|
|
I chose Macalester because I was interested
in fighting social injustice
through development, and Macalester,
with its urban setting, offered the opportunity
for serious engagement with
communities beyond the college.
Taking Development Politics with
Professor David Blaney forced me
to tussle with the mixed history of
development. I was shocked to learn
that “development” started not as a
social justice project, but with the
aim of poverty alleviation linked to
institutions such as the World Bank
and USAID. That certainly was not
my idea of development; the class left
me creatively confused and sparked an
interest in how we think about development and poverty.
Every opportunity
built upon the last
experience.
—Trudy Rebert
The next summer, Professor
Blaney and I wrote a case study to
be used in a class the following spring
to look at ways of defining poverty
and to develop quantitative thinking
skills. While I wrestled with theories
in the classroom and through research,
Macalester’s extracurricular circles
allowed me to hold my questions up to
practice. I worked with organizations
addressing campaign reform, fair trade
and with Minnesota Public Interest
Research Group (MPIRG) on women’s
rights. First as a volunteer, and
then through Macalester’s program
that pairs work-study students with
local nonprofits, I worked at Youth-
CARE, a youth-focused nonprofit in
Minneapolis, in their young women’s
program and developing new research
for their grants.
Last spring I was able to study abroad
in India to re-question international
development, community organizing
and theory. I lived with a host family
and attended classes in Jaipur, where
I learned to cross the road between
camel-drawn carts, cycle rickshaws,
cars, buses and the occasional elephant.
I also interned with an NGO (nongovernmental
organization) that developed
women’s self-help groups and
organized in rural areas around health
and poverty issues and female feticide.
Moving through different socioeconomic,
caste and religious groups as a
foreigner and exploring development
in the Indian context equipped me
with a new comparative perspective.
In the future, I hope to work in development,
both at the grassroots and
at the transnational policy levels to
help redefine development, not only as
something done in faraway nations but
also as a process that requires economic,
political and cultural changes in the
U.S. and other core nations. As I have
built on my classroom knowledge, my
research and first-hand experience,
Macalester has enabled me to critically
engage ideas about development in the
classroom, test them and develop new
ones through work in the real world.
|
