It’s January 2021...
The Seattle metropolitan area has been living, working, and studying in remote mode since early March, having been the first place in the US to detect the presence of COVID-19. For many of us, that’s ten long months of makeshift workstations, dodgy bandwidth issues, eye strain, back ache, and cat tails inopportunely quivering across our screens and alleviating the Zoom fatigue.
On top of that, in the first week of Winter Quarter at Seattle U, we found the US’s sense of self in turmoil. Between our first two classes of the quarter, predominantly white insurrectionists invaded the US Capitol in Washington, DC, protesting a democratic election result they didn’t like. For sure, we’re living through a strange moment in the history of the USA.
So what better time could there be to think about ideas of nation and identity – and to wrap all that in the gloriously entertaining and perplexing, unifying and divisive context of the Eurovision Song Contest?
Nineteen intrepid students from degree programs all across the university – from STEM fields to humanities, from fine arts to social sciences, from business to nursing – are dipping their toes into the world of Eurovision, mostly for the first time in their lives. And what a treat Eurovision has in store for them!
The course they’re taking is a first-year humanities inquiry seminar as part of Seattle U’s Core Curriculum – a general education program that requires all undergraduates to get a taste of different fields of inquiry.
For the ten weeks of the course, each student will be exploring a different country that has participated in the Eurovision Song Contest over the last ten years. And as we seek to center the margins in our curricula, the countries they’ve chosen this year are not the usual go-tos of western Europe but were either east of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War or were non-aligned. Only four of the nineteen were even independent states prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Students will be posting their assignments as individual country blogs, each of which is linked from this central site.
Want to #JoinUs?
One of the thrills of using a public blog format is the chance to have a real audience.
We would love it if any of you who are either Eurovision fans or are Eurovision-curious would check out the students’ work and offer kind and constructive feedback.
Students have the opportunity to revise two written blog posts, so your feedback could really aid them in deepening their understanding and honing their skills as communicators.
This year, students have chosen following countries to study, organized into five regional peer groups that will provide each other feedback and support:
CENTRAL/EASTERN REGION
HUN | Hungary https://hungaryinharom.blogspot.com/
MDA | Moldova https://3minutemoldova.blogspot.com/
POL | Poland https://3minutepoland.blogspot.com/
UKR | Ukraine https://3minuteukraine.blogspot.com/
NORTH BALKAN REGION
BIH | Bosnia
& Herzegovina https://3minbosnia.blogspot.com/
HRV | Croatia https://triminutehrvatske.blogspot.com
SRB | Serbia https://serbiaeurovisionch.blogspot.com/
SVN | Slovenia https://3minuteslovenia.blogspot.com/
NORTHEASTERN REGION
BLR | Belarus https://3minutebelarus.blogspot.com/
EST | Estonia https://threeminuteestonia.blogspot.com/
LVA | Latvia https://3mingada.blogspot.com/
LTU | Lithuania https://3minlithuania.blogspot.com/
SOUTH BALKAN REGION
ALB | Albania https://threeminalbania.blogspot.com/
BGR | Bulgaria https://danawebbber.blogspot.com/
MNE | Montenegro https://3minmontenegro.blogspot.com/
SOUTHEASTERN REGION
ARM | Armenia https://threeminutearmenia.blogspot.com/
AZE | Azerbaijan https://threeminuteeurovision.blogspot.com/
GEO | Georgia https://3mineuro.blogspot.com/
RUS | Russia https://threeminuterussia.blogspot.com/
We’re all looking forward to your comments, suggestions, links, and encouragement. And if you have any thoughts or questions about this project and course as a whole, do drop us a line below in the comments.
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