My name is Elisha Wisdom. I am an International Affairs major most recently from Orlando, Florida. I was born in the U.S. but have roots in Indonesia, and moved back to the States in 2019. I am going to be an Honors Colloquium Leader for Summer B in Tallahassee, and I will also be working with teens at a conference in Indonesia. Additionally, I am visiting the UN offices in New York with my dad. These all seem very unrelated, but they actually have crossover because of the identities of the people I will be in community with. In Tallahassee, I will have a small class of 15 students that I will be “mentoring” and helping adjust to college life. In Indonesia, I will be working with teens and children who are growing up overseas but are largely from the United States and Europe while their parents attend sessions. At the UN offices, I will sit in on sessions but mainly hope to interview the children of UN workers or others who are visiting the conference.
My community-based interest is to understand those with multicultural identities (or hybrid cultural identities, or culturally blended identities. I have not picked my phrase yet). Some examples of people groups I will be interviewing are second-generation immigrants, “expats”, refugees, biracial or ethnically blended individuals, and so on. Throughout the summer, I will be interviewing people with different transnational and intercultural identities to get a better understanding of how they experience their identity, and how they process being “half” of something. I mainly am interested in the shared common experiences that multicultural people have, and what makes their experiences different depending on their background and positionality. I will gain access to these interviews by reaching out personally to specific contacts and scheduling the interviews. While in Tallahassee, I will especially focus on people from the CGE and in getting referrals for interviews from others.
I am expecting the experience to be logistically challenging. I will need to coordinate a lot of in-person and virtual meetings. I will also need to anonymize and record the interviews and track the data of the different groups I will be meeting with. I think the experience will be very edifying and I will learn a lot about other people, but it may be emotionally exhausting too. Hearing a lot of stories and hard things about people’s identity could be very draining, and I want to be conscious of that before stepping into this summer.
I am not sure how many interviews and conversations I am going to conduct! I also am not sure still about some of the language I want to use for my capstone project, and how to communicate the value of this research to others. I feel hesitant to over-schedule interviews, because I don’t want to become jaded or cynical and I want to give each person enough attention and help them make their voice feel heard.
This photo of me is outdated because I shaved my head on Saturday! But here is my nice headshot 🙂
HSF House Blogs 