What does it mean to be a global citizen in a militarized world? What does it take for women and men to be treated with dignity and included in public life? How does the international impact on the personal, and vice versa? Think about these questions, and then ask more questions. There can't be too much curiosity about how the world works.
That was the message brought by feminist teacher, scholar, and writer Cynthia Enloe to Founders Day 2002. At this celebration of the 207th anniversary of the founding of the College, Enloe received an honorary doctor of laws degree and gave a talk titled “What Does It Mean to Be a Global Citizen in a Militarized World? Some Feminist Clues.”
Enloe, professor of government and director of women's studies at Clark University, said that over the years she's learned never to stop asking questions. “I went to Berkeley when Berkeley was Berkeley,” she said, eliciting a laugh from the audience, “and I never heard the word 'woman' in discussions of politics. And I never noticed. I began to realize that I wasn't asking enough questions.”
In her travels abroad after graduating, Enloe began thinking about industrialization and how it came about, specifically, how young women were recruited to work the textile mills. At Clark, encouraged by the curiosity of her own undergraduate students, she began learning about, and then began teaching, women's studies. This in turn reshaped her curiosity about the military: “I had never thought to ask, where are the women? Not only where, but also, why they are where they are, who put them there, and how they feel about being there. I had to become more interdisciplinary to pursue my own feminist curiosity.”
Militarization, she said, is the process by which any person, group, or culture becomes dependent for its legitimacy on its usefulness to military endeavors. “So it's possible to militarize a school, or a country, or a skill. This realization took me into a wider range of explorations: What is it about militarization that so shrinks people's capacity to be a citizen? Militarization encourages a sense of isolation, insecurity, fear-often debilitating to real citizenship. It's almost impossible to be a citizen, for example, if you're a victim of domestic violence.”
Also honored at the Founders Day convocation was high school science teacher David Magnussen, who received the Gideon Hawley Teacher Recognition Award. He was nominated by Sarah Kidder '05, a former student of his at Cohasset (Mass.) High School.
Kidder, now a biology major, said Magnussen not only encouraged her as the only tenth-grader in his anatomy and physiology class but also found creative ways of demonstrating complex topics such as taking the student on biological field trips to Belize, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.
“Not only could Mr. Magnussen easily guide students through a dissection in the laboratory,” she said, “he could also guide students on a jaguar hunt through a dense jungle in Belize. With Mr. Magnussen, wearing his tan bucket hat, pilot sunglasses, and lots of sunscreen, leading the way, I was able to experience and understand amazing cultures and exotic ecosystems of unbelievable plants and animals.”