About Our Program in Jordan and Turkey

[The header image, atop our pages, was built by Lisa Berasi, an artist and graphic designer based in Arlington, Mass. She used photographs taken by our talented students on their travels in Jordan and Turkey. Lisa can be reached at lcberasi@gmail.com.]

We are 19 students and three professors traveling abroad to two countries as part of Northeastern University’s Dialogue of Civilization program. This particular Dialogue is a collaboration between the School of Journalism and the departments of Photography and International Affairs. There are 13 writers and 6 photographers, working together as a traveling press corps. The program strives to deliver to its students “experiential learning” at its most sophisticated and professional level. Though they are indeed undergraduates, the students are functioning here as professionals in the field, writing not just for their professors or a campus-wide audience, but for anyone in the world who wants to read them. Northeastern’s School of Journalism created this program two years ago in collaboration with Denis Sullivan, director of the Middle East Center for Peace, Culture and Development at the university. Then, (in 2009) we went to three countries – Egypt, Syria and Qatar – to report. You can visit the product of that effort here. We are continuing to talk about expanding the program in the future with the hopes of returning, with student journalists, to these and other parts of the Middle East region.