EC EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN SUMMER PROGRAMS: Identity

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Identity

One of the threads that has been leading our traveling and experiences around the Mediterranean is the issue of identity. Through our visits, we were able to gain a modest framework of the innumerous factors and characterizations that identity entails. Nonetheless, it is very difficult to speak and conceptualize identity. At the same time, as a foreign in different lands and among different people (as I have been in the past three weeks), I have reached a better understanding of my identity, meaning what being Italian means to me. Our language, daily cultural references, local sayings, what we eat, how we dress and so on are an embodiment of our identity, that we bring with us wherever we go. Then, to what extent could we actually be a "citizen of the world"? How is it possibile to find some sort of compromise or balance between preserving your identity and, at the same time, integrating others?

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EC Eastern Security Studies Program

In the summer of 2011, as the "Arab Spring" was unfolding and the "Eurozone Crisis" was entering its second year, the Emmanuel College Eastern Mediterranean Security Studies Program was established in Crete, as a way to make the location the classroom. Beyond the grand theoretical, historical and political understanding that can be achieved through reading and classroom discussion and exchange, a more immediate, intimate and truer appreciation of the complexities can only achieved by experiencing the cultures, languages of personal interaction.

Since 2012 students have been able to combine an intensive curricular study, with the experience of immersion and living in a local setting. The geopolitical and geoeconomic forces that have acted in the region for centuries, can be identified in the classroom, but they can only be understood by being there. This year's EC EMSS Program will add a fourth week of study, experience and exploration and will also travel to the islands of Rhodes, and Cyprus. In Rhodes we will be partnering with the Prefecture of Southern Aegean and the Aegean University, while in Cyprus we will be hosted by the University of Nicosia.