Ewa Callahan

Fifteen undergraduate students will travel to Poland and the Czech Republic this spring as part of their QU 301 seminar on global community.

Students will take part in broad discussions on international human rights throughout the course, which will culminate in an 11-day trip in May to various sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. The course will allow students to explore political, social, cultural, religious, ecological and economic systems that define the global community.

Ewa Callahan, assistant professor of communications and a native of Poland, will lead the seminar and the trip.

Callahan says she chose two eastern European countries because they are "a great example of the role the free media and religion played in the process of abolishing the communist regime and the transformation to democracy."

In Krakow, students will explore Nowa Huta, a nearby communist utopian worker city, and the site of the former Auschwitz concentration camp. The group will also visit several Catholic religious sites and Judaic quarter known from the movie "Schindler's List."

In Prague, students will take a guided tour of sites related to the popular uprising in 1968 (Prague Spring), and visit the Museum of Communism, which hosts exhibitions related to censorship and media propaganda. The students will also visit the headquarters of Radio Free Europe, which currently transmits news to people of central Asia.

"During the course, we will be discussing other countries where human rights are violated and freedoms oppressed, so I am hoping that even before the trip, students will gain understanding of the mechanisms that are responsible for those situations," Callahan said.

"Visiting the sites will enrich this experience and will allow students to understand it in more detail."