{"id":1179,"date":"2018-02-02T15:47:20","date_gmt":"2018-02-02T15:47:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/?p=1179"},"modified":"2018-02-02T15:47:52","modified_gmt":"2018-02-02T15:47:52","slug":"trinity-college-professor-of-language-and-culture-studies-thomas-s-harrington-shares-expertise-on-catalonia-in-news-broadcasts-around-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/2018\/02\/02\/trinity-college-professor-of-language-and-culture-studies-thomas-s-harrington-shares-expertise-on-catalonia-in-news-broadcasts-around-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Trinity College Professor of Language and Culture Studies Thomas S. Harrington Shares Expertise on Catalonia in News Broadcasts Around the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hartford, Connecticut, December 4, 2017 \u2013 This semester, Trinity College Professor of Language and Culture Studies\u00a0Thomas S. Harrington<\/a>\u2014a noted scholar on the culture and politics of the Catalonian Autonomous Community of Spain\u2014has appeared on local, national, and international news broadcasts to speak about Catalonia\u2019s recent vote for independence and its ongoing confrontation with the Spanish central government.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a nationalist movement about peace, persistence, and inclusion,\u201d Harrington said. \u201cWhat I think is fascinating, and something I\u2019d like to transmit to students and the public, is the almost David vs. Goliath persistence of this culture. They are, in effect, saying to the world: \u2018What we have is very special to us and we want to preserve it, but that preserving it does not mean, as it does in so many other nationalist movements, restricting the influx of outsiders to the country or recurring to supremacist schemas of\u00a0 identity.\u2019\u00a0To me that is an amazing story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Trinity College Professor of Language and Culture Studies Thomas S. Harrington<\/p><\/div>\n

As the Catalan independence process has moved forward, Harrington has been addressing not only classrooms full of students, but also people around the world who want to learn more about what has led up to the current confrontation. He has provided commentary for news outlets including\u00a0Russia Today<\/a>,\u00a0China Global Television Network<\/a>, and\u00a0Connecticut Public Radio<\/a>, and has written many articles and blog posts designed to provide more\u00a0 historical and cultural context for those seeking to understand the October 1 vote on independence and all that has followed in its wake.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the latter part of September, when the situation came to a head, I became more active. My goal was to shed light on historical issues and details that are not often mentioned in the mainstream press,\u201d Harrington said. \u201cMany reporters, working in good faith, simply do not have the historical or linguistic background needed to understand the Catalan issue in an in-depth manner. Most people in big American and European media\u2014at best\u2014speak some Spanish; very few speak and read Catalan or have reported before on a daily basis from inside Catalonia,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

While some believe that this is an unimportant detail, Harrington said that he believes it is absolutely essential to gaining a more solid understanding of this situation and many others like it. \u201cThere is no such thing as unbiased media; everything comes from a point of view. Language and historical context, or what we might call our cultural \u2018point of entry,\u2019 affect our perceptions of a given reality in significant ways,\u201d Harrington said. \u201cWhile we cannot necessarily undo the slants that we and other bring to our analyses of social and political events, we can seek to become aware of their possible effects on our perceptions of \u2018reality.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Harrington believes that current impasse has its roots in Spanish Constitution of 1978, which was forged only three years after the death of Francisco Franco amidst looming threats of renewed military intervention in the civic life of the country. \u201cIt was very much a compromise document designed to bring a still fractious country into the community of democratic nations,\u201d Harrington said. \u201cAs such, it was seen by most of those signing on to it, and especially those embracing in Catalonia, as being subject to adjustment in the not too distant future. This was the understanding that everyone had until the beginning of the 21st century when the party now in governance, the PP, then headed by Jose Maria Aznar, turned around and said this constitution was sacred and could not be changed and that, therefore, the Catalans could never look forward to any incremental increase of their political power within the Spanish state.\u201d Harrington suggests that it was the articulation of this \u201chard\u201d upper limit on Catalan political, cultural, and economic aspirations, subsequently ratified in 2010 by a PP-dominated Constitutional Tribunal, which many saw as corrupt, that has led to the current situation.<\/p>\n

Harrington\u2019s interest in the problems of nations within states began with his college studies of the borderlands between Poland and Russia. When he began his doctoral work in Hispanic studies, he transferred his interest in the phenomenon to the Iberian Peninsula. In the course of his career, he has lived and or studied in all of the major culture-nations of that geographical and cultural entity, earning his master\u2019s degree in Madrid, teaching for two years in Galicia, studying in Lisbon, spending numerous summers in the Basque Country, and exploring the breadth and depth of Catalonia.<\/p>\n

Harrington teaches courses in 20th and 21st century Spanish cultural history, literature, and film. He is a two-time Fulbright Senior Research Scholar (Barcelona, Spain and Montevideo, Uruguay). He has published two books, co-written a documentary film, and written several refereed publications.<\/p>\n

Harrington is the founder and one of three faculty advisors of the\u00a0Trinity in Barcelona\u00a0<\/a>study away program, which offers students the opportunity to spend a semester, summer, or full academic year in the city of Barcelona, Spain. Open to all levels of Spanish language, Trinity in Barcelona is a \u201chybrid\u201d study abroad program in which students enroll in a combination of Trinity-taught and local university courses as they experience both the Spanish and Catalan cultures.<\/p>\n

Written by Dana Martin \u201918<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hartford, Connecticut, December 4, 2017 \u2013 This semester, Trinity College Professor of Language and Culture Studies\u00a0Thomas S. Harrington\u2014a noted scholar on the culture and politics of the Catalonian Autonomous Community of Spain\u2014has appeared on local, national, and international news broadcasts to speak about Catalonia\u2019s recent vote for independence and its ongoing confrontation with the Spanish […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1424,"featured_media":1180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[196,26,340],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1179"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1424"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1179"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1181,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1179\/revisions\/1181"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/facultyhighlights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}