Casey Love

"About seven years ago I became the Director of the Altman Program in International Studies and Business. It's a dual degree program where students get a full degree in business and a full degree in liberal arts with a focus on international studies. We take our rising sophomores to a developing country for a month after their freshman year and most recently we've taken about twenty students every May and June to Vietnam. The Center for Global Education (CGE) is really attuned to the need to try to cultivate cultural competence in the students who study abroad, and learning how to avoid very basic cultural taboos. I remember one taboo in Vietnam is that in this village we go to, you're not supposed to touch children on their heads because they think that that steals their spirit. And I remember the first year I went there, the first thing I did when I saw this cute child was tap him on his head –and he looked at me with this horror in his eyes and it was clear that I had made a pretty severe cultural misstep. So I do think it's important for travelers to educate themselves about cultural norms before they go into a different community, and then practice those norms and be respectful of them. Americans abroad have a tendency just to barge through with their privilege, with their American passports, and act very American with complete disregard for local customs. Now we've shifted how we approach the experience, to talk of it more as an exchange and not 'white men and women going in and fixing a problem for a community that (in theory) could not help themselves.' Instead, we're there to learn from the community. So we've sort of flipped the power dynamic.”

Sarah Mellman

“My topic for my Masters at Tulane was indigenous language education, and [for my PhD] I'm currently looking into how I can expand that into cultural rights related to land rights of this community in Brazil, called Ka'apor. I'm researching language education as a form of cultural resistance to hegemonic linguistic practices. [In Ka'apor] they speak the language that is the same name as their community: Ka'apor. It's only spoken by 2,000 members of their community and everyone still speaks it in the home and in the community in their demarcated territory. I'm so fascinated by how that is all changing now. They recently introduced internet and that sort of connection, so I see this as a way for me to learn more, educationally, and then also to look into education as a way to encourage autonomy among groups that have been oppressed historically. And so that's my nerd angle. Of course it's all complicated by the fact that I am a white foreigner going in to do the work, right? But I really embrace that challenge of  'Okay, relations with indigenous groups and researchers have not been even and equal in the past, and for the past 20 years or so, researchers have been trying to make it more equal. I want to go out there and do the work.' I'm going to mess up and make mistakes, but the learning experience and what that could bring to the field could be really interesting and hopefully change some paradigms and dynamics.”

“I was stressed for many years thinking like I'm supposed to get a 'real job.' I should move to D.C. and work in international development or some job where the lifestyle is to go to an office and to have meetings and abstractly try to figure out the answers to on-the-ground issues. Coming from an upper middle class background, there's the pressure to do something prestigious, to do something that pays well, to do something 'big' or important, you know? But determining what to do with those pressures and how to combine lifestyle with the impact one wants to have in the world, it's important to understand that there are many different ways of getting there. You can try something and then be inspired by what you're doing in that moment and see how that takes you to another thing. The way I'm living my life is that I live very fully in the moment and then I decide where I'm moving next based on the present experience. And so I can trace this linear thread of where my interests piqued and then where I went with that. I studied abroad in Brazil in college. After that, it was 'How can Icome back to live in Brazil?' So with that in mind I went to Brazil to teach English after undergrad, which I did as a side job to like make a connection to my interest of working with international people while making money. We were at the small university in the Amazon, and I really was interested in exploring intellectually, 'What are people doing? How do people see things?' Through a researcher there, a linguist there, I got connected to this indigenous group in Brazil called Ka'apor. I maintained connections with them. And the only American researcher who has ever worked with them is a anthropologist at Tulane... So here I am.”