obviously someone living in Rwanda at the time of the genocide has personal experience with it and has in some way been affected by it, but others, like us, experience the event through news stories, without a personal experience attached to it for the most part.

I do have some questions after attending the event. Since learning about the sociological imagination in my rural sociology course, I think it would be interesting to look at newspapers and articles and assess how thorough the coverage of this event would have been, in turn, to see how people in communities like mine may have been exposed to it. I do think, since it was mentioned that the US and other western entities did not want to label the genocide using the term “genocide” as it would have made it so that these entities would have had to do something, that there probably wasn’t very much coverage at all to lend to the effort of escaping responsibility as well.

Event: So you think you can do research? (Academic Event) 

Date: Monday January 28, 2019 @7:30pm 

The “So you think you can do research?” research panel included multiple students who are involved in research currently here at Ohio State. I personally thought it was cool how the range of interests spanned and how that tied into the work that each student was partaking in. For example, one of the students/researchers, Kate Greer, talked about how she was involved in research focusing mainly on German Theatre and how it has ties both into the German department and the Dance department. Her research topic arises a lot of my interest. 

For myself, I’m not necessarily interested in German or dance, but I am interested in Korea and other East Asian countries on the topics of women’s and gender equality in these countries as well as the effects of globalization on the homogeneity and collective thought of the people. So even though I don’t have an entire research proposal, I do have a general idea about what I would like to work on. I think it’s cool that there are research opportunities available for pretty much anything and would love to take part in it sometime. 

One thing about the event that really impacted me was the fact that more than one of them said that they at first didn’t actively pursue research opportunities until an experience finally hit them to push and act on their instinct. I honestly thought a lot about doing and getting involved in research but really didn’t think I would be capable of doing something of that extreme. I learned, however, that there are many other options to get involved in research rather than just heading your own project by simply branching out and talking to professors and advisors about possible opportunities within the major, and even just applying to be a research assistant for something that you’re interested in. 

I also learned that there are plenty of funding opportunities to help fund your research and also that research projects can fail simply from not having the funding. There are also presentation opportunities which I think is super cool so that students who are even the slightest bit interested in participating in or doing their own research can see other examples of research going on. 

Thinking along the lines of getting started with possibly doing my own research, I already talked about a possible topic of interest I would like to do a few paragraphs above. Within classes I’ve taken, a few other possible interests would be global hunger and inequality and if/how it would be possible to skew the trends we see in our current world today. Identifying faculty within the departments related to those topics such as maybe the International Studies department, The East Asian Languages and Literature and Korean Departments, the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies department, etc. would be my next step. After that it would mainly be about contacting people within these departments and potential faculty mentors to get involved with research they may already be doing.