SOCI 361 Sustainable Central America
The Future Looks Different From Here
Let's study what works
- Discover how communities in Costa Rica and Panama are building more sustainable, healthy and prosperous lives.
- Our two-week travel component is entirely field-based with students learning hands-on from community leaders who are also farmers, nurses, teachers and entrepreneurs.
- How have they defined progress?
- What strategies have they used to meet their goals?
- Which have succeeded?
- What does the future look like from their perspective?
Global Issues, Local Perspectives
- Our award winning team of faculty from the US as well as scholars, experts, community liaisons and logistics team from Panama and Costa Rica has been working together since 2004, and bringing students to Central America since 2010.
- This collaboration gives unparalleled access to authentic voices on the front lines of global issues
- Understanding how problems like public health, habitat loss or poverty are being challenged at a community level is vital to progress on these issues.
- Local perspectives deepen, and challenge, global-level, structural, analysis by emphasizing the agency of the people most affected by these complex issues.
Short Term, Affordable, Applied
- Designed to make world-class international education possible for more students; whether they are experienced travelers or will get their first passport stamp when we arrive in Panama.
- Now offered at the State University of New York (SUNY) Potsdam, all instruction is in English with a curriculum emphasizing practical solutions that can be applied to a wide variety of majors.
- Two-week travel component is brief enough to fit into students’ schedules and budgets.
- Online training modules that are completed before traveling, allow students to spend each day in the field comparing the different paths taken by similar communities in different countries.
