Sewanee - The University of the South
AC-5: Immersive Experience

1) Sustainability and Global Environmental Change: Iceland gives students a chance to explore Iceland, a place so unique that it has at times seemed mythical. We focus on two complementary facets of the relationship between human societies and the natural environment: natural resources and natural hazards. Both are central to life in Iceland. Natural resources provide food, shelter, energy, and livelihoods to the Icelandic people while natural hazards threaten their homes, economies, and sometimes even their lives.

The class is divided into two parts: a semester-long seminar that meets once per week to discuss readings relevant to the subject and objectives of the course (ENST 211), and a two-week field excursion that travels through the interior highlands and southern coast of Iceland (ENST 212). While traveling, we stay in small guesthouses and sprawling campgrounds. We visit museums, historical sites, and places of cultural importance. We soak in natural hot springs and hike across landscapes carved by glaciers or deposited during lava flows. http://www.sewanee.edu/iceland/

2) Sustainability and Global Environmental Change: New Zealand focuses on the biodiversity, natural resources, and natural hazards of New Zealand. The overarching theme of the class will be the tension between the natural resources that make New Zealand livable—both for human and nonhuman inhabitants—and the natural hazards that threaten sustained livelihoods there. The shifting paradigms presented by the historical changes from Māori dominance to British colonialism to today’s independent and multicultural New Zealand will provide a socio-political backdrop to the changing environment of the country.

The class is divided into two parts: a semester-long seminar that meets once per week to discuss readings relevant to the subject and objectives of the course (ENST 211), and a two-week field excursion that travels through both the North and South Islands of New Zealand (ENST 212). While traveling, we stay in small guesthouses and university dormitories. We visit museums, historical sites, and places of cultural importance. We summit volcanoes, trek through temperate rainforests, and hike across landscapes carved by glaciers or deposited during lava flows. http://www.sewanee.edu/newzealand/

3) Haiti Institute: The Haiti Institute in Sewanee is a center for collaborative educational partnerships between Haiti and Sewanee: the University of the South. Its goal is to promote, foster and envision scholarship and research across a broad spectrum of interests pertaining to Haiti and Haitian studies.

Many of our projects are in the early stages, but we hope that each develops as a model that is useful, scalable and adaptable, both in Haiti and in Sewanee. We welcome the involvement of diverse disciplines and new ideas. Currently, we are exploring diverse partnerships, ranging from an initiative to reintroduce shade grown coffee agroecosystems in a remote Haitian mountain village, to linking the renown Sewanee Summer Music Festival with young musicians in Cange, Haiti. http://haiti.sewanee.edu/