Revo|lution weblog

Revolution is het gelukt. Ik doe mee aan het zomerprogramma van Humanity in Action in Amsterdam in juni! Ik rol echt van het een in het ander en dat is bijzonder. Wat zal er uit voortkomen?

Mijn motivatie:

“We need to think beyond the nation state” is the first sentence of the well-known essay by Arjun Appadurai Patriotism and it’s Future (1993). In my master thesis on the Dutch asylum and migration policies I have experienced why. Due to fuzzy and untameable globalization processes the significance of national borders decrease, but at the same time new borders are invented (not only physical but also in people’s minds). We appreciate the flow of goods and ideas around the globe, we welcome expats from multinationals in our countries and we dream of becoming one of those cosmopolites, who travel each day by airplane like it’s a bus trip to the nearest city centre. But we feel threatened by the coming of ‘the unwanted other’: the asylum seekers, the poor migration workers, the refugees who are hoping for a better life. The nation state tries to deal with this unwanted flow of people, by inventing labels for them and by listing criteria for who is allowed to stay and who is not. In the end, to say it blunt, we are protecting our welfare state build on beautiful principles of humanity by denying the ‘unwanted others’ the chance to be fully human. This is a pressing contradiction and there is no easy solution. All I can do is use my intelligence and creativity to learn to think beyond the nation state. Not for the sake of growth in the Gross National Product but for the growth in Gross Worldwide Fully Human Beings.

I like to pass borders, physically but even more metaphorically. I want to discover the world not only by my own map, but by the map of many other people: refugees, migrant workers, minorities… As you can see in my Curriculum Vitae, I like to explore different scientific disciplines. Not with the intention to feel comfortable and safe high above the world in a ivory tower, but to develop broad academic capabilities to use outside the academy, for persons caught up in, or scared about, the untameable flows of globalization. I want to combine my intelligence with an pragmatic action perspective. The summer programme of Humanity in Action would be a wonderful opportunity to help me develop this aspiration.

Dit bericht is gepost op 10 maart 2010 om 10:09 uur. Je kunt alle reacties op dit bericht volgen via de RSS 2.0 feed. Je kunt ook een reactie achter laten.