Q&A: Maple Razsa, International Studies

Hannah DeAngelis ’12 talks with professor Maple Razsa about activism, film, and human rights.

You’re a professor of international studies and anthropology. Can Colby, in Waterville, Maine, call itself an international school?

Given [the] geographic factors, a lot of international stuff has to be on campus. I’ve been pleasantly surprised that there are a lot more international students than I would expect at a school like this. I don’t think there are any classes I teach that don’t have an international student. Especially teaching on the kind of issues that I teach on, to have other cultural experiences that you can draw on in the classroom is huge, and I find it really useful.

You have been deeply involved in political activism in other places. What part of that work did you bring to Colby?

I’ve been teaching a lot about the issues like migrant rights and labor issues now, which I haven’t done in the past, so I find that I’m bringing that experience with activism and using it in my classroom. And I’m trying to do it with some of the guests I’m bringing to campus like the Yes Men and filmmaker Alex Rivera, who’s coming in the spring. I’ve just come back from three weeks in Slovenia. I was meeting with activists there and doing research. And I’ve been working over the past two or three years finishing up my new film, Bastards of Utopia, that’s about activism.

And Bastards of Utopia isn’t your first documentary. How did you choose film as your medium?

A couple of reasons. Initially I think I was just seduced by the technology. … I was assigned a five-minute video that ended up turning in to something much larger—on a student group that was planning to occupy the president’s office. It [became] a feature length documentary with Ben Affleck narrating and this huge production that took me away from my studies as a graduate student at Harvard for six months touring with the film.

Wow. That’s pretty big.

Part of it was a matter of circumstances with that. But then I began to really reflect on some of the things I was able to do and able to represent in film that I really couldn’t in text. One of the things I like is just how accessible film is. So many more people can watch what you’ve put into film, and so many more people just feel that they can critique what you’ve done in film. It isn’t sort of isolated from public discussion the way that scholarly texts are.

Do students use film in the classes that you teach?

I teach Media, Culture, and the Political Imagination, a senior seminar. It’s not primarily a production class, but I have students do a couple of exercises. I find that [when] students have to film a process or do a portrait of an individual, they subsequently have an eye for watching … that they didn’t have before. I think it’s crucial to actually work with the media a little bit in order to get students really thinking in a different way.

What is your favorite subject to teach?

I now have a pretty consistent group of classes, and I really enjoy them because they’re very diverse. I teach on human rights, social movements, nationalism, and documentary film, and well as intro to anthropology. That seems very disparate but really sews together the interests that come together in my primary research and in the kind of fieldwork that I’ve been doing.
You teach a Jan Plan class working with the Oak fellowship program, which brings a front-line human rights activist to Colby for a semester.

This class right now is called Human Rights and Social Struggles in Global Perspective and it’s IN211. I’ve taught it as a Jan Plan the last few years because the timing allows us to look at the new candidates for the Oak fellowship, which is really great. First there’s an introduction to human rights, and the second half is a chance for students to really get their hands dirty doing research and understanding the issues in each country. It’s really fun. We look at the top cut of the candidates, and then students look at the organizations they work for and do research and build a research file.

The Oak fellowship is one of the neatest things that happens at Colby. It’s really remarkable to bring a front-line human rights activist to campus and have those really direct interactions with students. That’s pretty incredible.

Is the Oak fellowship program unique to Colby?

I haven’t seen it anywhere else. And the emphasis is on a front-line human rights activist rather than someone who is an administrator or who is now primarily working on the international level. It has to be people who are really directly engaged in these issues and at some personal risk to themselves.

You have studied and worked all over the place. How did you choose Eastern Europe and then Waterville, Maine?

I grew up in Maine and [as a child] had sort of planned, and been saving money from my paper route for a long time, to be an exchange student somewhere. I wasn’t really sure where I would go, and the year I was a junior in high school an exchange student from Yugoslavia was staying in Bath [Maine]. … He talked me into coming to Yugoslavia as an exchange student. I didn’t really know what I was getting into—I learned my first phrases on the plane from Frankfurt to Belgrade. Then the country fell apart that year while I was there. So a lot of my work since then has been trying to make sense of what happened in that year and what the right kind of response should be to that kind of crisis—from both scholars as well as people living there. I’ve just gone back there over and over. It became my obsession.

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