We conclude this course of Peace Lab with our final blogpost of the semester. For me, this is my final assignment of my AUC career. I promise that throughout this I will try to not be too emotional about the writing and try to reflect as honestly as I can on both the course and my final project.
To begin with the course: I have never had a course quite like this. Of course, it has been praised several times throughout my university career, but what makes it unique is not the hype. It is the fact that you engage with real people, you learn about a country and wars so close to home, and we get to dive into how reconciliation occurs from a bottom-up and top-down level. This class comes with a lot of privileges and amazing opportunities: like meeting the Prime Minister of Kosovo and getting all these amazing internship opportunities that can open doors for us--something that all of us, despite our backgrounds, can take advantage of and truly appreciate.
Our class only just finished, so I still have a lot to digest and understand, but I feel like what I have witnessed might have changed me more than just partaking in an interesting class. What I know now, and what I truly appreciate is that this class has put me into contact with some incredible people, who I hope to befriend for the years to come. Of course, visa liberalisation is a real issue, but I hope to visit them in Kosovo and solidify the friendships I’ve made. I want to make sure that it is not just an academic relationship that we have, but that it truly is more personal than that.
It is interesting to witness how the different forms of contacting people impact how others perceive your interests. With all individuals I contacted I had a slightly different tactic. Some seemed to be more formal, while with others I took a more colloquial approach. What I soon noticed is that this strange dynamic began, which I disliked, when I contacted them formally. I felt more disconnected and it all felt like more of an academic project rather than a situation where we were having a conversation and understanding people better.
Something that did stand out from the very beginning is that everyone was welcoming and open to the possibility of an interview. They all wanted to help, in one way or the other, and although others might have been a bit skeptical of their motives, they approached us with an open mind; we hope that we have done the same. During our project, I was the primary point of contact with all our participants. I reached out to everyone, tried to organize a proper time and place, and made sure they were all aware of what our project entailed and what we aimed to do. I cannot express enough how kind and helpful everyone was during our project. From the moment I contacted them to when we finished the interviews, everyone wanted us to succeed.
It was interesting, though, how, although they wanted to help as much as they could, many were concerned about the end product and whether it was published or not. Of course, as you might witness from the blog posts, our product is not yet published because we don’t have everyone’s consent yet, but we tried to communicate with them as clearly as possible about all we aimed to do.
It has been an interesting thing to witness, how some individuals are very careful about how their words are portrayed. What surprised me is that there might be real consequences to anything that might be taken out of context for our participants. This is something I only realised during and after the interviews and it made sure we took extra care to not take any words out of context. We tried to portray all participants as honestly as possible.
I want to draw a comparison to myself, where I have never feared being misrepresented in the public eye. I have never been too concerned about what I put out online, or what I put out as a public statement. Where I live, activism is promoted, and encouraged. I cannot imagine a place where my activism allows me to be targeted and discredited. All everyone ever wants is a better place for themselves and for the future generations, and often that is achieved through activism on issues that must be solved. I feel honoured to have witnessed these people’s stories and for them to have chosen me as someone to be trusted in representing their words in the right context.
I thank everyone who participated in this project for their kindness, their selflessness, and their strong-hearted spirit for sharing the stories they did--some which might have been hard to tell, and others that might have been too personal. I want to thank each and every individual for allowing us to better understand Kosovo through their eyes and through their thoughts. It is through the power of the youth that I have better understood people, and I hope that the power of youthening continues to bring people together, even against all odds.
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