{"id":31882,"date":"2024-05-03T13:31:10","date_gmt":"2024-05-03T17:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=31882"},"modified":"2024-05-03T13:43:10","modified_gmt":"2024-05-03T17:43:10","slug":"english-professors-essay-about-swimming-and-borders-published-in-open-rivers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/english-professors-essay-about-swimming-and-borders-published-in-open-rivers\/","title":{"rendered":"English professor&#8217;s essay about swimming and borders published in Open Rivers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On Nov. 2, 2019, Furman University&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/people\/melinda-menzer\/\">Melinda Menzer<\/a> crossed the Amistad Reservoir on the Rio Grande from the U.S. side to the Mexico border in a 10-mile roundtrip swim. In the journal <a href=\"https:\/\/openrivers.lib.umn.edu\/article\/not-a-border-but-a-path\/\">Open Rivers<\/a>, Menzer, professor and chair of the English Department, wrote about her experience and why she made the watery trek.<\/p>\n<p>Originally, Menzer set out to raise funds and awareness for HIAS, a Jewish-American refugee relief agency that has morphed into an advocacy group for asylum seekers from all over the world and from disparate religious backgrounds.<\/p>\n<p>Menzer later reflected on the &#8220;arbitrary,&#8221; &#8220;imaginary&#8221; and often &#8220;irrelevant&#8221; dividing lines that bodies of water impose, lacing her story with historical vignettes in which water and other borders created division as opposed to unity. &#8220;But when you are in a river, when you are swimming in it, you recognize that a river is not a line that divides but a body that connects,&#8221; she wrote. &#8220;It is the opposite of a border: it is a path across.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Melinda Menzer&#8217;s U.S. to Mexico swim across the Amistad Reservoir in 2019 originally served to raise funds and awareness for a humanitarian relief agency. Later, her swim became a commentary on borders and the arbitrary way humans draw lines of demarcation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":257,"featured_media":7545,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,6,2767],"tags":[2769,2771,2768,2770,2772],"class_list":["post-31882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english","category-in-the-news","category-open-rivers","tag-amistad-reservoir","tag-national-borders","tag-open-water-swimming","tag-rio-grande","tag-u-s-mexico-border"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/257"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}