Where in the world to study?

The spring semester having ended about a month ago, I find myself at home in Denver caught in the summertime lull that so many Duke students begrudgingly acknowledge. And while I've enjoyed the quiet pace of life in this Colorado valley, a place my family moved to recently and where I still know few people, I admit I miss the hubbub of campus, the random chats with friends in Vondy, the many intertwining communities. But I bring the things I've learned both inside and outside the classroom to most spaces of my life, whether it's the communities around me in Denver or the communities I will spend time with for the remaining two months of my summer.

During most of June, I will be navigating South Korea's bustling capital conducting a research project on language and identity construction among LGBTQ-identified residents of Seoul. From July to early August, I will study at a Korean university in an immersive language program. When I think about the prospects of these summer adventures, a couple of things come to mind.

First, I think of how downright gracious Duke can be. For Duke to fully fund a research project self-proposed by a naïve college kid with no prior research experience, it must have a lot of faith in young students like me. But it understands that we all must begin somewhere and that these cross-cultural endeavors prove invaluable in enriching our educational journeys.

But even with the incredible opportunities that Duke presents to students, I also wonder what social and political forces lead us into certain areas of study and to what extent students are free to choose their own volition. For perhaps obvious reasons, students of Korea are likely to have direct ties to the peninsula where their families and educational experiences are rooted and where their future careers await. In addition, students who are members of the Korean diaspora may study the peninsula because it sheds light on their identities, which may have been ignored or overshadowed in the communities that they grew up in. Studying the region might illuminate their understanding of identity in ways that might not do the same for people who do not share in this identity. But I, a white American student, do not have these identity-shaping ties to the region per se unless I zoom out to an international scale. After all, in the wake of World War II and after the Japanese colonization of Korea, the United States and the former Soviet Union divided the peninsula and later used it as an area for a proxy war that caused devastating loss of human life. I have family members that served in the war and in South Korea in the decades afterward, humbly sacrificing time and energy for a war deemed necessary by capitalist American expansionism as well as serving alongside South Korean troops in light of an increasingly hostile and repressive North Korean government. I can link myself to this region through the lens of national politics as well as through family members’ anecdotes. But despite why I think Americans should study the history of US involvement in Korea, I still contend that my study of this region is fundamentally different from the study of someone with indigenous ties to the region. My identity, security and livelihood are not directly at stake.

But imagine this simple yet startling fact: all people of all nations and cultures inhabit the same globe. Try though it might, globalization has not yet homogenized this world. We still live in extremely different contexts and face different challenges, but we are all still connected members of the human race. Every culture is infinitely worthy of study, regardless of the identity of the student.

Nonetheless, we would be deceiving ourselves if we ignored the intricacies of how world regions are interconnected and if we refused to acknowledge the inequitable hierarchy these cultures lie stratified into. While I travel in South Korea, I will remind myself often that only thirty-five miles from Seoul lies the North Korean border. I will remind myself the human cost of half a century of separation of the two Koreas. I will remind myself that in order to build relationships in the country and understand its inner politics, I must acknowledge the violence of international history and acknowledge the fact that this history can be reproduced at a micro-level in everyday interactions.

I will also remind myself that, while I do identify with some marginalized communities in the United States, my social identity markers overwhelmingly allow me to focus my eyes abroad without worrying about my prospects in my home country. I am compelled to stay invested in the politics of the US while I’m abroad, but I know that allowing myself to be fully immersed in a South Korean cultural context will give me a new perspective through which to view the American experience. Eurocentric and postcolonial patterns of history have deemed certain regions more or less important for study. I want to challenge these ideologies, but I also must acknowledge the limit to which I can travel outside of “safe” or “important” territories.

I do not take the privilege and blessing of being able to undergo these summer activities abroad lightly. I want to savor each experience, knowing that every moment is bought at a price and not just financially. The gift of life is precious and fleeting, but maybe the fact that it has a limit can allow us to appreciate it all the more richly. With the histories we have inherited in this world, I have to naïvely hope that the benefits of this experience will outweigh the costs. I have to hope that my education, whether in the classroom at Duke or on the streets of Seoul, will not simply benefit my own career prospects but also benefit the cause of justice in the world.