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"Don't you think it's a bit dangerous, mixing the personal with the academic?" was the confounded reply I re-ceived from Zarko after telling him why I had come to study in Serbia. I met Zarko, a Serbian male in his twenties, during

my time abroad in the Bal-kans. I went to S e r b i a , Croa t ia , Bosnia & Herzego-vina, and K o s o v o last fall to l e a r n about the dissolution of Yugoslavia and to get primary re-search for a Senior Thesis on Kosovo. The decision, I admit here as I did to Zarko, was largely driven by a budding desire to "explore my identity." I chose to study Kosovo as a stu-dent of Government because it is of political interest as a post -conflict, newly-independent state; but I also chose Kosovo as an Albanian who felt disconnected from this identity.

I was born in Albania and lived there through ten years of turbulent transition from strict communism to "democracy." The nineties were rough for Albanians in Alba-nia, but they were especially disastrous for Albanians in Kos-ovo (then an autonomous region of Serbia; unilaterally inde-pendent state since February 2008). The Kosovo war (1998-1999), during which thousands were killed and a million Al-banians displaced, is considered to be the first humanitarian war—one that led to the NATO bombing of Serbia and first time ever of NATO ground-troop deployment. Going

into the details of it here would be a digression, but I wel-come anyone interested in these details to either ask me di-rectly or come to my thesis defense. Most of what I know now about Kosovo and Yugoslavia I would not have been able to tell you before spending a semester in the Balkans. Simi-larly, much of what I know now about being ethnically Alba-nian I learned while living in a place that brought it into ques-tion.

Living in a space that was at the same time my topic of aca-demic inquiry meant that everyday experiences all became part of that inquiry. Learning took a new character: along with the obvious reading and writing came constant and direct reflection on the culture and political system I was standing under. I learned what I could not get from books by talking to politicians, writers, students, workers, and activ-ists. I learned what it meant to be an Albanian in Serbia not only from literature that emphasizes the conflict between Serbs and Albanians, but by living with a remarkably compas-sionate Serbian family in Belgrade. Ultimately, all of this per-sonal experience was in service of my academic expedition, but why make that distinction?

Zarko‟s accusation that I was “mixing” the personal with the academic is problematic, not because I see it as an attack on my topic of study, but because it assumes that the personal and the academic are two separate elements, and that mixing the two is a dangerous form of alchemy. But does not every academic pursuit emerge from personal curi-osity, and does not every student lean in an academic direc-tion that stems from personal wonder, is derived by personal means, and satisfies some personal end? Even speaking of the two in this manner implies more of a separation than there truly is. As subjective beings, we study the external world to better understand it, and especially ourselves within it. To know the political world, we have to know ourselves as poli-ticized parts of that world. The fact that I was driven by a desire to explore my Albanian identity cannot be separated from my political interest in the issue. If anything, this pecu-liar subjectivity added a great amount of fervor to my re-search, and a new viewpoint to already existing research on Kosovo.

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