Winter 2024 Honors Rome
Streams of migrants flow north daily from the southern hemisphere to Italy and the United States, where Europe held colonies, and the United States dominated business and politics for generations. The two countries are also both wrestling with swings in political discourse and shifting immigration policy, all at the same time as their citizens are occupied with debates about perceived threats to cultural identity. Italy and the United States provide similarities and contrasts for studying migration, immigration law, resettlement, and the lived experience of migrants. And so a group of 21 of us went to the University of Washington Rome Center during the Winter 2024 Quarter to do just that.
Roman Forum
Nineteen undergraduate honors students (and two Professors) joined two Italian Professors in four courses designed to complement each other and to provide students with a broad experience living in a world capital. They took basic Italian to be able to navigate the city, have some understanding of simple commerce, and greet their neighbors. The students took a lecture course which outlined patterns of disasters from genocide and civil war, to earthquakes and global warming. It focused on the varied traumas migrants experience from physical assault and depravation, to perilous migration routes, camps, detention, torture, and trafficking. And they learned about the institutions, policies and immigration law in Italy and the U.S. that migrants must navigate after they escape. The students worked in and examined resettlement organizations assisting migrants in Rome, and had some limited contact with refugees in these service sites. Finally, they studied Roman history and used the built environment of Rome to study narratives of power through the millennia that continue to reverberate today in discussions of public benefits, law and order, citizenship, trafficking, forced assimilation, and structures of inequity. Each course touched on elements relevant to the other courses and challenged students intellectually and emotionally.
Rome at sunset
The undergraduate students came from Environmental Studies, Biology, Philosophy, History, Public Health, Public Policy, and Anthropology. There is no discipline untouched by migration studies, from the biology of starvation and traumatic brain injury to the politics of water during global warming, as such there is something for each discipline and an expertise each student has to teach their peers. While this was not the international lark many will describe their study abroad program to be, the students engaged with real people, living the topics they were reading about, they learned about the enormity of losses faced, and the remarkable resilience of survivors, and while the workload was not overwhelming and they did have an opportunity to travel, many of them reported having their eyes opened to the hard realities of history and public policy, and firmly feeling they had left more provincial views behind.
Written by Dr. Jonathan Carey Jackson, professor in the Department of Medicine and an adjunct professor in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington. Dr. Jackson has 32 years of experience designing research programs and services for immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. He has mentored and taught generations of graduate students, medical students, residents, fellows, and colleagues on refugee-related issues for decades.