An Interdisciplinary Place

An Interview with Quinn Mecham 
Photography by Bradley Slade

Where are interdisciplinary international studies heading? Why is there so much interest among students in joining Kennedy Center minor programs and among faculty in being affiliated with these thriving academic programs? To find out more, we sat down with Professor Quinn Mecham, who is wrapping up his fourth year as associate director for research and academic programs and his tenth year at the Kennedy Center, where he previously served as the faculty coordinator for the Middle East Studies/Arabic program.

You’ve spoken at BYU during International Education Week about your experiences traveling to more than 100 countries. How did this start?

I think I’ve always liked traveling, mainly because it’s a broadening experience. I grew up in Cache Valley, and it’s a wonderful place, but I think I spent most of my teenage years trying to figure out how to get away. My mother was a Spanish teacher who’d had meaningful experiences in Mexico. My father didn’t share the same love for travel—but together they made some compromises to go on road trips and explore places where my father was very interested in stopping at every historical site along the road.

Then, as a junior in high school, I started going to Utah State University in the afternoons to take some additional language classes. I studied Arabic. During that time, I decided—in part because it’s where the Star Wars Tatooine scenes were filmed—to go to Tunisia, and I found a scholarship that helped me travel for a summer. I was eighteen years old. It was before I started college—at which point I realized I spoke basically no Arabic, and French mattered a lot there. There were lots of surprises there, and I came back having had a meaningful personal experience, feeling like I really wanted to invest in language and to see a lot more of the world.

What’s the latest country you’ve added to the list?

This year I made it to Uzbekistan. I presented at a conference, but because I studied the Islamic world—and it was a center of Islamic thinking for several centuries in the medieval period—it was meaningful to me.

What’s a country you haven’t experienced?

The biggest and most important one is India, but I do have plans to spend time there in 2025.

What initially drew you to the Kennedy Center, and how has it played a role for you as a faculty member?

I’ve been at BYU for twelve years, and for ten of those years I’ve had some form of leadership role at the Kennedy Center—six years with Middle East Studies/Arabic and four years as associate director for academics. I thoroughly enjoy being a political scientist but came to it from comparative literature, another discipline. I have a great love of language and literature and have always been interested in religious studies and film. One of the things that I love about the Kennedy Center is that we are an explicitly interdisciplinary place, and I feel like I am an explicitly interdisciplinary person. So I really like learning about the world through the lens of a variety of disciplines. I love being able to think about things through humanities lenses, religious lenses, and social science lenses.

Universities are organized around disciplines.What would you tell students who are considering a Kennedy Center academic program but wonder about its disadvantages?

I do think it’s important to have some disciplinary skill set. You need to have a way to study the questions you care about. Most of our programs require methods courses that are grounded in particular disciplines. But studying a question through a particular discipline leaves you with a lot of blind spots. It teaches you that there are certain ways of asking questions about the world and certain ways of answering those questions, when, in fact, a variety of disciplines have been asking very similar questions—if not the same question—and coming up with different insights through other types of methods over a long time.

One of the great things about a Kennedy Center degree is the fact that everyone coming out is going to have taken history, politics, and language courses, and often others such as literature, sociology, and religion. And because each of those disciplines comes at an intellectual question in a different way, our students are trained to have more flexibility and to be a bit more broad-minded about what the range of answers to a question might look like—and they have a richer set of skills to help them find those answers.

How have you seen Kennedy Center degrees broaden and change students in meaningful ways?

I have seen how Kennedy Center programs help students become different people. Some academic programs are primarily focused on professional skills and train students in the norms and skills required to succeed in a particular profession. None of our programs are profession specific. What we do is equip people with the tools to engage in multiple professions and to be transformed throughout their BYU experience.

Before a student decides what kind of major or minor they want, I would ask, “Who do you want to become?” If the answer is “I want to move myself into a particular professional role,” then there may be other options that could get them there faster or in more specific ways. But if they want to become a different person who sees the world in new ways, who has unique kinds of capacities for making a difference in the world, and who wants to explore a wide variety of talents and leverage them with bigger purposes and broader missions, then there’s no better type of program than an international interdisciplinary program—which is why students come to the Kennedy Center.

Could you explain more about how these programs guide students in putting on different sets of lenses to see the world?

We are taught to see things in certain ways by using a particular set of glasses, and some of that is based on our discipline. Locations where we study give us particular lenses. The place we come from gives us a lens. Our faith tradition gives us a lens, as
do our families. And as we go through our university experience, we are sometimes socialized into different lenses than we grew up with, and that can be very valuable. At the Kennedy Center, we explicitly try to help people see things through different lenses: disciplinarily, geographically, culturally, linguistically, and historically.

A student emerges from here able to compare their own lived experience with other lived experiences in a richer way because they’ve experienced another culture or place. They’ve been abroad, adapted to a different culture, and tried to get their mind around how people express themselves in a different language. And all of that is stretching their understanding of how to see
the world.

So the more lenses you can give someone, the more equipped they will be to figure out which lens is appropriate for a particular situation when they find themselves outside of their comfort zone. Then they have access to that particular pair of glasses that will enable them to see something that other people may have blind spots on.

It’s an exciting time at the Kennedy Center. Minors have been growing by 20 percent and we’ve reached a thousand students studying here. What’s going on?

We do have more students now than over the past decade. Our majors have also grown, but we have put an explicit emphasis on growing our minors over the past few years. One of the reasons is that we think BYU has a lot of amazing majors for people to study. Many of those majors, whether they’re in the Kennedy Center or outside, would be enriched by adding one of our minor programs.

