2nd Annual Woolf Symposium

CEA CAPA is pleased to announce our 2024 Woolf Symposium, hosted by Emerson College in Boston on March 19, 2024. This year's theme will be: "Navigating Difference: Otherness, Boundaries, and the Idea of the Stranger."

The enterprise of education abroad is, at its core, about navigating differences idea that by going somewhere else, where things are different, we learn things that we would not have learned by staying at home. But now, in many ways, students are confronted with sameness as much as difference-global brands scattered throughout their new environs, English as a lingua franca, and ever-present social media and popular culture providing familiar backdrops to ostensibly novel experiences.

As a field, how do we effectively navigate this tension between sameness and difference in pedagogy and program design? As importantly, why? What exactly do these dynamics teach our students? Difference is defined by boundaries and notions of otherness-and the idea of the stranger can be a fertile one in how we construct and convey the experience of education abroad. How do we frame perceptions of groups and individuals, constructions of stereotypes, and the narratives around them? How can we, with pedagogical skillfulness, trace the lines between exotic allure and dehumanization, alienation and engagement, curiosity and indifference, openness and mistrust? In a world that is both rife with conflict and collectively facing common global challenges, how do we prompt students to leverage self-reflection and critical thinking in interrogating differences, navigating boundaries, and engaging with strangeness?

This symposium seeks to bring scholars and practitioners from early to late career-together around these questions, with a focus on translating ideas into publications and further dialogue for the field of education abroad. Participants may choose to simply attend, or to prepare a 15-minute thought piece to share and discuss with the group on the following or related topics:

• Navigating difference
• Encountering strangers, and being a stranger
• Boundaries and otherness
• The idea of ambilocation
• The role of the incidental: coincidence and casual conversations
• The effect of the digital age
• Ethical dimensions of engaging across difference
• Sameness in a foreign land