Summer Abroad Info Session - Manila

Learn about Philippine history, culture, and society through interactions with Filipino people, as well as selected lectures by leading scholars in the Philippines. Students will be based at the University of the Philippines Diliman, the flagship campus of the national university system, and will go on field trips to farming communities, urban poor communities, the Cordillera mountain region, and more. The course asks: How can we learn about Philippine history, culture, and society? What makes “experiencing” the chanting of an epic, with its ever changing narrative, different from reading it as a “fixed” text in a book? What can we know about Filipino spirituality through the work of a tattoo artist from a Kalinga village? What can a contractual factory worker on strike tell us about the Philippine economy from his/her point of view? How can we understand the situation of Filipino peasants by witnessing/participating in field labor and hearing the songs they have written? This course brings students on a research trip to the Philippines to learn through interviews and interactions with Filipino people, as well as selected lectures by the Philippines’ leading scholars. Among the other topics to be explored are: the Japanese Occupation (1942-1945) through the eyes of “comfort women”; indigenous knowledge, such as indigenous law, mathematics, and engineering in the Banaue rice terraces; health care and urban poor communities; and Martial law (1972-1986) memory and counter-memory from survivors of torture and detention. 

Highlights include:

• Program is based on the University of the Philippines flagship Diliman campus in Manila
• Excursions to visit and learn from indigenous communities the Cordillera mountain region, farming communities outside of Manila, factory workers and more.
• Consistent lectures from community organizations, artists, musicians, and leading scholars in the Philippines.

Visit our program page to learn more!