Last week of classes

Today was my last Human Security class. Even though I had a hard time keeping up with the workload and contributing to the class discussions, I'm really happy that I took the course. It was was very enlightening, both about Human Security and the International community in general.

Our prof did his best to instill a sense of responsibility and humility in us, warning us that we need to be careful, because our decisions don't affect us - someone in some developing country pays for our errors. I feel like that was the most important thing I've learned all term. Heck, that's probably the most important thing I've learned since I've started school in general. It's easy to think about what *I* want to do, or how *I'll* decide to do things... But I've never truly considered the potential ramifications of my decisions beyond, "Oh, I might get in shit and get fired."

There was some amusement in our final class though. There were three final student presentations. When our prof was making the presentation topics, he randomly chose issues he knew about, and other ones he didn't know about. Well, today one girl had to do a presentation about a topic the prof wasn't aware of.

Her topic was about gangs recruiting children in India. She presented the different ideas of gangs, recruitment methods in general, etc... And then she had a slide in the middle of her presentation entitled, "Understanding Gaps in Human Security Research (Or: My Very Bad Day at The Library)." While trying to research gang recruitment in the Indian context, she could not find any resources on children in Indian gangs. She ended up talking to the prof and they changed her topic to be about why there's a dearth of information on the topic. She had three hypotheses and the first one listed was, "Hypothesis #1: I am not very good at researching." We all laughed and laughed. Her other hypotheses were interesting too, and the class discussion was also fascinating as we tried to figure out why there could be no information, or how we could look for the information in other ways.

This lack of information on gang recruitment of children in India is one of the things our prof was trying to warn us about. As he told us today, if there truly is no information available on this topic, it means that all other generalizations in the world on gang recruitment of children are made moot - India is the second most populous country in the world, so lacking information on this country means that we don't have all the necessary information to make a well-rounded hypothesis... I don't know if this makes sense to you, but to me, it was a pretty amazing concept.