“What I did was building a plastic injection molding machine while collaborating with the local engineer students. It was done in a non-profit engineering education center called Vigyan Ashram in the small village Pabal, near Pune, Maharashtra, India.”

- Thanh Chu (Senior, Chemistry)

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“Ink drawings of the Zuckerberg chapel house in Castlegar, BC, and the Hardy Mountain/Makortoff communal village in Grand Forks, BC.These buildings have historical significance to the Doukhobors, a Russian Christian Pacifist denomination that lived communally in the Kootenays from the 1910's to the 1960s. I made the sketches over October break, as part of my field research for a comic book about Doukhobor history. The chapel house was home to Alexander Zuckerberg, a local German-Estonian schoolteacher. While many Doukhobor children were educated there, it is crucially not a sacred site to the Doukhobor denomination. The Hardy Mountain/Makortoff village is a prime example of the Doukhobor village, or dom: One or two large, multifamily houses, plus outbuildings.”

- Rose Driver (Senior, Art)

 

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“With the democratic election of Salvador Allende, the Nueva Canción—or Chilean New Song—Movement emerged, mixing Andean music styles with socially conscious, and politically driven, lyrics. The 1973 Chilean coup, which introduced the military dictatorship of General Pinochet, forced the whole musical movement to go underground by banning many traditional Andean instruments and killing musicians of the movement, namely Víctor Jara. To stop him from being able to play guitar, a soldier broke Víctor’s hands; however, the sound of Nueva Canción only spread further throughout Latin America, becoming a platform for political protest.  As information continues to emerge about the human rights violations of Pinochet’s dictatorship, Nueva Canción has persisted and new politically driven styles of music have emerged and grown under the re-birth of democracy in 1989. I traveled to travel to Santiago, Chile to visit museums and historic sites dedicated to the lives lost in human rights abuses of the rightist military regime.”

 - Savannah Hugueley (Senior, Anthropology)

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“Andel station, originally called Moskevska station, was built near the end of the Cold War as a symbol of friendship between the USSR and the CSSR (Czechoslovak Socialist Republic). With the collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern and Central Europe in 1989/1990, the station was renamed Andel after the neighborhood directly above and which it services. As a relic of the communist period, Andel is much more overt than most other traces of that time, as it was built in a Soviet style similar to that used in the opulent stations of the Moscow Metro.”

 - Nathaniel Eiffert (Senior, History)

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“I was in Senegal as a Global Citizen Year fellow. GCY is a gap year immersion program that places fellows with a host family and apprenticeship. I was in Senegal from August 2015 to April 2016 and the majority of that time was spent in my host village, Ibel, in the Kedougou region (we had a few trainings during which I was away from my host site). The first photo is of the wife of a cotton farmer my Baaba (host father) was friends with. The farm is near the village Iwol, during certain points of the year families will move closer to their farm. She's pounding some form of grain. The second photo is of my Baaba bringing his motorcycle to a mechanic. Both photos were taken in 2015.”

- Janet Sebastian-Coleman (Junior, History)

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“There are many towns in Nicaragua that are known for their folk healers and spiritual advisers, colloquially known as “los pueblos brujos”. These towns, especially Diriomo, are the recipient of many “spiritual tourists”, a kind of cultural tourism in which people travel to  develop their own spirituality. The spiritual advisors common in Latin America, and more specifically, Nicaragua, can heal many aspects of a person’s life; money, health, love, and tensions between people and spirits. Diriomo, Nicaragua, the witch capital of the Meseta, receives hundreds of tourists per year that are in search of brujos or spiritual advisors. These foreign visitors engage in a kind of cultural tourism whose goal is the development of their own spirituality. Within this small town, spiritual consultors are said to be the town’s economic backbone as these incoming foreign visitors generate work for restaurants, taxis, and hostels. Most practitioners have agreements with the local taxi drivers, who wait at the town center looking for unfamiliar faces. These drivers have agreements with certain practitioners in which they recieve some unspecified cut of the profits for the job performed. Tourists can also receive guidance from the town hall, whose employees  guide them to specific practitioners. This rising tourism has led some to question the authenticity and motivations of Diriomo’s spiritual consultants. Most practitioners are accused of being only concerned with money or profit, instead of being concerned in ways in which to help those who seek them out. The pictures included are of Leon Cathedral in Leon, Nicaragua and of El Enano Cabezon, a small dwarfish figure with a big head symbolizing the intelligent mestizo. These dolls are basically commentary on colonialism and enable current nation building.”

Alexandra Gomez-Lacayo (Senior, Anthropology)