Reflection for Class

The one thing that I realized during our final weeks is that everyone is going to relate to IR everyone differently. At the beginning of this course I thought everyone saw the theories as the same, more or less. While they might subscribe to realism or liberalism or constructivism, they saw each other's differing theories similarly. And through the first half of our class this perception didn't change.

But when we started doing the projects, everything started to change. It matters where people come from, how they were raised. Almost our entire terrorism group was from New York City or its suburbs, an unusually high number for the class (or so I assume). The feminism group only had two guys, which is not representative or our entire class. Everyone is going to be draw to the issues that they have grown up hearing about. Those from North Dakota aren't likely to want to research deeply into terrorism because they just don't have any incentive, just as not all guys are going to want to study how gender roles relate to IR, or atheists in the religion group, etc. So while the projects weren't theories or maybe not even fringe theories, they help shape what theories the rest of us subscribe to, and how we see the other theories as well.