Reflection Week #8

Over the past week and a half, I've been able to incorporate my interdisciplinary sense of learning into the classes I'm taking now. For a little backstory, the program I was a part of in high school emphasized interdisciplinary learning, that is, what I was learning in one class would relate to something I was learning in another class and so it would continue. I thought I would be losing that aspect of learning once I came to college, but clearly I was wrong.

The first time I really started to make this link in college was between World Politics and my Poverty and Culture class, where I started to make connections between constructivism and this concept of the "conventional wisdom." John Galbraith, who was an economist, proposed this idea of the "conventional wisdom" in his book The Affluent Society, which commented on the extreme wealth inequality in the US in the mid-1900s. The conventional wisdom is this concept that refers to "ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability" and equates familiarity with acceptability. It's basically the idea that ideas are in place for a while and so people become familiar with them and so then they are accepted, and I thought this was similar with the importance of norms in constructivism. Since I had found myself struggling with the concept of constructivism, it was interesting for me to be able to make those links between two fairly different classes.

Another link I made was between World Politics and things we talked about at the Model G20 summit. Reading Du Bois' and Enloe's pieces made me think about the hierarchy of global power and influence, which is something we talked a lot about during the Head of Delegation sessions. The G20 is acutely aware that it is not a truly representative force and lacks representation from the Global South, and so we discussed how to address this issue a fair amount. I thought it was very interesting to think about multilateralism in this way, especially because I've always thought of multilateralism as a given in this time of globalization.

I'm excited to make connections between more of my classes in the future and I can't wait to continue to grow my love of interdisciplinary learning!