One of the reasons why I applied to Bates was because of the emphasis that the college lays on the ‘abolitionist’ part of their presentation to the world. Coming from Mauritius, a country in which slavery is still fairly recent in the minds of its people, I greatly appreciated the idea of coming to an institution which, I thought, holds dear the same values as I do – those being acknowledging the traumas and sequels of slavery and actively working to dismantle its sequels in modern day society. It was quite disconcerting this week to learn about the history of Bates in regard to its foundation. Learning about Cheney and Bates’ relationship with the creation of the college was a component of the class that I greatly enjoyed learning about as it helps me recalibrate my understanding of Bates, Lewiston, and the US, more broadly.
Reading Emma Soler’s thesis chapter was very much a cathartic experience since I noticed that she bases herself off the same questions and intellectual quests as I did as a first year student but which soon vanished as I moved up the ladders of my academic career at Bates. I am grateful to be confronted with all these questions again as they had never been resolved. This week, I learned that life has its ways of answering questions you had and that those answers can and will come to you when it is time. After going through last year’s events which uncovered racial disparities in the US and after learning more about my ancestry to find out that 5 generations ago, my ancestors were slaves, I can say that I am grateful for learning about how to use data analysis to generate and establish a more truthful version of history and of reality.
This week, we learned how to read about historical articles. While I already knew some of the techniques suggested by McDaniel, I enjoyed learning about the reasoning behind the methodology he suggested. I enjoyed the idea that reading should become an active process – an invitation to engage with the author and their ideas. Most of the time, reading can be perceived as a passive process, but really indulging in what is written, in the ideas and the arguments presented to us, is one way to create atemporal intellectual discourse with people who lived before us.
This week, I also encountered the programming language R for the first time. I learned how to get used to the Notebook environment and with some of the features of R. More concretely, I learned to assign variables and to perform some basic operations. I am curious to see what we will be using the language for and how we are going to apply our critical thinking on the findings we are about to make. Finally, I learned that the information we are presented with is not always representative of the reality it aims at describing. In the context of this class, I learned that working with data can help us control narratives.
