Lauder Intercultural Ventures

ENTREPRENEURIAL ECONOMIES OF THE BALTIC BACKWATERS
March 6-14, 2020

This LIV will discuss the questions: Why does Denmark rank as one of the world’s best environments for doing business? Why is Estonia a startup paradise? Experience entrepreneurship in action by comparing and contrasting economies of business across two of the most vibrant countries in the European Union. This LIV will discuss how Denmark has established itself as one of the world’s leading entrepreneurial economies, including a focus on cultures of commerce, the ebb and flow of high capital investments, the rapid adoption of cutting-edge technology, and a growing professional workforce. Compare how Estonia’s advanced entrepreneurship policies, especially its progressive e-residency program, have enabled digital nomads, freelancers, and entrepreneurs from all over the world to get access to resources around company formation, banking, payment processing, and taxation. Discussions will also debate to what extent each country’s topographical features and geographical location have made certain kinds of business environments possible. For example, can Denmark’s advanced industrial peninsula and vast archipelago of 443 islands be productively compared to the striking biodiversity of Estonia on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea? What about the nature of politics and policies that have affected cultures in both countries? Through a series of firsthand experiences, including company tours, exchanges with local academics, and interactions with businesses at various stages, this LIV is all about entrepreneurship in action.

Listen to a Lauder student’s experience on this LIV by clicking the image below:

TAHITI AND ITS ARTS: FROM TRADITIONAL TO CONTEMPORARY
March 6-15, 2020

In this LIV, travel to Tahiti to think critically about how its artistic and cultural work functioned in the era before and after European contact and into the present. Traditional Tahitian art forms, from carvings to tattoos to dance, participated in complex ritual, social, and other contexts, conveying concepts that represented and connected these people to belief systems across Polynesia. European explorers arriving in the 18th and 19th centuries often described Tahiti as a paradise, as a place of beauty and bounty, while at the same time appraising its culture as “primitive” and its images as “idols,” turning its art into curiosities diverting to bourgeois audiences back home. Tahiti was also, for some nineteenth-century French travelers like Paul Gauguin, a place of escape from a world transformed by the industrial revolution. For many tourists today, Tahiti is an exotic destination, its arts repackaged for entertainment, purchase, and decoration in exclusive resorts. In this trip, you will encounter these and other ways that Tahiti’s art has functioned in and beyond its islands. How is Tahiti’s artistic past understood and represented in its museum and preserved for the present? What has been the impact of outsiders, from Captain Cook to James Michener, on how its arts are understood? How is it used, for example, in the travel industry and other sectors to perpetuate exoticizing narratives? To engage these and other questions, meet with curators, dealers, students, artists, and others to develop a more layered and nuanced understanding of the competing roles of art in contemporary Tahiti.