Spain
The Mediterranean City at the Crossroads: Bringing the Past into the Future
June 23-July 1, 2008
Please note: This IFDS seminar has been designed to follow the APUNE Building Bridges Conference in Barcelona, which takes place from
June 19-21, 2008. Building Bridges is designed for faculty, administrators, and staff who work in the study abroad field with an interest in Spain. The conference seeks to bring Spanish and University representatives together to share ideas and foster collaboration around common themes in international education. For information: www.apune.org.
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Itinerary
This 9-day seminar begins in Barcelona (3 nights) then travels by air to Palma de Mallorca (5 nights) and returns to end in Barcelona the morning of July 1. Group travel by air from Barcelona to Palma and back to Barcelona is included in the seminar fee. Seminar participants should plan to fly home (or on to further travels) after the seminar from Barcelona (participants will return to Barcelona the morning of July 1).
Seminar Fee
CIEE Member: $2,800 Non-Member: $3,000
Academic Content (please note this is tentative and subject to change)
Lectures
Barcelona
- The Development of the Mediterranean City and How Barcelona and Palma are Representative
- The City and Visual Culture: Bridging the Global and Local Divide
- Religious and Cultural Heritage on the Construction of an Urban Landscape: The Example of the Barcelona Jewish Quarter
- Marketing Cultural Heritage in a Mediterranean City: The Barcelona Case
Palma
- Ritual and Spectacle: Art, Music and Traditions
- An Approach to the Anthropology of the Mediterranean
- The Mediterranean Melting Pot: Adapting Local Flavors to the Global Palate
- Building the Future into the Past: A Contemporary Art Museum within the Renaissance City Walls
Co-curricular Site Visits & Field Trips
Barcelona
- Barcelona Past and Present: Itineraries that Explore the City’s Cultural Roots
- Local Production / Global Consumption: The Wine Industry as Cultural Heritage
- Saint John’s Eve: Fire as Purification and Renovation
Palma
- The Three Cultures: Palma’s Jewish, Islamic and Early Christian Foundations
- Behind Closed Doors: The Secret Life of Palma’s Patios
- Packaging Local Flavors for the Global Economy: Gastronomy in Porreras, Inca, and Petra
- Origins of Traditional Mallorcan Dance in the Village of Sóller
Rationale
Historically, the Mediterranean city is a crossroads, a meeting-point for many cultures over the centuries. However, crossroads also brings to mind a turning point, a dialogue between the past and the possibilities of the future. The Mediterranean city of today is a place where incipient modernity calls into question traditional ways of life. This seminar begins its journey at the point where these two concepts, the city and culture, meet.
Mediterranean culture has been defined over the years through the convergence of many overlapping cultural identities, which find their expression in gastronomy, music, dance folklore, history, architecture, arts, religion, and politics. Ironically, however, the emergence of an impersonal global culture threatens to eliminate the authenticity and idiosyncrasy of these historical roots.
Barcelona and Palma are both millennial cities marked by Roman, Arab, and Jewish reminiscences. Both cities have experienced a rapid influx of tourists and immigrants since the 1950s, particularly after Spain entered the European Union in 1986. In the past 25 years the city of Barcelona has been an important dynamic laboratory for exploring architecture, urbanism, culture and the arts. Public space and civic life in the city has been one of the main themes addressed by a multi-disciplinary community of practitioners. In less than 50 years, Palma has transformed into one of the wealthiest and most diverse societies of Spain. Because of the rapid economic and social changes, archaeological heritage and vernacular architecture coexist in Palma with contemporary art expressions and modern urban spaces.
The debate about the contemporary city has been of principle concern within Barcelona and Palma and makes them an ideal location to explore these issues. While these two cities enjoy the benefits of tourism and migration, both cities are poised at the crossroads of tradition and modernization.
Host Institutions
The University of Barcelona (UB) was founded in 1450. The present central building was inaugurated in 1871. Today the university has four campuses, in different parts of the city. The UB is the oldest and largest of the six universities in Barcelona, and of the ten in Catalonia. It has 76.000 students --more than half of the total student population of Catalonia-- and is the second largest in terms of student number in Spain. The UB library is the second largest in Spain in number of books, after the National Library in Madrid. UB students have access to an extensive range of services. Ten thousand bachelor’s degrees and 450 PhDs are awarded each year.
Universitat de les Illes Balears (UIB) was founded in 1978 and is the descendent of Mallorcan universities dating back to the 15th century. The UIB is a modern public institution with 15,000 students specializing in 36 different majors. The UIB is a university rooted in the culture and identity of the Balearic Islands and the Mediterranean, with a strong commitment to serving society, sustainability and respect towards the environment. The fact that the Island economy depends mainly upon tourism has resulted in a stronger emphasis on academic and research areas such as tourism studies, business, economics, and sustainability of the environment.
Seminar Leadership
Lucía Conte is the Resident Director for the Liberal Arts program at CIEE Barcelona Study Center. She holds a BA in Liberal Arts and MA in History, from the University Pompeu Fabra, where she has developed a long academic experience both teaching and researching at the Humanities Department. The research areas she has specialized in are Medieval History, Urban Cultural Studies and History of Private Life. Besides her academic experience, in 2005 she founded her own business, a company specializing in customized cultural projects and history tours of Barcelona. She has worked in the areas of diffusion, education and consulting for several local museums and cultural institutions and, she is a member of the City Council Board for the Barcelona 2007-2012 Strategic Plan for Culture.
Antonia Ferriol is the Resident Director of the CIEE Study Center at the Universitat de les Illes Balears in Palma de Mallorca. She earned her Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from Pennsylvania State University. Her main research focuses on contemporary Spanish novel. Dr. Ferriol was previously visiting professor at Middlebury College, assistant professor at Denison University, and CIEE’s Resident Director both in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), and Barcelona.
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