We’ve done a great deal of outreach to students across campus, helping them understand the ways in which adding a Kennedy Center minor to their chosen major will make them more compelling for employers and graduate schools but also more compelling people.

How do the Kennedy Center’s academic programs prepare students?

One of my priorities has been to create a coherent Kennedy Center curriculum that is designed for all of our majors and minors. Because our programs have a lot of their own curricular requirements, this revolves around three different one-credit courses.

The first is IAS 300: Professional Development in International Studies. We want sophomores or juniors to start thinking about the various pathways that they might choose and to be deliberate about seeking out the kinds of internships, professional experiences, and work that they want to do—all before they graduate from BYU. Also, they should consider whether graduate school is a good fit for them.

This is unlike career courses across the university that are based on interviewing skills or résumé building; rather, classes involve a range of exercises that help individuals think about what matters most to them, where their strengths lie, where their energy comes from, and what kinds of professional tracks are consistent with their values. After exploring a lot of those tracks, they make a five-year plan moving forward.

And our students—because the world really is their campus—have so many opportunities to do a wide range of things. We give them time to focus and deliberate on areas that they want to prepare for professionally, and it has been successful.

For the last eight semesters, you have been responsible for the Kennedy Center Lecture Series. What can students gain from participating in that series that they might miss from other classes?

The lecture series is the second class unique to the Kennedy Center curriculum. We wanted it to be the most dynamic, interesting academic lecture series on campus and bring people in from different disciplines all over campus. Students register for IAS 301R and receive credit for attending lectures and writing thoughtful essays about them.

Our most recent theme was “Building and Brokering Peace,” and we had wonderful participation from across campus in that. Other themes have focused on inequality, global religious experiences, civil society, culture, authoritarianism, colonialism, and global disorder.

We also choose a featured title at least once a semester—a book for our Kennedy Center students, faculty, and staff to read together—and we try to bring the author to campus to speak. This helps our BYU community to see people who may have never been on campus, who come from all kinds of great academic programs, and who also offer professional experiences and interesting insights on our core themes for the year.

Students who want to learn on a deeper level can take another class, right?

Yes, that’s IAS 302R: Seminar in International Studies—the third class in our curriculum. It’s a one-credit seminar taught by faculty from around campus. The class is designed to be a smaller, more interactive experience with no more than twenty students from all of our majors and minors together. Individuals with all of those different lenses interact to discuss a particular topic. Last semester we had a peacebuilding workshop where students met with some of our semester speakers and other experts for customized workshops and experiential learning opportunities. At the end of the semester, our students created original, remarkable peacebuilding projects to apply what they learned.

Where do you see the Kennedy Center heading in its next 40 years?

The world has shrunk so much. People have access to so many
things from all over the world because of the Internet revolution. With transformations in the way we learn—through artificial intelligence and digital coursework—we have so much to learn about the world. And yet it’s really quite hard to know how to approach it.
Being able to prioritize that information is going to be one of our great challenges.

The world will continue to shrink. Things that happen in one corner of the world will continue to have ripple effects on people in Utah County and elsewhere. I think that given how automated many technical skills are going to become in the coming decades, it’s going to make less sense for people to spend four years learning a narrow technical skill set.

What’s going to matter for the professional and personal success of most people is being able to see complexity, appreciate difference, and navigate an incredibly diverse, interesting, and challenging world. The kind of holistic skills that we have been very focused on delivering for our students will matter more than ever before as the ability to type a math problem and receive technical answers becomes lightning fast.

The challenges that people will still struggle with are how to do the kinds of things that we prepare people to do. So I think we’re in a great position to help our students thrive in a changing world.

Quinn’s 15 Practical Travel Tips

1. Prepare before you go by reading to understand the historical context. Then bring local literature, watch local TV/movies (search Netflix by country of origin), and listen to local music.
2. Take advantage of the “fresh eyes” moment and record what surprised and impacted you when you notice unexpected things for the first time. Journal, write, or create to process your experiences.
3. Take photos to remember your meaningful moments—not as a substitute for them and not to show to others. Experience the moment before recording it.
4. Traveling while “poor” can often lead to better experiences than well-resourced travel. You are more likely to have richer, unmediated experiences on the cheap—but have a contingency fund.
5. Remember that your job is to be a good guest, not to judge and not to assimilate. Share who you are and express appreciation for who others are.
6. Don’t worry if you can’t communicate in the local language; you will find a way. People want to help you out and Google Translate can always save you.
7. Things will be less efficient than you plan for because the context is new and you will make logistical mistakes. Build in buffer time to miss a train. Slow down and do three things a day instead of five. You need to allow for time to process new things intellectually and emotionally before rushing on to the next thing.
8. Try to stay at least two to three nights in each new location so that you are not constantly looking ahead to the next day’s travel.
9. Try out “micro-tourism” by spending some time really understanding one neighborhood.
10. Explore “B-list” sites and travel during the offseason to have more intimate experiences.
11. Pack light and versatile with layers. Take great shoes and socks so you can walk, run, hike, or bike. Save room to buy some local clothing if needed. Never bring a bag that doesn’t roll or that you can’t wear on your back.
12. Fully unpack your suitcase as soon as you get to a new place. You won’t feel like you have arrived and belong in a place until you are unpacked.
13. You can do a remarkable amount without changing currency—but be sure to bring a credit card that doesn’t charge international fees.
14. Shop for things that you want to take home at the end of your trip, not at the beginning.
15. Get local advice on security precautions when you arrive in a new place. Use your front pockets to store credit cards and passports and place your financial resources in different locations. Be careful going out alone at night until you have checked on security issues.