SHASS/MISTI Global Classroom awards funding to four projects

Four projects have been awarded funding through a round of grants from the SHASS/MISTI Global Classroom Fund. 

The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences created the new pool of funding to support subjects abroad led by SHASS faculty or teaching staff. SHASS/MISTI Global Classrooms are 2- to 4-week experiences that may take the form of a credit-bearing course; a student trip related to an on-campus, semester-long course; or a standalone non-credit-bearing student workshop. While some Global Classrooms explore “grand challenges” such as climate change, sustainability, and health, others focus on language, culture, and history.

Through an annual call for proposals, up to four projects are selected to receive $25,000 each toward course implementation. The next call for proposals will open February 2, 2027, with an application deadline of April 26, 2027.

The following projects have been awarded funding and will take place during IAP 2027, unless otherwise noted:

From the Forum to the Cypher: Hip Hop, Humanism, and the African Diaspora in Italy, led by MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing lecturer Amy Carleton, brings MIT undergraduates to Rome and Bologna to investigate a striking claim: that Hip Hop’s cultural structure—its rhetorical practices, pedagogical systems, and civic knowledge traditions—replicates the classical humanistic framework that emerged in ancient Rome and was refined during the Italian Renaissance.

Each day pairs a classical site or text with a contemporary Hip Hop practice: the Roman Forum alongside the cypher, Cicero’s rhetoric alongside MC battle structure, Renaissance public art alongside street art in Rome’s Ostiense district. Students also examine the African diaspora in Italy, exploring the fusion between contemporary Black cultural production and classical humanism. The course includes pre-departure reading and fieldwork preparation, daily reflection journals, a collaborative experience at the University of Bologna, and workshops with Italian Hip Hop practitioners and Afroscholars. Students produce a culminating multimedia project based on fieldwork conducted during the trip.

The course has five interconnected educational goals: (1) analysis of the structural continuities between classical rhetorical traditions and contemporary Hip Hop culture through direct engagement with Italian sites and practitioners; (2) articulating how the African diaspora in Italy has shaped and been shaped by both classical and contemporary cultural forms; (3) evaluating how cultural knowledge systems gain or are denied institutional recognition; (4) developing qualitative fieldwork skills—interviewing, site documentation, and cultural analysis—in an international context; and, (5) producing a culminating project—a multimedia essay, podcast episode, or creative work with critical reflection—that applies course concepts to a specific case study encountered during the trip.

MIT in Greece, co-led by Ancient and Medieval Studies lecturer Eric Driscoll and Concourse senior lecturer Linda Rabieh, is a 16-day IAP course focused on in-person study of the history, art, and philosophy of Greece. Students will gain a direct and immersive encounter with this extraordinary world and its significant legacy. Over the course of our time in Greece, students will develop skills in analyzing archeological remains while also engaging directly with the ideas embedded in its philosophy, poetry, art, and politics, all of which have much to teach us today.

Time in Greece will be spent on guided site and museum visits and supplemented by reading groups and other opportunities for discussing what we see. Our themes and goals will be established during two classroom lectures in Athens, which will prepare students to make the most out of our site visits.

Participants may visit several partner institutions: The American School of Classical Studies at Athens and its Wiener Laboratory, a cutting-edge facility for archaeological science, and the Institute for Aegean Prehistory’s center in Pacheia Ammos on Crete. The itinerary includes three days of site and museum visits in Athens, a week-long road trip into the Peloponnese and back to Athens via the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, a brief stay in Athens followed by a three-night excursion to Crete, and two final, concluding days back in Athens.

The Practical Field in Kenya, led by MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society professor Chakanetsa Mavhunga, is a partnership between the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society, MISTI Africa, and Origin Labs, a United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA)-initiated innovation hub and makerspace based at Dedan Kimathi University of Technology (DEKUT). Students seeking to use their skills for social impact will experience community-based experiential learning.ng.

By “field” we mean a space where practical work can be turned into learning through doing, for example, a crop field, a river, a forest, a workshop, etc. “Lab” is the work done at that space, whose outcomes are tangible, are scientifically tested, and meet local social and technical standards. The PFL is grounded in humanities and social science approaches to the interactions between local and nonlocal (including in-bound) ideas and things that local people assign technological meaning and purpose to.

Participants will travel to Nyeri, Kenya, to build on the principles of working at the intersection of multiple disciplines intentionally encompassing humanities, business, finance, science and technology studies, engineering, science, technical and vocation education and training (TVET) and everyday innovation. The sites—all located in communities off campus—have been selected to provide opportunities for students to immerse themselves and add value to people’s everyday innovations and creative resilience. The MIT students will be working on carefully assigned and examinable practical field tasks with their peers at DEKUT, as well as TVET students, engineers and artisans, constituting a vibrant peer-to-peer and community-academy practical knowledge osmosis. While the focus is on addressing the toughest challenges affecting small-holder fish farmers, students will immediately find themselves innovating with farmers not only of fish but unique circular aqua-agriculture systems, wherein wastes/by-products from one process are used as inputs in another.

Rambax Senegal Study Tour, co-led by MTA lecturer and director of the Rambax drum ensemble Amadou Lamine Touré and Music and Theater Arts professor Patricia Tang, offers students an opportunity to complete a cultural immersion capstone as part of the course 21M.460 (MIT Senegalese Drum Ensemble). The experience includes a week of daily intensive drum and dance lessons, building upon the material students have practiced at MIT, but bringing it to the next level with a cohort of Senegalese master drummers who will be assisting with the rehearsals. The trip includes two performances (in Dakar and in Kaolack), playing at tannibeers (nighttime drum and dance events).

Students traveling to Senegal can experience sabar drumming in its original cultural context, playing alongside a large group of Senegalese master drummers and deepening their knowledge and understanding of sabar in a way that is only possible on the ground in Senegal. The trip emphasizes cultural immersion; students will live “sénégalaisement” – i.e. in a typical Senegalese lodging alongside Senegalese drummers, eating in traditional Senegalese style (with bare hands, communally from a large platter) and learning to speak some Wolof and French along the way.

These four new SHASS/MISTI Global Classrooms are among many other MISTI Global Classrooms listed here.