CIEE, Prague

Gain insight into a variety of approaches to ensuring that children grow up healthy and with opportunities to become contributing members of society. The historical roots, current issues, and future challenges related to children’s well-being are addressed in this course by covering a broad spectrum of related topics, including family life, the influence of the turbulent 20th century on youth and education, regional and national differences in educational systems, preventive youth health care, public policy on social services and divorce support, parental leave, and daycare provision. Students also learn about alternative educational approaches, such as those developed by Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, Célestin Freinet, and A. S. Neill. The course includes guest speakers and incorporates guest talks and site visits to relevant museums/exhibitions.

This course examines the tremendous impact of social media on many walks of life, with a special emphasis on how social media have been transforming the profession of journalist and how the public now consumes news and information. It also offers a look beyond the field of journalism to consider how social media and online communities are profoundly affecting the ways in which young people form their identities and then how those identities develop later in life. Special sessions tackle the influence of social media on the construction of identity, and on the relationship and community building. Many of these issues are discussed in the context of Central and Eastern Europe and the Western experience of social media is compared to the situation in the post-communist world. The course addresses many questions related to social media, including the definition of social media; the role of social media in the formation of community; the role of social media as a uniting or dividing factor; the differences in the consumption of social media in Central and Eastern Europe; the role of social media technologies in constructions of youth, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality; the effect of social media improving on the state of journalism; changes in the role of the journalist with the advance of social media; and others.

This course examines the influence of psychoanalysis and art on each other. It primarily focuses on dream psychology, psychology of the creative process, and aesthetic experience. It explores basic conceptions of psychoanalytic psychology, including the unconscious, the formation of dreams, and conditionality of love. The psychoanalytic theory is evidenced with examples from visual art, literature, and film, some of which are explored through field trips to current exhibitions of Czech and international art, offering a first-hand experience. In addition to theoretical study of psychoanalysis and its application on art and artistic process, including the psychoanalysis of the creative process, the aesthetic experience, and psychoanalytic aesthetics and criticism (including film theory), students also employ the theories and techniques related to the creative process
to critically reflect on a work of art or to produce one of their own, accompanied by a reflection on their own creative process. The areas of art covered during the course include dreams and art, jokes and humor, surrealism, and the uncanny.

This course examines various elements of Czech non-mainstream culture, such as graffiti and street-art, political art collectives, the underground, new social movements, psychedelia, D.I.Y. music scenes, LGBTA, and social theatre. The instructor, an anthropologist with hands-on experience in local subcultures, assists in the application of critical theory to discuss the practices of “alternative” urban lives in postindustrial society and certain trends of artistic production. The course focuses on the political interpretation of youth subversion and disclosures of power mechanisms. Visuals and field trips to graffiti and other subcultural sites are a part of this course.

This interdisciplinary course discusses the identities of nations in European space that have served as a crossroad of ideas and ideologies, as well as wars and totalitarian regimes. The course covers masterpieces of Russian, Hungarian, German, French, Georgian, Polish, and Czech cinematography, focusing on several crucial periods of history, in particular WWII, its aftermath, and the Stalinist years. Students are exposed to often controversial works of film art focusing on the moral dilemmas of individuals under the stressful times of history. Students map the European space through the means of film, analyzing the individual’s approach to historical events, and gain a general picture of Europe in its crucial periods of history. Students participate in open discussion sessions following each screening.

Cultural psychology examines how our psychology (perception, emotion, judgment, attitudes, personality, etc.) and our culture (the distribution of values, practices, beliefs, institutions, and human-made physical environments within which each of us uniquely develops) make one another up. Some of the topics explored in this course include: how language influences how we think or what we can think about; the extent to which are our emotions shared across the species and the extent to which they depend on culture; mental disorders such as PTSD, depression, ADHD, or schizophrenia, which are more highly diagnosed in the U.S. than in other countries around the world; the role culture might play in mental health and in its diagnosis, and in the conception of mental disorders themselves. A common tension throughout this class is the extent to which we can—or should— generalize about psychology across the human species. Arguably, unlike any other species in earth's history, humans come into the world ill-prepared to survive in any particular physical environment; yet, thanks in large part to social and cultural systems, we are able to adapt across an extreme range of habitats. The basic question to examine here is: To what extent do people in all cultures share the same psychology and to what extent does our psychology differ along with our distinct cultures?