Welcome to our Winter 2022 edition! Another 20 Seattle
University students will be encountering the Eurovision Song Contest, digging
in, and seeing what they can find. They hail from undergraduate degree programs
all across the university and the vast majority of them are in their first year
of study.
Now almost two years into the pandemic, we’re back online
for January due to the Omicron Variant (which itself sounds like a Eurovision
band name), so we’re all hoping that Eurovision provides a little relief and
joy while we wait to meet up in person (and in masks) later in the quarter.
The students are all taking this first-year humanities
inquiry seminar as part of Seattle U’s Core Curriculum – a general education
program that provides all undergraduates a taste of different fields of
inquiry.
For the ten weeks of the course, each student will explore a
different country participating in the Eurovision Song Contest over the last
ten or so years. We’re focused mostly on countries that were east of the Iron
Curtain or were non-aligned during the Cold War, including some that didn’t
exist when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. One group, however, will be examining western-European
powers that once had empires and that profited from the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Students will be posting their assignments as individual
country blogs, each of which will be linked from this central site.
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 peer groups that will provide each other feedback
and support:
EX-EASTERN BLOC
BGR | Bulgaria
HUN | Hungary
POL | Poland
ROU | Romania
EX-SOVIET A
ARM | Armenia
AZE | Azerbaijan
BLR | Belarus
RUS | Russia
EX-SOVIET B
GEO | Georgia
LTU | Lithuania
MDA | Moldova
UKR | Ukraine
EX-WESTERN POWERS
BEL | Belgium
FRA | France
PRT | Portugal
ESP | Spain
EX-YUGOSLAV
HRV | Croatia
MNE | Montenegro
SRB | Serbia
SVN | Slovenia
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.
