Lauder Intercultural Ventures

WATER ISSUES AND INNOVATION
March 6-15, 2020

This LIV will focus primarily on how Israeli society has managed its water resources, and aims to foster insights into the unique challenges posed by Israel’s natural and geopolitical location, and the successes that Israel has enjoyed in meeting those challenges. Students will explore water in Israel in all its political, historical, communal, agricultural, technological, entrepreneurial, and business dimensions. Students will learn how geopolitical and cultural factors pushed Israel toward innovative solutions in water recycling and conservation, clean technology, drip irrigation, public policy, investment, and resource management. This LIV will include visits to both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where they will learn from a historical and political viewpoint about the factors that led Israel to innovation in water technologies. Historical and cultural sites will include the Old City of Jerusalem, Ben Gurion Tomb, and Nazareth. Students will visit the National Water Carrier, a desalination plant, and meet researchers and investors in new technologies.

Click here to read about student perspectives after visiting an international school in Tel Aviv.

SOCIAL IMPACT FROM A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT
March 6-15, 2020

Mongolia is home to one of today’s few remaining populations of pastoral nomads, a legacy reflected in the vast open landscape and the nation’s music, art, oral traditions, and poetry. This LIV will explore how this nomadic lifestyle is changing and adapting as more Mongolians move to cities, massive new mines bring new wealth and strong protests, and global climate change puts pressure on traditional practices. Activities will include a tour of a local non-profit that works to help build infrastructure resources for ger district residents, a tour of Erdenet, a socialist mine, a countryside excursion to meet herding families, meeting with young Mongolian cultural figures, and a meeting with an advisor to the president of Mongolia on “controversies of development”, from a governmental perspective.

“Participating in the Mongolia LIV was a wonderful opportunity to explore a new culture and to stay connected with the Lauder community after graduation.”

-Frank DeSimone, Class of ’15

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.