Introduction

Hey y'all!

This is the blog where I will be chronicling my year as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow.  At the end of March, I was lucky enough to be chosen as a Watson Fellow after being named an alternate.  The Watson Fellowship funds a year of travel for recent graduates to explore a personal passion. The tab at the top of the blog navigates to the Watson website, where there is more infomration on the fellowship and each of the 40 fellows for 2013-2014.   Over the next year, I'll be traveling to Warsaw, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Delhi, and Toronto (with a few shorter stops along the way), working on my project, "Out of the Closets, Into the Streets: Exploring Queer Identity through Pride Parades an Community Organizations." The project focuses on queer identity and the importance of public and private demonstrations of community for queer individuals across the globe in a number of different social and political situations.

As a queer person, I have found that Pride parades and queer community have been essential to working through my own questions and fighting against a lot of the negative experiences and fears that often come with being queer. Over the next year, I hope to investigate what it means for me to claim an identity that reaches across nationality, race, class, and religion and to see how both visible demonstrations such as Pride and more private community sites impact queer people across the world. I couldn't be more excited to be able to spend a year doing something that means so much to me personally and provides an opportunity to expand my understanding of myself and the world.

It is the coolest, if also the scariest, opportunity that I've ever had.  I am so grateful to the professors, friends, and family members who encouraged me to apply and helped throughout the process.  Thanks to all of y'all for everything, from enduring all of the fairly frantic emails and visits, to writing edits and recommendations, to, later, putting up with a shocking number of discussions of what kind and how much footwear to bring.

I'm hoping to blog once a week.  We'll see how that goes, depending on what is happening and how much internet access there is throughout traveling.  Please feel free to get in touch with any questions or just to say hello.  Thanks for reading!