In my first incarnation, I was a philosophy major: committed to the pursuit of wisdom; arrogant about what I knew was “good” in society; in love with the interpretation of the mundane things in life that make us human. Immersed in both the conceptual and the social aspects of the major (I was first secretary, later president of the Philosophy Honors Society), I took an adolescent love of politics and history towards a second major in International Relations. Between these two worlds, I found a space to link the continuity of ideas in Western ways of thinking with the historical events and processes that gave rise to the history of philosophy. Juggling five courses per semester, work, and organizational duties (funny how once you become president of an academic organization, no one else really wants to take the job from you), I somehow managed to remain involved in the political and existential questions that I had made my interest and in the process begin a journey that would take me down many roads.
On one side, intellectually, I defined my studies through a melding of phenomenology and existential philosophy (perhaps two of the most popular and far-reaching of European systems of thought) with the migratory experiences of my life after leaving Honduras. On the other side, personally and privately, I struggled to explain to those around me how my choices were a reflection of my desire to learn and to create knowledge in communal ways, while not confessing my insecurities about myself and the work I engaged in. I basked (or at least told myself this) in the homelessness of my strange blend of identities: a migrant, a repentant communist, and a Dionysian. I began to question whether or not I belonged in the place I called my physical home, whether or not there was something more waiting for me. Exhausted and overworked, I lived my senior year with a sense of despair: not necessarily about life after school, but more about life outside of school. Graduate work seemed a default position for me, yet one that came with the angst of not knowing whether I was cut out for it. Philosophy had given me the eyes to see and the senses to feel, but I wondered whether I had the legs to swim. I let old ghosts go free and opened my mind and body to new horizons and greater challenges…
In my second incarnation, I took the pent-up energy from the desire to leave my home in Miami and directed it towards my M.A. work in International Relations. I had been had well-warned that graduate school was not an advanced version of undergraduate work, where we were not only expected to read and write at levels beyond what we were used to, but also demanded to think at levels we knew not we could. The latter of these commands spoke powerfully to my philosophical self, providing the “real-world” outlet my personal angst (and my family) felt I lacked. After stumbling through the “second-semester blues” of my first round in graduate education, I thrived in my intellectual output; I began to highly consider the doctoral route as both a personal and professional vocation. Going through a range of theoretical lenses, I questioned the socialization and authoritarianism of the academic establishment in a fashion Kant would perhaps have been proud of. I strived to look at the underside of the ideas and “facts” I had been told were true of history; I wanted to teach and be taught, no longer by my professors, but by the people I felt were the strongest participants in the world of global politics: everyday people who constructed the inter-national as a meeting of places and ideas.
A key turning point in my path rose through the opportunity to teach, both in a college and public school setting. Having successfully defended my Master’s thesis proposal, in addition to the positive feedback from my section of Intro to International Relations, I came across the opportunity to become a Philosophy Instructor at a charter middle school. Not only did I fall in love with the experience of translating my developing ideas to a young audience in need of a critical, yet empathetic interlocutor, I felt compelled to make my work clear and its implications relevant to the daily phenomena of culture, politics, and how the human condition is caught in their midst. Having to teach two types of audiences (teenage and adult), while simultaneously write a thesis on the theoretical violence of Euro-American philosophies, I was professionally invigorated. I began to embrace the professional lifestyle of conferences, workshops, and manuscript revisions, living life as a way station to a new professional identity. Ironically enough, my own identity found itself at a crossroads towards the end of that year. My time in Miami was finally running out…
In my third re-birth, the discipline of Geography became my home. Through circumstances far too numerous to outline here – a strange blend of the personal and professional choices that emerged upon finishing my M.A. – an opportunity to work as a research assistant in an NSF-funded project brought me to Florida State University. The task: studying the local and global impacts of the recent (though hardly new) escalating “scramble” for the Arctic, particularly as it related to climate change. The benefits: take a hands-on approach to the theoretical issues I had worked with for three years and be a member of a cutting-edge research team looking at issues of both political and existential importance. I had no clue where a geopolitical understanding of the Arctic would begin from, nor did I have any experience studying and working with the history of the region and how its changing geo-physicality affected its political representation. Both at the time and today, however, going to Tallahassee was an opportunity for which I am greatly indebted, and which has shaped much of what both my outlook and approach to research and scholarly life look like.
