One day, I entered PCJ 260 to find something quite shocking on the day’s PowerPoint slides: the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, as well as the resulting wars of independence in Croatia and Bosnia. I felt my heart rate go up almost immediately. My friends in class looked at me with a combination of amusement and concern.

Allow me to explain. As a woman of Croatian descent, the topic Yugoslavia as well as the Croatian and Bosnian wars of independence has been an important part of my ethnic identity. Ever since I can remember, merely bringing up the word “Yugo” to my relatives, all of whom had either grown up in or visited the region during Tito’s rule or the War, brought forth both anxiety and rage. Growing up visiting my family in what is now rural Bosnia, I witnessed many of the war’s leftover effects first hand. I have seen war memorials, tanks left at the side of the road, cities where people continue to live in and amongst the rubble left by artillery fire, and the loss of an entire generation of young men who fought to achieve the shaky peace that now exists in the region. Most recently, a drive to my uncle’s property in the mountains was accented by signage warning travellers not to leave the road, for fear of the many active land mines that remain hidden nearby. Walking into class that day and seeing that semester’s main case study, then, was more than business as usual—it was an acute reminder of the pain experienced by so many of those closest to me.

By the end of the semester, I had an epiphany: that however personally affected I was by the case study, someone else was likely just as emotionally invested for every other case study we examined in class. In other words, someone is always affected. And while this might seem obvious, it’s something that’s easy to overlook when your education has mainly focused on issues and conflicts from decades, centuries, even millennia past.

And in a program like PCJ, where so many students come from so many different backgrounds and experiences, the likelihood that someone will be personally affected by the cases we examine is very high. After all, studying such sensitive topics is much of what we do in this program. That being said, it often doesn’t make approaching these topics any easier for those who continue to live in their aftermath.

My experience studying such a sensitive topic did, however, provide me with a few insights. Often, students feel like they are confined to the attitudes and biases presented by both their professors and their readings. However, studying an issue where my personal opinions and experiences sometimes differed from the almost clinically cold results presented in readings, it served as a good reminder that you don’t have to blindly agree with whatever is being presented to you. And I think that’s a lesson that all students should learn at one point in their lives.

Another thing that actually benefitted me because of this was that learning about events that meant so much to me actually inspired me to want to do a good job with my work and studying. I’ll never know if seeing my dad’s old Yugoslavian passport the night before my essay was due actually contributed to a higher grade or not, but it did make me feel the need to perform well and do the events justice. And I’d like to say my engagement with course materials was more meaningful because I actually cared. If anything, I had a lot of fun pointing out the irony of Slobodan Milosevic’s name[*]

Sitting there in class that day, examining my homeland’s conflict in such an academic context did one more thing—it gave me some insight as to how the future will look, when students will study the breakup of Yugo with the same emotional removal with which I studied, say, the war of Spanish Succession. Ultimately, this inspired a will inside of me to keep the conversation about what happened in the 90s going, and to make sure that the story future students will learn about what happened won’t just be one written by those who yell the loudest, but will contain the full truth.

Overall, blissful ignorance is impossible in a program like PCJ, and students are more likely than not to encounter subjects and case studies that make them feel uncomfortable. But what my experience taught me was that this needn’t be a bad thing—we can take this discomfort and shape it into a productive learning experience, for both ourselves and those who will study after us.

[*] The name “Slobodan” directly translates to “free,” or “one who is free.” The irony becomes clear when discussing Milosevic’s actions before, during and after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.