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Global Experience Seminars
Global Experience Seminars are short, study-away opportunities led by Beloit College faculty in the summer.
Summer 2025: Spain! (Details below)
Take your first step toward a lifetime of global engagement through a Global Experience Seminar: a 3-week summer course where students have the chance to study off-campus, often internationally.
- Students receive 1.5 units of Beloit College credit.
- Scholarships and financial aid are available to help cover costs.
Global Experience Seminars in Summer 2025
- Location: Asturias region of Spain
- Dates: May 12th - June 1st, tentative
- Faculty leaders: Prof. Pablo Toral, International Relations and Prof. Amy Tibbitts, Spanish
- Credit: SPAN 320/ENVS 295 1.0 unit. GLBL150 Global Experience Seminar (reflection companion course) 0.5 unit (total 1.5 units)
Course description: The region of Asturias in Spain serves as a laboratory to study the development and confluence of sustainable practices linked to environmental clean-up, economic revival, cultural heritage, and tourism. As a region recognized for its natural beauty (think Seattle) and heavy industrial past (think Pittsburgh,) Asturias has emerged as unique for its innovative thinking, reinvention, and self-promotion, to become a European Union high-tech hub, all anchored around implementing more sustainable practices and a healthy economy. This course examines and interrogates this transformation and offers important lessons, such as the importance of building a resilient community around creativity, constant innovation, generous social welfare plans, and sustainability.
Global Experience Seminars in Summer 2026
- Location: Kyushu, Japan
- Dates: May 11 - June 1 , 2026 (tentative)
- Instructors: Prof. Susan Furukawa, Japanese, Prof. James Rougvie, Geology
- Credit: 1.0 unit, with 0.5 unit Global Experience Seminar reflection companion course (total 1.5 units)
Course Description: How can volcanoes and temples help promote sustainability and community resilience? Students explore answers to this question during a two-week tour of the island of Kyushu in southwestern Japan. In particular, we look at how natural and cultural heritage and associated tourism are being used to sustain many aging and depopulating communities. These demographic trends threaten developed countries worldwide, and the problem is particularly acute in Japan. Students visit UNESCO World Heritage sites, UNESCO Global Geoparks, and UN Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems and consider how these designations promote regional identity and sustainable development while also facilitating vital conservation efforts.
Spain: Socially-Responsible Sustainable Development in Nature’s ParadiseLocation: Dakar & Saint-Louis, Senegal
Dates: May 11 - June 1, 2026 (tentative)
Instructors: Prof. Joseph Derosier, French, and Christa Story, Academic Curator of the Wright Museum
Course Description: Dakar, the capital of Senegal, is a thriving art center that has long hosted art festivals that promoted African art in the wake of decolonization. In this class, students encounter and engage with art, artists, and arts institutions in Dakar and its environs. Students are expected to think about the geopolitics of an art biennale in Dakar and how a transnational arts festival builds solidarity, reclaims national identities, promotes social change, and facilitates art becoming enmeshed in the social fabric of urban life. The goals of this course are for students to understand decolonization, post-colonial Africa, and the role of art in social change. This course aims to de-center Western notions of art and understand how Dakar operates as a global city and a global center for art that critiques Eurocentric and Americanist notions of art. In collaboration with local students, partners, and institutions, students develop global self-awareness and understand cultural and linguistic diversity, explore personal and social responsibility, and understand global systems.
Global Experience Seminars in Summer 2027
Dates: mid-May - early June, 2027
Location: Northern Ireland (UK) and Republic of Ireland
Instructor: Prof. Joe Bookman, Media Studies
Course Description: This intensive 3-week summer course explores environmental media production and sustainability efforts in Northern Island. The first week takes place on Beloit’s college campus. Weeks 2 and 3 will occur in Northern Ireland. The course blends classroom learning with experiential and reflective assignments. Through regular engagement with individuals, institutions and organizations in and around Belfast and Derry whose work centers on environmental media and sustainability, the course offers students opportunities to engage directly with local artists, practitioners, educators and media professionals. Students also have opportunities to take a series of day trips, allowing them to witness first hand some of the environmental challenges facing the region. Throughout the course, students explore ways that environmental media influence policy and public opinion in Northern Ireland. They also learn various journalistic and creative strategies for producing environmental media themselves. The course culminates in students’ developing their own original environmental media productions.
Interested in participating?
The deadline to apply for Summer 2024 is December 1, 2024.