As my first experience away from home and family, I became highly mindful of my choices and the path before me. In fact, the experience made terms such as home, family, and career take on much more profound meanings than I was used to. Not only did my year at FSU allow me to learn how geography parallels many of the questions and themes rooted in philosophy and the study of global politics, but I also learned how geographical perspectives can strengthen, broaden, and localize the political problems that so much of social science is concerned with. A quick glance on the work I have taken on over the last year reveals these lessons – from thinking the space of modernity as a historical enterprise catalyzed by the geopolitical encounter with the Americas, to the ecological challenges that spaces such as the Arctic bring to the theoretical canon of International Relations – but more importantly, they uncovered my desire to transcend the bounded spaces of disciplinary territories and embrace an organic, yet critical, mapping of how it is that I have come to know. No amount of words can quite yet say how my sojourn in the world of geography has affected my intellectual prospectus and desires; however, such a silence remains a strange, joyful burden that, much like Sisyphus’ boulder, continues to urge me to fulfill its monumental expectations…
I find myself now in a new program, but not necessarily in new territory. Entering my twenty-third consecutive year in school, although the work has not become any easier, my sense of direction has sharpened significantly. I am not sure how the word “home” and its implications will affect the way I will conduct my research and professional development at the University of Florida, but I have already found in the Political Science department a home to embrace and (I hope) be embraced in. From my first day here, though there was little surprise in this, I found myself “caught in the middle” (see Image I below) of a broad range of philosophies, experiences, and personal values that I had been seeking out for some time. Politics is hardly a realm where one can easily link notions of philosophical pluralism, let alone friendship. I should admit at some point, however, that the phenomenologist in me is more interested in taking on these “political” assumptions rather than the discipline’s “scientific” endeavors. In all fairness, my separation of these two elements is rooted in an intellectual exercise; that is to say, an act of philosophical analysis that helps me (us?) uncover the very real circumstances from which maddening experimentation emerges and through which a scientific identity is known.
On one side, intellectually, I defined my studies through a melding of phenomenology and existential philosophy (perhaps two of the most popular and far-reaching of European systems of thought) with the migratory experiences of my life after leaving Honduras. On the other side, personally and privately, I struggled to explain to those around me how my choices were a reflection of my desire to learn and to create knowledge in communal ways, while not confessing my insecurities about myself and the work I engaged in. I basked (or at least told myself this) in the homelessness of my strange blend of identities: a migrant, a repentant communist, and a Dionysian. I began to question whether or not I belonged in the place I called my physical home, whether or not there was something more waiting for me. Exhausted and overworked, I lived my senior year with a sense of despair: not necessarily about life after school, but more about life outside of school. Graduate work seemed a default position for me, yet one that came with the angst of not knowing whether I was cut out for it. Philosophy had given me the eyes to see and the senses to feel, but I wondered whether I had the legs to swim. I let old ghosts go free and opened my mind and body to new horizons and greater challenges…
In my second incarnation, I took the pent-up energy from the desire to leave my home in Miami and directed it towards my M.A. work in International Relations. I had been had well-warned that graduate school was not an advanced version of undergraduate work, where we were not only expected to read and write at levels beyond what we were used to, but also demanded to think at levels we knew not we could. The latter of these commands spoke powerfully to my philosophical self, providing the “real-world” outlet my personal angst (and my family) felt I lacked. After stumbling through the “second-semester blues” of my first round in graduate education, I thrived in my intellectual output; I began to highly consider the doctoral route as both a personal and professional vocation. Going through a range of theoretical lenses, I questioned the socialization and authoritarianism of the academic establishment in a fashion Kant would perhaps have been proud of. I strived to look at the underside of the ideas and “facts” I had been told were true of history; I wanted to teach and be taught, no longer by my professors, but by the people I felt were the strongest participants in the world of global politics: everyday people who constructed the inter-national as a meeting of places and ideas.
