First week of classes

From random blog photos

It’s Saturday morning here in Fig Tree Pocket, our little corner of Brisbane. Deanna was up with a restless Mason through much of the night, so she’s getting some sleep while he is, and I’m watching the morning in a quiet house. I’ve finished my first week of classes at the University of Queensland, and this morning I’m taking stock of where I am and where I’m going.

In case anyone reading this missed the chapters leading up to now, you can go here to read a short post on the Rotary World Peace Fellowship and why I’ve suspended my music career for a while. This is an incredible opportunity, and a rich time for me.

The classes are fascinating, though they’re not even the most exciting part of this for me. This semester will consist of three courses and a weekly small group session to take one of the classes a little further in discussion and exercises. A quick note on each:

Advanced International Relations – This class is going to kick my academic butt all over town, I’m afraid, and I’m strangely happy about that. The first article of four we need to read for Monday’s class is only twenty-eight pages long, but took me over four hours of focused time to plow through. I got excited when I saw that it was written by Colin Hay. I mean how dense could an article by the lead singer of Men At Work be?

Different Colin Hay, as it turns out. The learning curve will be steep here, as we’re starting out looking at the major philosophical and academic schools of thought in the history of the field of political science, and a lot of familiarity with the subject matter is assumed. Sure, I understand that Calvin and Hobbes are more than just cartoon characters, but when we get into the “challenge posed to the political science and international relations mainstream by the distinctly post-positivist agendas of constructivism, critical realism, post-structuralism and and postmodernism,” without defining any of those terms, simply discussing their ontological and epistemological implications — for twenty-eight pages — I confess I’ve got to work pretty hard to keep up.

Fortunately, the professor, Martin Weber, is an animated and engaging lecturer, and has encouraged us to interrupt him constantly with questions and/or objections. I imagine I’ll take him up on that.

Principles of Conflict Resolution in Deep-Seated Conflicts will probably be the most accessible of the three classes for me, since that’s an area where I’ve had at least some training and study in my undergrad degree. There will be a good bit of role-playing involved in that one, which I look forward to.

Ethics and Human Rights is taught by Roland Bleiker, who is one of the reasons I made U.Q. my first choice for this Fellowship. Bleiker’s academic interests include the interplay between aesthetics and peace work, which is right up my proverbial alley. We’ll spend the last chunk of the semester in that class role-playing a war crimes tribunal in the International Court of Justice. Even the first class meeting was promising, though. At one point we went around the room and introduced ourselves briefly by name, nation and reason for choosing this class. Among about fifty students there were twenty-eight nationalities represented.

And that’s my deepest joy and excitement in this experience so far. Deanna, Mason and I are going over to a party being thrown by one of the Fellows in a little while, and I’m pretty confident that all six of the inhabited continents will be represented there, hanging out by the pool and chatting on a warm afternoon. The depth of experience that these people bring when they arrive is rich and enticing. While here, we’ll deepen and broaden that experience with intense academic interaction and with our three-month field assignments around the world. And we’ll take these relationships as well as this knowledge with us when we move on from here.

The caliber of the other Fellows is extremely high. Joseph Hongo, for instance, who has been involved with negotiations between rebels and African governments in several African countries, and Zuska Petovska, who has been working for the UN High Commission on Refugees advising on policy questions around refugee issues in eastern Europe. Pamela Padilla worked for the Philippine government in their peace negotiations with Communist rebels there, and Teddy Foday-Musa, who was involved in founding a third political party in Sierra Leone only a few years ago. There are stories like that for each of them, and having their input on these conversations is invaluable. I promise I’ll tell more of their stories later on.

For now, though, I have some reading to do. Then off to the pool. 😉

From random blog photos