I would like to first offer my sincerest thanks to the Arts Undergraduate Improvement Fund Internship Award (AUIF) for making this internship possible. With your generous support, students like me are enabled to pursue enriching internship opportunities in Qu茅bec and abroad. For my part, I am an Honours Political Science student entering my final year of studies. I focus primarily on politics of nationalism and political pedagogy, with a budding research interest in 鈥榓lternative鈥� political organization and pedagogy. I chose to apply for an internship with 脡duconnexion because I felt that their mission and prior work aligned with many of my academic and personal commitments. Particularly, their commitment to political education centered on decolonial paradigms seemed to me an effective pathway to realizing political change in and with community organizations and actors.
Perhaps most importantly, I felt that 脡duconnexion was an organization working to move past the politics and praxis of 鈥榬ecognition鈥� or 鈥榤ulticulturalism鈥�. In my experience these ideas and their implementation into discourse and policy serve to undermine many of the social initiatives pursued by both academics and community members. From my research into the organization to my interview with the directors, I came to believe that these excellent individuals were fully engaged in working towards providing political education that goes beyond rhetoric and platitudes. A fine example of the work I speak of is the 脡duconnexion workshop catalogue. The organization offers a wide array of workshops each focused on topics in decolonization, ecology, racism, capitalism, and international cooperation. These workshops are offered to current and potential partners to help recenter their initiatives on a solid foundation in a political philosophy dedicated to positive social transformation. The workshops provide essential information and methods to achieve this end respective to the needs and initiatives of our partners.
My mandate as an intern for 脡duconnexion was focused primarily on the improvement and facilitation of the workshops in our catalogue. Under the supervision of Monsieur Jean-Baptiste Ndiaye, I performed research related to the improvement of existing workshops. I was able to integrate my experience at the University in this regard most directly. I applied many of the essential texts and articles from POLI 458: (De)Coloniality to this dimension of my internship work. Here I was able to apply key concepts from these readings to improve our workshop titled 鈥淒茅colonisation des pratiques en coop茅ration internationale鈥�. My secondary mandate under the supervision of Madame St茅phanie Germain was focused on researching the prevalence of violence in the Montr茅al metropolitan area within the dimension of public health. My work was targeted at finding relevant statistics and conducting interviews with teachers and students from public schools and youth centers in Montr茅al Nord and Saint Michel. This part of the internship was the most hands-on and the qualitative research conducted produced important findings that will ultimately be published in a comprehensive report to be delivered to the Minister of Health.
The work effected during my second mandate was full of enriching experiences and challenges. Interacting with the youth from Montr茅al Nord was enlightening and incredibly educational. A colleague of Monsieur Ndiaye, Cedric Irakoze, wanted to test a new workshop on racism and prejudice. To this end, Monsieur Irakoze created a workshop in the style of a game which would be played with the younger children at a youth center in Saint Michel. The children were aged 7-12. The responses were fascinating. It was interesting to hear about racism and prejudice from the perspectives of young children, who I believe in this case were not inclined to lie or mislead us. They gave us honest, sometimes shocking answers about their own experiences and beliefs around race, identity, culture, and immigration. The information gleaned from this game-style workshop helped us find spots in our adult workshops that would benefit from substantial improvement.
This and other experiences, along with the constructive mentorship of Monsieur Ndiaye, have had an immense impact on the way I view the world and how I will operate academically and professionally in the future. While presenting information on dense concepts in my secondary acquired language (French) was at times difficult, patience and determination to work with the team and community members helped strengthen my resolve. I would like to again offer my thanks to the Arts Internship Office for awarding me with the Arts Undergraduate Improvement Fund, which enabled financial stability for the duration of my internship. May the Office continue its essential work providing enrichment opportunities for students of all backgrounds at the University.