A key turning point in my path rose through the opportunity to teach, both in a college and public school setting. Having successfully defended my Master’s thesis proposal, in addition to the positive feedback from my section of Intro to International Relations, I came across the opportunity to become a Philosophy Instructor at a charter middle school. Not only did I fall in love with the experience of translating my developing ideas to a young audience in need of a critical, yet empathetic interlocutor, I felt compelled to make my work clear and its implications relevant to the daily phenomena of culture, politics, and how the human condition is caught in their midst. Having to teach two types of audiences (teenage and adult), while simultaneously write a thesis on the theoretical violence of Euro-American philosophies, I was professionally invigorated. I began to embrace the professional lifestyle of conferences, workshops, and manuscript revisions, living life as a way station to a new professional identity. Ironically enough, my own identity found itself at a crossroads towards the end of that year. My time in Miami was finally running out…
In my third re-birth, the discipline of Geography became my home. Through circumstances far too numerous to outline here – a strange blend of the personal and professional choices that emerged upon finishing my M.A. – an opportunity to work as a research assistant in an NSF-funded project brought me to Florida State University. The task: studying the local and global impacts of the recent (though hardly new) escalating “scramble” for the Arctic, particularly as it related to climate change. The benefits: take a hands-on approach to the theoretical issues I had worked with for three years and be a member of a cutting-edge research team looking at issues of both political and existential importance. I had no clue where a geopolitical understanding of the Arctic would begin from, nor did I have any experience studying and working with the history of the region and how its changing geo-physicality affected its political representation. Both at the time and today, however, going to Tallahassee was an opportunity for which I am greatly indebted, and which has shaped much of what both my outlook and approach to research and scholarly life look like.
As my first experience away from home and family, I became highly mindful of my choices and the path before me. In fact, the experience made terms such as home, family, and career take on much more profound meanings than I was used to. Not only did my year at FSU allow me to learn how geography parallels many of the questions and themes rooted in philosophy and the study of global politics, but I also learned how geographical perspectives can strengthen, broaden, and localize the political problems that so much of social science is concerned with. A quick glance on the work I have taken on over the last year reveals these lessons – from thinking the space of modernity as a historical enterprise catalyzed by the geopolitical encounter with the Americas, to the ecological challenges that spaces such as the Arctic bring to the theoretical canon of International Relations – but more importantly, they uncovered my desire to transcend the bounded spaces of disciplinary territories and embrace an organic, yet critical, mapping of how it is that I have come to know. No amount of words can quite yet say how my sojourn in the world of geography has affected my intellectual prospectus and desires; however, such a silence remains a strange, joyful burden that, much like Sisyphus’ boulder, continues to urge me to fulfill its monumental expectations…
I find myself now in a new program, but not necessarily in new territory. Entering my twenty-third consecutive year in school, although the work has not become any easier, my sense of direction has sharpened significantly. I am not sure how the word “home” and its implications will affect the way I will conduct my research and professional development at the University of Florida, but I have already found in the Political Science department a home to embrace and (I hope) be embraced in. From my first day here, though there was little surprise in this, I found myself “caught in the middle” (see Image I below) of a broad range of philosophies, experiences, and personal values that I had been seeking out for some time. Politics is hardly a realm where one can easily link notions of philosophical pluralism, let alone friendship. I should admit at some point, however, that the phenomenologist in me is more interested in taking on these “political” assumptions rather than the discipline’s “scientific” endeavors. In all fairness, my separation of these two elements is rooted in an intellectual exercise; that is to say, an act of philosophical analysis that helps me (us?) uncover the very real circumstances from which maddening experimentation emerges and through which a scientific identity is known.
Image I: The Space-In-Between
It is no stretch of this narrative to conclude that my own academic experience over the years has been a particularly political (if not politicized) version of the broader contours and dynamics of graduate education in the U.S. Though there is much in this enterprise that I remain dissatisfied with, there is clearly a great deal which continues to drive me deeper into it. The house of academia – much like the house of political science, smaller manifestations of what Heidegger calls the house of Being – thrives only from what its inhabitants can bring to it, particularly when facing its ghosts: histories of violence, oppression, intolerance, and worse, indifference. I hope to face these challenges, in one shape or another, through many more incarnations. In a poetic sense, I have never stopped living my previous lives: they continue to haunt my thoughts and my work. Though I strive to be able to “sing the world” into existence through my work, I will admit that as of late words have become harder for me to come by. I remain committed and in love with expressing the multiplicity of lives that as a scholar, a thinker, and a human being I am but one manifestation of. However, knowing that the ground left to cover remains shrouded in uncertainty, I trust my time here will not only help fill my map further, but also change the way in which I view its contents with every passing day.
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