STUDY ABROAD
Office of Global Learning and Experiential Learning
Director: Clayton Walton, cwalton@newark.rutgers.edu
The Rutgers University-Newark, Office of Global Initiatives and Experiential Learning facilitate a dynamic menu of study away, field study and experiential learning opportunities that prepare students to be global professionals, scholar-practitioners, and community engaged social change agents.
Vice President: Eric Garfunkel, vp@global.rutgers.edu
Rutgers Global is the university-wide unit of Rutgers University committed to leading, developing, and promoting international initiatives and education. We foster global engagement that enriches the student experience, builds faculty excellence, and enhances Rutgers University’s national and international reputation as a preeminent teaching and research university. Rutgers Global nurtures the diversity of Rutgers and New Jersey, advances cross-cultural awareness, and cultivates citizens and leaders whose knowledge and skills can bridge the local and global.
Cuba
Rutgers Newark graduate and advanced undergraduates are invited to participate in a month-long interdisciplinary study-abroad program in Cuba. This four-to-six-credit program will study U.S.-Cuban cultural and political interactions from the 19th century to the present, with special attention to the current revision of U.S.-Cuban relations taking place in 2015. Through a graduate seminar (conducted in English), students will consider: How have the U.S. and Cuba--and in particular cultural and social movements that have straddled the two countries--interacted across a divide marked by asymmetrical power relations and radically divergent politics? Students will have a unique opportunity to assess and critically reflect on the current political transformation in Cuba and the United States. As students consider this unfolding rapprochement between the US and Cuba, we will also develop a practice of critical reflection on our own act of encountering Cuba in translation and during this phase of negotiation and reconciliation.
The Innovation Alliance for Social Enterprise Development places fellows (graduate students from Rutgers-Newark) in Cape Town, South Africa. Students spend two months (late May – late July) in Cape Town working with Community Chest and its partners to identify research-based innovations and build an infrastructure to bring them to market. Fellows have the opportunity to focus on areas relevant to their expertise and interest. Potential areas include: commercialization (and technology transfer), lab-based and/or social science research, entrepreneurial development (including social enterprise development), and research-based solutions to challenges linked to inequalities in health, sanitation, and education. Although Fellows work on individual projects, all travel together and work at the Community Chest as a cohort.
