Transformative Travel and Identity

📋 Course Outline

1. Travel as transformative experience
2. Freedom and truth in Into the Wild
3. Forced displacement in Migrant Mother
4. Segregation and empathy in Green Book
5. Immigration and identity in Americanah

📖 1. Travel as transformative experience

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Transformative experience : A transformative experience is a journey that reshapes identity and changes how someone sees reality.
• Quest : A quest is a journey driven by a search for something essential, like freedom, truth, or self-understanding.
• Confrontation with reality : A confrontation with reality is when travel forces characters to face social conditions they could ignore before.
• Identity shift : An identity shift is a change in how a person understands who they are after entering a new environment.

📝 Essential Points

• The research question is whether traveling can change the way people see the world.
• Travel is treated as more than movement between places: it also changes identity and perception of reality.
• The presentation organizes documents into three functions of travel: personal quest, social injustice confrontation, and identity/cultural transformation.

💡 Memory Hook

Travel = Quest (inner) + Injustice (social) + Identity (cultural).

📖 2. Freedom and truth in Into the Wild

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions