The latest episode of the podcast series on ‘Nostalgia’, hosted by Dr Chris Deacy, Reader in Theology and Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, has just been released.
In this week’s interview, Chris interviews Valeska Hass who works as a Project Manager in the Business Improvement and Projects Unit at the University of Kent, where she has been for the last two years. She started working in the automotive industry delivering intercultural training for sales teams and we discuss the role and importance of transferable skills.
Valeska was born in Germany but grew up in Namibia in southern Africa and later Venezuela while her father was a teacher who taught in German schools abroad. She has lived in the UK for 13 years, which is the longest time she has lived in one country. We talk about how home for her has always been the people she has met and about her earliest memory which pertains to the day when her sister was born.
Valeska talks about her experience of finding African drums in Venezuela, which reminded her of her time in Namibia, and about her passion for music, which she considers foundational, and how she has adopted new tastes in the different locations where she has lived.
The conversation then turns to Valeska’s time in university in Germany where she found her degree, which crossed several disciplinary boundaries, to be creatively structured. This led to her broadening her horizons while she was able to create her own timetable. She refers to the student protests that took place at the time, and we then move to discuss people’s ‘fear of the other’ in the context of the apprehension of strangers to her family’s different and exotic life story.
In the final part of the interview, Valeska explains why her memories are predominantly positive, and why she has been doing creative writing in her spare time. Her ambition is to write and publish a book. She talks about living in the here and now rather than looking back to the past or forward to the future, and we end by considering the possibilities inherent in the notion of nostalgia.
The podcast is available here:
https://audioboom.com/posts/6983957-valeska-hass