Braindump!!! (or la fuite des cerveaux?)

I'm having a hard time starting this entry because there's been an influx of information, images and ideas in my brain in the last two weeks. I'm still digesting it all. It didn't help to have mid-terms in that time frame; I had to process coherent thoughts about what I've been exposed to since the beginning of the semester. And I'm finding it harder and harder to organize my thoughts. I just want to read and absorb. I don't think I've ever spent as many hours absorbing information, opinions, accounts, reflections, reports, footage, maps, and images as I have in the past weeks.

Two weeks ago I was at Germain's apartment reading my favorite weekly the Courrier International when a thought-provoking subject presented itself to me and, within 10 mins of being exposed to I felt entirely hooked. There was a section devoted to refugee movements, featuring articles not only on the recent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Congolese but also on international migration more generally. I don't think I could explain to someone else a single idea from this one article by Raymond Depardon (photographer/director), but it was a total success because it sparked off a million little traces of thought through my brain. And none of them crossed paths somehow-no closure whatsoever! It's a neat experience to read something that leaves you speechless. This has been happening a lot to me lately. No closure necessary.

Raymond Depardon just produced a documentary on French rural life called La Vie Moderne. After reading his article, Germain and I decided the very next day to go see it. I had a very mixed reaction to it, because his article had excited all kinds of thoughts in my head about research topics I could have about trends in international human mobility. But his film contained calm, picturesque footage of the French countryside and very banal (but revealing) interviews with farmers--with emphasis on their attachment to their land. Their immobility. It was a total tease! And a real pleasure to watch. I'm not complaining at all. Like his article, it simply left me wanting to know more. Good thing there's an exposition on migrations that he and an essayist/urbanise named Paul Virilio just opened here in Paris.

A couple of days ago, Germain bought me a special report of Le Monde (a French daily) on international migrations, and I've already almost gulped down all 180 pages of articles, maps and graphs. It was stated in one of the articles on natural disaster refugees that Katrina displaced 780,000 'from New Orleans to Texas,' but this number sounds almost too large to be true. Maybe they meant from the region affected to Texas? In any case, I also learned that the Kurdish Cultural Center that Germain lives down the street from was the first center of its kind in the world. Speaking of the Kurds, one of the languages this people speaks is called zaza!

This is probably a long and boring entry but I felt like writing all this. So I'm still trying to narrow down a topic for my thesis, and I need to do it pretty soon because it's strategic to do so sooner than later, then adapt your class papers to fit into the theme. I'm flirting with ideas involving different factors related to (obviously) international displacements of people, international education, the concept of 'la fuite des cerveaux' or the phenomenon involving the departure of a poor country's brightest young people to go study/work in a rich country, exploring the main categories of international student mobility: 1)those travels undertaken voluntarily by students from rich, developed nations to other rich, developed nations, 2)those taken voluntarily by students from rich, developed nations to poor, developing nations), and 3)those taken necessarily by the richest or the brightest students from poor, developing nations to rich, developed nations because they deemed it their only chance for success.

There's an unusually high concentration of African students in France (46% of their foreign students in 2007 were from the African continent and not just the Maghreb). This isn't surprising considering colonial history. But is the phenomenon of 'la fuite des cerveaux' perpetuating the conditions of underdevelopment in these African countries? Do the African students return after their studies or do they stay? Do the North American and European students return after their studies or do they stay? I think a case study of France in whatever I'll write about would be interesting for many reasons. The French government invented the concept of 'diplomatie culturelle' or 'cultural diplomacy' which is part of their foreign policy that tries to improve French foreign relations through educational and cultural exchanges. How do 'core' nations perceive such an aggressive policy versus those nations in the 'periphery'?

Time to head to bed. I think I just needed to clear my head. It'd also help to turn off BBC because my head is swimming!