Finals, DK style

Imagine this: you walk around a room talking to all kinds of people about various issues on your mind, like gender and sex politics, the Third World (or Global South if you are a leftie like me), post-colonization Europe, etc. And out of this ‘conversation’ you start to find people who think a bit like you, or who at least are interested in the same shit you are. And out of this experience, you commit to doing a project together to explore some question. This is the foundation of the Roskilde University group project.

My group consisted of all Communication and Journalism folks, and this isn’t coincidental. I proposed a project before this group formation process. My proposal was focused on newspapers, so other people into journalism gravitated in my general direction so we could sniff each other out. And we found that we had similar views. Shortly thereafter, my group was born and we dove right into research.

The university learning model here is almost explicitly theory driven. While at UW we obviously use theory, it is used in a supportive cast role than a central figurehead way. So throughout the project formation process people kept asking me which theorists I’d be using, I shrugged and said it’d come with time. To me working with theory didn’t seem as interesting as doing the research, seeing what we could uncover, and only then find some theorists to help explain the results. This small divide in approach to group work soon became a bigger and bigger issue.

I came up with some theorists to satisfy my group. I figured since we were doing image and text analysis, we’d use Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis. Someone else recommended we use Brigette Frello’s (a Roskilde University professor) work on homeland and nation identity as the other central piece. And armed with these two central theories as a starting point to dive in to our project in early October.

Oh, our project? Well thankfully for me, it remained intact from my original proposal. I wanted to take a look at articles on immigration from U.S. and Danish newspapers and see if there were any similarities between the ways immigrants are talked about. It’s a simple project formed out of the parallels between proposed immigration reforms in both countries, and since the whole point of my study abroad program is to study immigration and race and gender why not look to newspapers as a site of analysis? Plus, I have a long history with newspaper production and I wanted to explore how powerful they are in contributing to how people talk and think. And equally as awesome was the fact we had Danish speakers in our group, so we could do untranslated discourse analysis, adding some fuel to our claims.

We added more theorists as we moved along, because we started looking at power structures and how discourse contributes to truth (Michel Foucault), and to explain how immigration and remittances and gender and neoliberalism all are intertwined we applied transnational feminism, we brought in some more specific discourse analysis theory to apply to newspapers, with then threw a little image analysis theory on top.

Needless to say, our project turned into a beast. Sure, a tamable beast, but a beast nonetheless. As the end of November came, the six of us in the group started spending 12 hours a day together. We’d meet up at an apartment in Copenhagen, armed with shitty snack food, our laptops, headphones and iPods, loads of caffeine, and our snarky selves. These intense academic days drove me nuts. I’d work on these same pages for hours at a time, trying to figure out why Foucault changed his mind on discursive power so many times, or how the World Bank could use such obvious gender stereotypes to form worldwide economic policies on folks sending money to the Global South. It was tough – but that’s what I came here for.

The final stretch about killed me. I’m not even kidding. By 7:30 pm last Thursday I was crippled with pain radiating from the top of my head to the bottom of my shoulder blades. My vision was shot, I was nauseous, and I could not form coherent sentences any more. I left my group to finish the conclusion without me, laid in bed in the fetal position with all my lights off, and cried myself to sleep. It was horrible, and most likely the result of 8 weeks of intense writing and academic research, shitty eating, and inadequate sleep.

As I took all our printed pages to a copy shop yesterday morning, I watched a man poke holes in the pages we worked so hard on, and in that rhythm of the hole punching I started to let it go: all that tension in my body, the frustration I had with myself and my group at various points during the project, and the guilt that I had about leaving my group to wrap things up at the last minute. When I finally dropped off the project and started to walk away, the emotional weight melted off. I was left with unadulterated pride. We did it. I did it.

I approached this project, and Denmark in general, as a test to myself. Am I going to get something out of being back in school (again) this time? Do I have the gusto to actually make a difference in the world? Can I be disciplined and tough on myself? I think I proved I am and I can and I did. And now I have this 119 page project to prove it.