By Jeremy Craig, Communications Manager for the Office of the Provost

A team from Georgia State University has garnered a Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad grant from the U.S. Department of Education for a four-week seminar next summer, where Georgia State will take 16 educators and students in the humanities and social sciences to study Afro-Brazilian culture.

Participants will travel to Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, where they will study Portuguese, and learn about the culture, art, history, politics, and community of Afro-Brazilians. Activities will include lectures, seminars, cultural events, and culturally relevant excursions to become fully immersed in the culture of Salvador da Bahia, located in a country that has the second largest population of Black people outside of the African continent.

Co-Directors for this Global Education Initiative project include:

• Program Director: Dr. Lakeyta Bonnette-Bailey, Professor of Africana Studies, Co-Director of the Center for the Advancement of Student and Alumni (CASA)
• Language Director: Dr. Leslie Marsh, Chair of World Languages and Culture
• Co-Director for Diasporic Connections: Dr. Elizabeth West, Professor of English
• Co-Director for Student Engagement and Involvement: Dr. Kyle Frantz, Co-Director of CASA

Among the 16 participants will be 12 humanities and social science educators — six college-level and six elementary/secondary educators — and four advanced undergraduates.

This Global Education Initiative project (GEI) is led through the CASA, the Center for Studies on Africa and Its Diaspora (CSAD), the Department of Africana Studies, and the Department of World Languages and Cultures.

Through this program, which seeks to remove the boundaries between the experiences of African Americans and the experiences of Black people throughout the African diaspora, the Georgia State team will:

• Enrich collaboration between world languages and other humanities and social science disciplines
• Establish long-term associations with Brazilian educators
• Broaden collaborations between elementary, middle, high school and college educators
• Increase knowledge and understanding of Afro-Brazilian cultures and communities of Bahia among United States educators
• Develop the inclusion of Afro-Brazilian history and culture into international area studies courses
• Introduce Portuguese language study for research abroad
• Encourage and support advanced undergraduates interested in pursuing graduate studies in modern foreign language or area studies

The Fulbright-Hays grant program is supported by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of International and Foreign Language Education. More information is available at https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/iegps/index.html.