Making a complaint

So my tutor got back to me on Friday, in a mail encouragingly beginning 'hello, everyone'. Everyone! It turns out that he gave extensions he wasn't authorised to give to several of us, and the Course Chair has said that the only way out is for us all to make a formal complaint.

This is slightly distressing, because Tutor has actually been incredibly helpful, and I might - probably would - have ditched this course before Christmas if he hadn't been so supportive. But there doesn't seem to be an alternative. I have asked him to pass my email address onto the other people affected, so we can coordinate our approach. I could do without the hassle, but at least it means there's a good chance that this can be put right.

I spent part of the day doing a series of searches on 'Belgian Studies'. After five years in a Belgian village near nowhere in particular, with petty-minded parochial neighbours, I don't particularly want to spend the rest of my life specialising in things Belgian. By the time I left Belgium I was quite close to a total crack-up, and only the fact that the other half got there first prevented me from descending into gibbering idiocy. But it has to be acknowledged that I have the wherewithal to make a contribution to cultural studies in Belgium. I know the country quite well, after living there for ten years; and I read Dutch with almost as much facility as I read French. In fact, I make the greater part of my living from translating out of Dutch. I translate sociological and cultural texts - conference papers and abstracts - for a major Dutch -speaking Belgian university. So I am, or will be, in a position to tackle this wayward, fragmented society as a research subject. So I searched on 'Belgian Studies'.

Now, departments of Belgian Studies do exist. Specifically, they exist in the US, one or two UK Unis, and - intriguingly - Romania. In every case they are sub-divisions of French departments. Qui dit Belgique dit France, it appears. And there are places where Flemish culture is studied. Without exception, Dutch (or Flemish, if you prefer)- speaking parts of Belgium are studied along with the Netherlands. Nowhere appears to tackle Belgium as a whole. This is understandable, partly because it is a very fractured country, and partly because very few anglophones can work with Dutch and French. It does not - so far - appear that anyone outside the country has made a comparative study of the ways in which history, literature and art were used to construct a specifically 'Belgian' identity during the years surrounding the founding of the state in the early 1830s. Or, for example, of the ways in which visual materials have been used differentially by sister political parties on either side of the language divide in their election material (there are no 'Belgian' political parties. But a party will work together with its cognate in parliament - cf. the two Green parties, the francophone 'Ecolo' and the Dutch-speaking 'Agelev').

So this appears to be an under-researched area. Bugger.