Program Overview

Program Overview

The Berlin: City of Remembering and Forgetting program is a Faculty-led Global Learning Program offered by Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies. This program allows students to travel to Berlin, Germany, and engage in immersive learning experiences, exploring the city's complex cultural lineages and historical traumas.

Course Details

Syllabus

The program's syllabus is available as a downloadable document (F26 Berlin City of Remembering and Forgetting Syllabus.docx).

Instructional Dates

The program takes place from September 23, 2026, to December 04, 2026.

Travel Dates

Students will travel to Berlin from October 18, 2026, to November 28, 2026.

Credits

The program offers 12 credits, with the course code FAIR 337.

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this program.

Program Description

In this program, students will investigate and respond to the living force of German colonization and genocides, Nazism and the Holocaust, postwar mass migrations, and contemporary communities of immigrants, workers, artists, organizers, and returned exiles. Through reading, writing, artistic research, collaboration, site study, and critical discussions, students will interrogate, debate, contemplate, and struggle through how violent histories are remembered and overwritten in the city.

Program Highlights

• Berlinische Galerie, permanent exhibition Art in Berlin
• Revolutionary Berlin Walking Tour: Rosa Luxemburg's Berlin
• Weekly 'Durational Contemplation' seminar at the Institute for Art in Context
• Floating University Berlin: A Natureculture learning site
• Ravensbrück Concentration Camp Memorial
• Jewish Museum Berlin, permanent exhibition Jewish Life in Germany: Past & Present
• Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)
• Discussion with Pary El-Qalqili, Palestinian German artist
• FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum, permanent exhibition Re/assembling anti-racist Struggles: An open archive
• Savvy Contemporary: The Laboratory of Form-Ideas

Expectations of Participants

The course will span five introductory sessions at Fairhaven College, followed by over six weeks of immersive engagement in Berlin, Germany. In Berlin, students will meet on average three days a week, including a praxis-based seminar every Friday with international graduate students at the Institute for Art in Context. Students will be paired with an Art in Context mentor-collaborator and will work on assignments, explore Berlin, and participate in a bookmaking workshop at Colorama.

Accommodations and Accessibility

The program accommodates students with disabilities, ensuring equal participation and opportunity. Students must work with the WWU Disability Access Center to determine specific accommodations or services.

Health and Safety

The program strongly recommends that all students traveling on this Global Learning Program are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to maximize the safety of the student cohort.

Program Schedule

The program will end the second-to-last week of the Fall quarter, with a final reflection session in exam week. Students will have the option to continue traveling in Europe afterwards through Winter Break.

Testimonials

"The word that is called to mind when I think of Berlin, as explored in this program, is entangled; encircled, enclosed, and endeared.

We were given generous guidance and opportunity to engage directly, with and through our bodies, in sites of in/significance, ruin, preservation and memorial. I learned to take my own entanglings seriously, and to follow sensory cues toward constructive and creative expressions. It is a city, and program, of tension as well as release. I learned just as much about what it means to be enclosed in and care for a body, as it is to inhabit a place, all with the encouragement from peers, passersby, community partners, and professors.

Instances of engagement, such as the Tisch with House of Taswir, were each exceptional, even when challenging and heartbreaking. I say this because it fundamentally is not "easy" to do this work; though, discomfort was something I learned to be comforted in without erasing that ache, instead, humbling and finding myself more open as a result. Partly because our dialogue encircled itself, and asked us to hold a center for which we could examine from many different points of reference. Retaining a center is another lesson, I carry with me.

Lastly, there is much to be endeared by, the content aside. I call to mind the steady-tilting view from the railways, how it rocked me awake or asleep. The ever-present songs of birds carried in wind, and the many seedpods and swamps, I found new and familiar. I recall the sound of a tea spoon clinking the side of a glass, sitting in Turkish Cafés, and the hollering of music from windows and wheatpaste posters. I recall my peers, their ear-to-ear smiles and sometimes sobbing faces; their awe, hunger, critique, laughter, all which inspired me and allowed me the grace to show up however I was each day. Each time I look in their eyes, now, I feel our feet settle in both soils. We carry and share it forever. The stories, and stories, and stories, I participated in, and listened to, that I read, and that I wrote. I recall the way the city heeds its own vibrance."

Iliana Bradley, Spring 2022

Scholarships

• WWU Foundation Scholarships
• Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship
• WorldStrides Scholarships for Custom Programs