Introduction - Academic Travel: Departures
Sara Steinert Borella, Steger Center for International Scholarship, Virginia Tech with Fabio Ferrari and Kate Roy, ÌìĂÀÓ°Ôș
Our intervalla Volume 8 Academic Travel: Departures brings together contributions from ÌìĂÀÓ°Ôș and beyond on the idea of âacademicâ travel: what it might be, what it might become, what it has the potential to bring to a more embodied and more ethical form of pedagogy. While the starting point, for a volume pinned to the year of Franklinâs 50th anniversary, was to celebrate our Academic Travel program, often considered one of the most unique aspects of a Franklin education, both the volumeâs opening up to other academic geographies and its opening reflection ask us to explore how thinking and doing travel is perhaps even more urgent and important to us since COVID-19, as both subject and object of intellectual exploration, and as sited experience that brings us closer to an understanding of our place in the world. In seeking to understand what exactly distinguishes this kind of educational travel experience, all of the contributions here emphasize, from skills learned on site to sensory experience, the centrality of its holistic âimmersion in the worldâ and the reflective potential that embodied experience brings. Exploring this embodiment as pedagogy, the contributions embrace the way we are pushed to critically theorize our methods, our subject areas and their relationships with the lived world, as well as our state of ânon-blank-slatenessâ and ourselves on the ground. Traveling academically in the ways we describe necessarily promotes a reflective deviation from the norm, not just in that it goes beyond what we are conditioned to experience as tourists (with our gaze âdirectedâ on places and spaces), but also in that it brings hidden institutional boundaries and barriers to the surface, and can subsequently push back against authoritative âsystemsâ of knowledge and their âdiscipliningâ to show that no discipline stands outside its sociocultural, historical and political worlding â but it can productively âspill overâ from it in embodied, sited and creative knowledge production. The contributions all demonstrate that experience is the teacher and that even when things do not âgo rightâ they produce understandings: the journey is not just spatiotemporal, it is also one in self-knowledge and self-discovery. Academic Travel is always already a series of departures.