Independent Concentrations - Student Voices
Bathsheba Demuth, "Trauma Studies: Ethics and Practice," Honors ’06
Before coming to Brown, I spent two years living in Old Crow, an isolated Native American community in the Canadian Arctic. I was apprenticed to a local family, whom I assisted with all parts of life above the Arctic Circle – hunting, fishing, training sled dogs, and gathering wood during the long winters. I went to Old Crow to find a world more adventuresome than my home in Iowa – and in the Yukon there was no dearth of adventure, both triumphant and tragic. I saw people living on the rough edges of poverty, in conditions that were humbling and that forced me to reconsider my approach to education, communication, and the fraught and fulfilling possibilities of working across cultures.
When I came to Brown, I had difficulty making this experience fit into a defined field of study. I tried public health, comparative literature, history, and international relations – all of which touched on aspects of my experience in the Arctic. But none fit perfectly. I wanted to explore how ethics, history, and anthropology can be used to find solutions to social and structural problems. Designing my own concentration allowed me to connect my life outside Brown with a discipline that incorporates the multiple departments and points of view necessary – in my mind – to study the rich history and modernity of cultures different from my own.
Shoshana Lavinghouse, "The Development of Science," Honors ’06
I chose to complete an independent concentration because, like so many other ICers, the course of study I wanted to pursue was possible at Brown but not established. In my case, I wanted to pursue how modern science developed in Europe. Brown had the classes for my endeavor, but no concentration program. My educational experience has thus been far more nomadic than my friends', involving classes in history, english, philosophy, biology, and classics. When people want to know what department I'm in, I find myself telling them I answer to a building-less bureaucratic body, or I give them my advisor's department. For all my peregrinations, I feel the IC program has allowed me to better understand my course of study. Answering questions from friends and acquaintances about my work and composing my thesis have deepened my understanding of what I want to get from my topic and the associated content.