Discovering culture and politics:
Dispatches from Paris
Dispatch 1
June 13, 2007
The famous Jardin du Luxembourg is only a block away from my apartment.Credit Sarah Weaver
Hey, I'm here! I think to myself, peering out the window of Air France Flight 365 from Philadelphia to Paris. Hundreds of feet below, the City of Light sprawls out in miniature like one of those dioramas in a museum: I spot the Louvre, Sacré Coeur perched up on Montmartre, and even a tiny Eiffel Tower. The Seine is a thin, glinting silver ribbon in the morning light. As the plane veers north towards Charles de Gaulle Airport and Paris disappears behind us, I extract myself from two scratchy blankets and fumble underneath the seat in front of me to find my shoes. Although my twelve-hour, sleepless trip is finally drawing to a close, the real adventure has yet to begin.
So how does a 19-year-old junior-to-be end up in Paris for the summer, anyway? Thanks to the support of an Undergraduate Summer Discovery Grant, the Schreyer Honors College, and the College of the Liberal Arts, I'm here to get a jump start on research for my senior thesis. My goal is to examine the shift from a cultural to a political agenda in the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (an agency that unites all the French-speaking countries in the world) as reflected in the press. When Dr. Thomas Hale, head of the Department of French and Francophone Studies, agreed to supervise my project, he told me that the French National Library and the Pompidou Center Library both had great archives of the papers and magazines I needed, such as Le Monde, Le Figaro, Jeune Afrique, and even a satirical journal called Le Canard Enchainé ("The Chained Duck"??). So here I am, jet-lagged and ready to go!
