Event Description
Mary Ebeling, PhD, associate professor of sociology, and director of Women's and Gender Studies
Drexel undergraduate students, learn about an exciting travel course to San Juan taking place this summer! This travel course will run during Spring Quarter 2016 on the Main Campus and culminate in San Juan, Puerto Rico during week of June 11-18, 2016. In order to participate in the travel course, students must be registered for the on-campus Spring Quarter course (SOC 310/WGST T380/IAS T380). About the travel opportunity: Join other students and Drexel community members, along with residents of San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a one-week course on the debt crisis in Puerto Rico. The course is co-taught with Beta-Local, a local arts organization based in Old San Juan. During the course we will meet and workshop with visual artists, filmmakers, performance artists, musicians, farmers, historians, economists, poets and writers who are working on issues of debt, colonialism and gender. We will make day trips around the city to meet with food activists, student and education activists, and feminist activists to learn more about grassroots responses to the debt crisis. The workshop will culminate in a group project, developed with local residents, based on what we learn. About the spring course: In this course, we will explore the sociological implications of debt, on a personal, local, national and international level. Starting with ourselves and our personal relationships to debt (such as student loans, medical debt, credit cards and other debt instruments), we will explore themes, dilemmas and complications embedded in what is owed, who owes and to whom, and how to pay it back. Using our own debt as a ethnographic point of departure, we will collectively analyze personal debt, and through this analysis, link our debt to national debt, to historic debt, to reparations, to dispossession, to austerity, both historic and current, to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and to alternative strategies to ameliorate debt, such as Jubilee or debt strikes. Above all, we will consider our emotional relationships and political commitments to debt, on both a personal level as well as a larger societal level. For more information about the course, requirements and associated fees, please contact Mary Ebeling, PhD, mfe@drexel.edu or Kate Hughes kfh28@drexel.edu. |
