298H Seminars - Spring 2024

This Nebraska Abroad program will provide students with opportunity for a hands-on learning experience in Prague, Czechia (formerly the Czech Republic) focused on the search for freedom, belonging and hope at challenging times, specifically focusing on issues related to democracy and civil society. Students will learn about these issues in central Europe and in Nebraska, comparing the Heart of Europe to the Heartland of America. Through an examination of the culture, history, politics, and institutions of Czechia/Central Europe and the U.S. Heartland alike, we will learn lessons merging these local and global perspectives. This course includes a variety of field experiences and full-day field trips and multiple other global dialogue components. We will explore questions like: What do the heartland and the heart of Europe share and what can both regions learn from each other? What are the stories of hope, freedom and belonging when we enter in dialogues between “the heartland” and “the heart of Europe”? How do both locations perceive past and current global challenges to democracy? How much can we learn from those with different experiences, different backgrounds?

Students must apply by September 15 for this program through the Global Experiences website.

In this class, we will study cities around the world that are at the forefront of developing solutions to the biggest problems humanity faces in the 21st century. Many of the challenges facing the world today are too complex to be solved by nation-states alone. In instances where the governments of some nation-states have proven too unwieldy, ponderous, and politically divided, cities have often stepped in to pick up the slack, pioneering new solutions to the problems plaguing the planet. Cities around the world share a common set of strengths that make them especially well-suited to solving wicked problems: an emphasis on pragmatism over idealism, fast-paced innovation around creative solutions, a tendency toward collaboration across jurisdictional borders, and – perhaps most importantly – a willingness to learn and borrow from the success of peer cities.

How do people and whole countries get trapped by debt? Is requiring repayment an ethical or unethical practice? How does it intersect with power and control? Or the very idea of a society? What do we owe to each other? This course will explore the idea of debt—financial, moral, religious—and examine the ethics of debt in the various way that it plays out in both historical and contemporary contexts. Students will have the opportunity to explore and make a case for the rightness or wrongness of continuing indebtedness in their choice of modern context. Examples might include modern debt slavery, student loan debt, medical debt, reparations, incarceration, or others.

The purpose of this course is to provide a background and history on the concept of “wilderness” and how a planet with 10 billion people might require us to reevaluate our views. Historically, university courses on wilderness focus on philosophical, theological, historical, or scientific/conservation perspectives. Instead, in this course, we will explore how wilderness is defined by societies over time, but with an emphasis on practical considerations in defining wilderness, particularly in areas where human presence and behaviors will erode those places on the planet that represent our current vision of wilderness. The Okavango Delta (rural Botswana) will be used as a case study for the course as it represents one of the great defined wildernesses of the world. It also encompasses the conundrum of the 21st century, in which some of the long-standing views of what constitutes wilderness might need to be reexamined.