Sean Svoboda ’11 will miss life at Scripps College, but the anthropology major is not afraid to pursue life after college. She plans to explore some non-academic passions like non-profit development, community acting and film production, and other ways to satisfy her wanderlust before heading to graduate school in 2012.
Sean selected anthropology as her major because it bridges the gaps between science, the humanities, real life, and academia. “I’ve been forced to confront my own values, biases, and positions of privilege,” she says. “Because of that, I’ve gained an analytical skill set to make broad connections between cultural difference and historical systems of power.”
Research for her thesis, American Warrior: a Multi-Sited Ethnography of Military Acculturation, began with a contradiction she observed: “There is a lack of discourse about war in higher education, and yet fighting as a soldier is one of the primary means by which many Americans have access to higher education at all.” This thought led her to ethnographic research in the form of personal interviews and fieldwork with the Claremont ROTC program, as well as the study of military documents, journals, and various other accounts of military training and occupation experience.
Sean argues: “Class, gender, nationalism, technology, and trends in the privatization of security all converge to create a moral lens through which Americans view war. Thus, the human impact of war (on both sides) is far displaced and abstracted from the civilian consciousness.”
Her perspective on thesis writing as a time to explore an area she feels passionately about has made the work extremely rewarding. “The opportunity to engage with independent, hands-on research and make my own theoretical claims has been an invaluable culmination to my inter-disciplinary education at Scripps,” she says.
For Sean, academic life began with a Core lecture that radically altered her “limited preconceptions about the world into a million nagging questions about – well – what it means to be human.” Four years later, the end result was a Capstone Day presentation where her own voice – and its call for a greater look at humanity – carries itself to the larger community.