Category: December 5 (Page 2 of 3)

The phrase “the end of the beginning” is thrown a lot these days as kind of a pseudo-spiritual allusion to there being more to come. But if you think about, this is, literally speaking, the point at which we find ourselves. The end of the series of lectures on origins. Using fancy linguistic algebra (which is an actual thing–I read an article on it, though I’m not using it in accordance with the way it was designed), we can determine that the end of the origins series is, in a way, the “end of the beginning.” And we ended the beginning with a small conference celebrating varying research projects, from the sociological precedent for Bitcoin to the anthropological origins of a group of Kenyan ethnic groups. But why did we end the semester this way?

I could’ve answered this question by sending any number of people involved in the Center for the Arts and Humanities a quick email. But philosophically musing for a page or two is a lot more fun.

To me, the significance of ending a semester spent investigating origins with a celebration of research is fairly complex. I like to try and distill it down to thinking about presenting research as an outcome of having evaluated origins in the abstract sense, not just in the literal sense. Think about it in this way: If you have a research question (just drawing from the plethora of questions presented at the celebration, an example might be “are there any historical social precedents for the behavior we observe surrounding Bitcoin?”), then it’s a popular thing to do to try and get to the heart of the question. My high school teachers pounded this idea into me like a nail into a two-by-four.

So researchers will try to get to the heart of their question. Any decently written peer-reviewed journal article will discuss the implications of this question, it will it will discuss opportunities for further research germane to the question, and it will, most importantly, discuss the origins of the question. In this way, we can empirically observe how our academic society has heralded the origin of a question–the notion of understanding from whence the topic area came, how it has been historically influenced by changing zeitgeists, et cetera–as a modus operandi for ascertaining a proper understanding of the research to come. So it’s totally fitting that we ended our investigation into origins with a celebration of the logical conclusions of origins: Research.

Let me try and phrase it differently. An alternative way of understanding something never hurt anybody. Think about the “onion” model that Professor van der Meer discussed with us. The onion itself represents the research question at hand. There are billions of onions in the world, just like there are uncountably many feasible research questions. So once you’ve picked an onion, you have to start peeling away layers. These might be layers of colonialism, layers of record-keeping, or any other barrier to proper understandings. But once you peel them away, you’ve made it to the center: To the origin.

Professor Fleming purposefully kept the research prompt vague so that students had the power to explore whatever interested them. From the initial proposals to the final presentations, it was obvious that students were taking what they learned in the course and applying it to their passions. On the last day of class, we jokingly talked about Colby’s Dare Northward campaign, and we related it to the presentations. To take it a step future, I’m going to include the discussions I had with the students who viewed my poster about how the campaign will affect the topic of my research.  Continue reading

Last Tuesday marked our last meeting of the Origins seminars, but rather than having just one presenter, we heard a little bit about many origin stories selected by the Seminar Class (232). Throughout this semester, I have continued to be surprised by the variety of origins our presenters discussed, and these presentations demonstrated the theme’s far reach historically and globally:   from the origins of journalism, to the origins evil, the origins of the use of “trans,” the origins of refugees in Lewiston Maine, and many others. Not only have I learned that the theme of origins has a much greater scale than I understood at the beginning of the semester, but there is a clear, greater value in considering the origin of something. An origin, regardless of whether its a historical event or a more personal matter, tells the story of a fairly intricate process that requires an assortment of factors to fall perfectly in place. With the alignment of these pieces, it then creates a significant, sometimes universal and sometimes personal, impact that then continues on throughout history.

Continue reading

Haley Andonian

December 5, 2017

End of Semester Celebration of Research for the Origins Seminar

The end of semester celebration of research poster session was a very nice end to the semester of origin themed seminars.   The diversity of topics made me realize how broad of a theme “origins” is and how many fascinating topics fall under the theme or can be viewed through the lens of the theme. The poster that most interested me was the one on the origins of evil.  Usually, when we consider origins, we think of the origins of people or technologies or cultures, but rarely do we consider the origins of concepts as widespread and deep-seeded as evil.

This poster included descriptions of a couple of experiments or cases which revealed the essence of evil in all people.  For example, the Milgrim experiment revealed that most people do not hesitate to respond to instructions or authority even when these instructions include harming other human beings.  This ability to and tendency for people to inflict serious harm on other people without hesitation is surely a form of evil.

Another experiment that the poster highlighted was the Stanford Prison Experiment.  In a similar way to the way the Milgrim experiment was conducted and the results it produced, the Stanford Prison Experiment revealed that people often obey authority or instruction even if it means harming another human.  Further, this experiment revealed the evil associated with people in power.  The subjects assigned the role of guard valued their authority and control more so than the wellbeing of other people.

The conclusion of these experiments and of this poster was that all people have some evil in them.  Evil is an innate quality that is present in all people and can be expressed in many forms, including greed, physical harm, and deceit.  Whereas we like to think the best of the human race and assume that most people are good and that evil is only something that takes over certain people, this poster argues that evil is not a foreign quality but rather something in us all.

I thought that the way this poster made readers think about origins in a complex and unique way was particularly interesting.  The poster really made me think about the presence of evil in society and within us all and, more broadly, about the origins of our actions and the qualities that tie us all together as humans.   I thought that the experiments and historical data presented did a great job of highlighting actual evidence pointing towards the evil within all people, and it was very cool to see how something as intangible as evil could actually be tested in experimental studies.

Overall, the final celebration of everyone’s research into origins this semester was a great event in which we were able to appreciate the breadth of the concept of origins and how origins can be applied to a variety of different topics.  The event worked very well as a final appreciation for and understanding of the humanities theme and I was happy to have been a part of this experience.