APPLICATIONS OPEN NOW!
Dates of the Program: April 2 - June 8, 2018
PLEASE NOTE: The student housing starts (and thus is available)
from noontime on Saturday, March 31, 2018.
Classes start on Monday, April 2, 2018 with a
comprehensive orientation meeting for the program, which everyone is expected
to attend! Students should arrive in Prague on the weekend before
classes begin but no later than Sunday noon.
If students want to arrive before March
31, they need to secure their own accommodations for those dates! (For
hostels and other accomodation options please go to Useful Links.)
The last day of the program is Friday, June
8, the program student housing ends on Sunday,
June 10, 2018 at NOON! (If students will wish to
stay in Prague longer after the program is over, they will need to find their
own accommodations after this date.)
General Description of the Program:
The Spring 2018 CHID Study Abroad Program in
Prague, Czech Republic explores the dramatic social, cultural and political
transformations of the 20th century in Central and Eastern Europe. The 15-credit,
10-week program surveys Central and Eastern European history, politics, art,
architecture and film, examining such themes as resistance to authoritarianism,
gender equality and human rights, nationalism and ethnic violence, globalization
and environmental justice, and the role of the European Union in shaping discourse
in these areas.
The program consists of three core classes (5
credits each - all three courses are VLPA and also satisfy the "diversity"
credit, in addition the CHID 390 course satisfies the "W" writing
credit), complemented by international and domestic field trips and cultural
events. The background history course "East European Communism and
Everyday Life " (HSTEU 490/CHID 471A), taught by the program director
Vera Sokolova, will introduce the students to the history of the
region in the 20th century, focusing mainly on three major periods of the
interwar period, Nazi occupation and Communist rule in Eastern Europe. After
familiarizing ourselves with the general background of the region's history
in the 20th century, we will proceed to discuss the post-WWII region in depth
through the lens of so-called Altagsgeschichte or the history of everyday
life. Throughout the course, we will pay particular attention to the issues
of ethnicity, art, consumer culture, gender and sexuality in order to explore
the contesting and conflicting narratives of the country’s and region's
recent history. By examining the relationships between the state, society
and the individual, we will work against the simplistic binaries of "regime"
vs. "people" and "East" vs. "West" to see what
these reveal about the nature and reality of the Communist regimes in Eastern
Europe. In our readings, films, field trips, guest lectures, discussions and
assignments, we will concentrate on the plurality of voices that together
produce what we call “history”, on unofficial narratives and representations,
which are produced (especially) by various overlooked and/or suppressed individuals
and groups in order to explore the issues of collaboration and resistance,
complicity and responsibility, legacy and change, memory and forgetting. The
goal of the class is to study how these unofficial (as opposed to the officially
accepted and promoted) and “everyday” narratives complicate the
notions of a national history, collective identity and individual agency.
The HSTEU 490 course is closely linked with
the second class, "Colloquium in the History of Ideas: Collective Memory
and Public Space" (CHID 390) also taught by Vera Sokolova.
This CHID 390 colloquium is a reading and discussion course that will focus
on the relationship between collective memory and the constructions of public
space. We will explore how memory and commemorative practices of recent traumatic
events (concretely the Holocaust, WWII, expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern
Europe and the Stalinist Purge Trials of the 1950s) shape the construction
of public space(s) in the countries of Central Europe and how the public space
(through monuments and memorials) in turn affects the way people and states
selectively remember and forget those events. Central Europe has a vast reservoir
of actual physical sites to examine these specific relationships. Given the
many sharply contesting historical and ideological (spatial) narratives of
the past, which are continuously produced, used and abused in the region,
the Prague Program with its four international trips to Vienna, Krakow, Budapest
and Berlin is the ideal context in which to examine the questions of memory
and space as mutually constructed and interrelated processes.As with other
CHID 390 courses, we employ three interconnected critical practices: reading,
talking, and writing, all of which will work together to create and sustain
a learning community in Prague, one in which all of us will gain an enhanced
ability to "think out loud" and develop thoughts and ideas through
productive and supportive discussions.
The third class, Political Science course "Democracy
and Development" (POL SCI 495/CHID 471B), taught by Michael Smith,
examines the interaction between democratization and the politics of economic
development in Central and Eastern Europe. After the collapse of communism,
democratic and economic reforms took place simultaneously and rapidly, leading
to a host of urgent problems and consequences their designers did not always
predict, such as increases in economic inequality, unemployment and an increased
sense of insecurity by large segments of post-communist societies. These phenomena
have, in turn, provided a base of support for reinvigorated communist parties
and nationalist movements, as well as provoked disillusionment with the democratic
process. In exploring the complex intersections of recent social, political
and economic transformation, we will pay particular attention to the role
of civil society and membership in the European Union in shaping the democratic
futures of post-communist societies. An integral part of our class are visits
of and from important Czech NGOs.
In addition to the core classes, the program
includes 4-day international trip to Vienna and 5-day
international trips to Krakow, Budapest and Berlin.
The courses will also be supplemented by visits to important Prague historical
and cultural sites, visits by Czech NGO activists,
exhibitions and other current cultural events
in Prague.
- More detailed information for all three classes
is available in the section "Courses".
- More detailed information for housing, transportation
and life in Prague is available in appropriate sections.
