The Colombia trip was organized by Javier Corrales, the Dwight W. Morrow 1895 Professor of Political Science, and Sebastian Bitar, a Karl Loewenstein Fellow and visiting associate professor of political science. It served as the final project for their fall classes, “The Political Economy of Petro States” and “Foreign Policy Analysis,” respectively.
They spent a week in Cartagena, a port city on the Caribbean coast that is home to nearly 1 million people. Students attended classes at the Cartagena campus of the Universidad de los Andes, studying politics, economics, immigration, gender and race. Their itinerary also included visits to historical sites, an Afro-Colombian community and one of the largest oil refineries in South America.
This was the first time Corrales conducted such a trip, and he hopes to make a tradition of it.
“I'm fully behind the idea of internationalizing the curriculum in as many ways as we can. This is one component,” he says. “What’s so great about this is that it combines the opportunity to go abroad with an Amherst College classroom experience.”
For Dean of the Faculty Catherine Epstein, whose office underwrites such trips as part of a broader initiative to encourage pedagogical experimentation, there’s a deeper agenda: supporting community and diversity.
“Each course is obviously amazing in and of itself, with obvious intellectual benefits,” she says. “But for me, it is actually the social part that is most compelling.”
The trips are one means of bringing together students from diverse backgrounds in meaningful ways.
“We've brought all this amazing diversity to campus,” she says, but it’s not enough to simply form a diverse student body and expect its members to connect with and learn from one another. “We have to do things to make it happen,” Epstein says. “That process of spending 24/7 together really lets you get to know people. Students make friends they’d never expect to make.”
Or, in the words of Diana Daniels ’21, the Colombia trip “gave us not only more insight on the country of Colombia and petrostates but also the opportunity to see the history of a city and bond with a select few students in the class. There were eight students on the trip plus our two professors, and it was a perfect amount.”