{"id":24048,"date":"2024-04-19T12:54:23","date_gmt":"2024-04-19T16:54:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/?p=24048"},"modified":"2024-07-03T19:49:10","modified_gmt":"2024-07-03T23:49:10","slug":"krenare-recaj-reflects-on-phd-training-in-active-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/2024\/krenare-recaj-reflects-on-phd-training-in-active-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Krenare Recaj Reflects on PhD Training in “Active History”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\"Krenare<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Krenare Recaj<\/a>, PhD Candidate, has written an article for Active History<\/em> reflecting on her PhD training. An excerpt is included below with the full article, “Sadness, and sacrifice: A reflection on PhD training, comprehensive exams, and the discipline of history<\/a>,” available online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the third year of my undergrad, I was sitting beside my friend Jeremy in a lecture for the class America: Slavery to Civil War. The professor was going into explicit detail \u2013 showing photos and drawings \u2013 of the torture enslaved people in America were subjected to. The logic was that these details were necessary to properly appreciate the gravity of the suffering. Sitting in the same place I sat no matter the class \u2013 last row, closest to the exit \u2013 I could see the laptop screens in front of me. Twitter. Facebook. Instagram. Online Shopping. Suddenly the professor\u2019s alarm went off. He stopped mid gruesome detail, and told us it was time for the 20 minute break. I sat in the hallway with Jeremy and tried to hide my tears. I couldn\u2019t reconcile the fact that while listening to the darkest depths of human suffering, the worst moments of real human lives, I too was scrolling Twitter. What does that say about our attention spans, I wondered? But more importantly, what does that say about our humanity? Jeremy is both kind and disciplined. He was one of a small handful of students in the entire class that was not scrolling the internet that day. He told me that I was being too hard on myself, and that maybe scrolling is how students coped with the heaviness of the class content. I told him that when I was in high school, I painted the words \u201capathy is the enemy\u201d on my walls. I felt the weight of those words in that moment and promised both Jeremy and myself that I would never treat human suffering as dismissively as I had that day. After the break, I sat back down in the lecture hall, ready to take more notes on human suffering. My hand twitched. I kept nearly opening another tab.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Had callousness become a reflex?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wish I could say that I haven\u2019t opened Twitter in class since that day. But I can\u2019t. However, that day has never left me. I have since spent a lot of time wondering what it means to be a historian. Not what it means for humanity, but what it means for the soul. I have tried to be intentional about how I study history and how I process the trauma experienced by others. I have tried to remind myself that human suffering is still suffering, whether it happened a millennium ago, a century ago, a decade ago, or yesterday. I have tried, and failed, but really really tried to center dignity even if it often feels like I am making a career out of the suffering of others. I work on histories of displacement involving the Kosovar Albanian diaspora, a history that I am bound up with. As I embarked on graduate studies I was determined not to sacrifice my humanity for a career\u2026 or that\u2019s what I told myself at least.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Krenare Recaj, PhD Candidate, has written an article for Active History reflecting on her PhD training. An excerpt is included below with the full article, “Sadness, and sacrifice: A reflection on PhD training, comprehensive exams, and the discipline of history,” available online. In the third year of my undergrad, I was sitting beside my friend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[146,43,1,105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-graduate-student-projects","category-history","category-news","category-publications"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":"news-1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24048"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24049,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24048\/revisions\/24049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}