Visit the Global Hub or the Global Experiences Office instagram @pittglobalexp to vote for your favorite photo in each category for the International Photo Contest 2024!

Looking to brush up on your Swahili? Join Swahili TA and students every Wednesday and Thursday in the Global Hub.

On Nov. 14th (11 am to 12 pm) REEESNe is holding a FREE webinar on digital hygiene, intended especially for students and scholars contemplating travel to Central Asia, the Caucasus, or Eastern Europe. While nothing can guarantee absolute safety for one's data, understanding the risks and the precautions that may mitigate them can make travel a more secure endeavor. Our speaker, journalist/producer Nikita Makarenko, is an experienced reporter and educator who has worked in the United States, Uzbekistan, and many other parts of the former Soviet Union, creating and traveling with film and print media content in both democratic and authoritarian contexts. The discussion will focus on some of the known risks of and strategies for traveling with data, hardware, and one's own internet/social media footprint in parts of Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

Andrea Gevurtz Arai teaches Japan and East Asia anthropology and society courses in the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. Arai’s first book, The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan (Stanford U. Press, 2016) is a long-term multi-site fieldwork study of the social and cultural effects of the bursting of the financial bubble in the early 1990s in Japan and the protracted recession that followed. This ethnography delves deeply into how the recession provided the conditions for government and corporate “neoliberalization,” replacing former support and security in education and labor with new logics of self-responsibility, self-development and patriotism, privatizing public services; shifting cultural ideologies and producing a profound “uneasiness” about everyday life. The book traces the way that the young became the subjects of these unfamiliar or “strange” conditions and the objects of blame for not being able to fulfill new requirements of human capital development. The Strange Child tracks the hardships of this altered national-cultural environment as well as introduces some of the surprisingly creative responses of the recessionary generations.

Arai has edited, co-edited and contributed to three East Asia volumes: Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in 21st Century East Asia (July, 2022-Digital and Print Teaching Volume and Pre-publication Draft) is the product of an interdisciplinary collaborative group of U.S. and East Asia based scholars and scholar-activists, and a May 2021 workshop organized by Arai and Jeffrey Hou (UW Built Environments) and supported by the UW Global Initiative Fund and Title VI East Asia Center. Arai also wrote the Introduction, “Shifting Contexts, Creative Responses” and chapter, “DIY Sensibilities, Eco-Aesthetics and Women’s Projects in Post 3.11 Japan.” Spaces of Possibility In, Between and Beyond Korea and Japan (UW Press, 2016) w/Clark Sorensen, is the product of cross-national, collaborative fieldwork in Japan and South Korea. Arai’s chapter in this volume focuses on the struggles over how to represent the colonial period and postcolonial landscapes at the Seodaemun Prison History Hall in Seoul and the Japan Folk Art Museum in Tokyo. Global Futures in East Asia (Stanford U. Press, 2013) w/Ann Anagnost. Arai’s chapter, “Notes to the Heart” in this volume engages with a moral’s curriculum for the age of recession and its relation to the 2006 revision of the Fundamental Law of Education enacted in 1947 alongside the new postwar constitution.

Arai’s second book project focuses on the social and cultural “development from below” movements in the peripheries, rural areas, outskirts of regional cities, and lower income sections of major cities in Japan. The second decade of Japanese neoliberal reforms have resulted in a social landscape of underemployment, income inequality, “social disconnection,” falling birth rates and over 8,500,000 vacant homes, schools and buildings. Further exacerbated by March, 2011 triple disasters of Fukushima, these realities inform and have transformed the lives, livelihood prospects and world views of the younger generations. Arai’s ethnographic project investigates creative action responses to these conditions. No longer able to fulfill and/or be satisfied with the former status quo of middle-class trajectories, increasing numbers of young Japanese are “turning away” from prescribed paths of social reproduction (including exiting salaried positions) and “turning to” environmentally conscious, gender and income equalizing DiY collective projects of social change. Informed by socio-political and ecological movements around the world, these projects challenge former gendered, spatial and environmental hierarchies of center and periphery and employ aesthetics of “rebuild, reuse and rescue” to reimagine forms of work and society, in contrast to the growth focused model of past generations. Arai’s second book describes the how, what and where of the innovative and imaginative rebuilding, creative reuse of materials, sharing of ideas, resources and knowledge, film and social media outreach and horizontal collaborations across social class, age, gender and ethnicities.

Arai is working on two separate articles: one on Hitomi Kamanaka’s documentary films and notions of eco-disaster, sacrifice zones and the interrelation between documentary film and social activism. The second focuses on notions of care, kin and nature in Michiko Ishimure’s novel, Lake of Heaven and Erika Kobayashi’s “Precious Stones.” This piece looks at intersections in these authors’ environmental and ethnographic sensibilities of life and thinking about and from the Japanese peripheries.

The Himalayas to the Andes Information Session to learn about study abroad Summer 2025.

Mangia con noi! Bring your lunch and chat with us! Pitt students only, all levels welcome!

Join us for an informative session on the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, an excellent funding opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students who are committed to language study and international expertise. This session is designed to help students understand the application process, benefits, and unique experiences that come with being a FLAS Fellow.  A great opportunity to ask questions and get advice directly from fellows. 

Dr. Pulford's research focuses on experiences of socialism and empire in borderland and minority regions in Eurasia, including along the China-Russia border, the focus of his first two books. His most recent project examines the experiences of cross-border ‘Chinese’ minorities in Southeast, Central and Northeast Asia. In many global locations, crossing state borders involves a sense of temporal shift. Modern citizen-subjects often perceive a world divided into areas of greater or lesser ‘development’ or ‘backwardness’, containers for different versions of the big-H official Histories which nations have written since the era of European Enlightenment and empire. As this talk explores drawing on a new book, at the three-way convergence of China, North Korea and Russia, populations with similarly stark but also very different experiences of socialism and its varied aftermaths interact regularly, and in doing so shed unique light on the progressive schemes which have unfolded here.

The University of Pittsburgh has a long tradition of activism for global justice by students who seek to raise awareness, engage communities, and advocate for change at the university and in the United States. To showcase that history, we are bringing together student activists across generations for a dialogue, including those who demonstrated against the war in Vietnam in the 1970s, South African apartheid in the 1980s, and those advocating for divestment from Israel today.

The goal of this event is to share insights and strategies for fostering generative and constructive classroom experiences related to student activism. How can instructors support student activists? How can instructors help student activists teach and learn about global history outside of traditional classroom boundaries? How can instructors effectively and responsibly teach the history of global justice activism in their classrooms?

Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeUesdaFdFJ-SaGl9usWwqctR1e3w13...