Our Fall 2025 Field Methods class! (Photo credit: Professor Meredith Landman)
One of the larger Columbia-induced changes to my thinking has been an interest in the process of knowledge production. This has been stimulated by my experiences in the Core, which helps us to wonder, for instance, how our understanding of matter got from Aristotle’s four elements to the Higgs boson. This interest has also been stimulated by my senior thesis process, which has involved reading, taxonomizing, and engaging with several swaths of scholarship. I have been surprised at how rapidly scholarship can develop within a decade, let alone a century. Essentially, I have realized that no piece of knowledge should be taken for granted, and that all ideas have an origin point. In realizing this, I’ve also begun to wonder where widely-held ideas come from, how some ideas dominate, and how different groups of thinkers interact with each other.
Aside from senior thesis and the Core, my best window into this problem has come from a linguistics class called Language Documentation and Field Methods. This is an amazing class, and easily the culmination of my years as a linguistics major: over a semester, we worked with a native speaker of an under-documented language to learn, study, and describe the language in linguistic terms. I loved this class so much that I took it twice, both times working with a native speaker of Kalmyk (a Mongolic language spoken in Russia, China, Mongolia, and the USA’s east coast). The goal of this course is to teach the methodology of language documentation, which is a vital task of linguists given that most of the world’s languages are currently endangered.
