IDH 3034/35 Diplomacy Lab

Diplomacy Lab is a U.S. State Department and university research partnership program, and is offered at FIU through the Honors College in the form of a year-long course.  Students form a group to tackle foreign policy challenges and work with Department of State representatives to build a final product.

For one project, we created an intelligence brief tracking gender-inclusive language usage on President Maduro’s Instagram account.  We briefed our findings to six State Department representatives specializing in Venezuelan- and Colombian-American affairs.  Here, I have included the final product for the gender-inclusive language project.

AMH 2020 American History Since 1877

AMH 2020 focuses on central themes and questions pertaining to United States history from 1877 until the present day.  Students examine a broad range of topics, including tenets of the U.S. constitution, social movements, war, economic and political development, immigration, and issues pertaining to race, ethnicity, and gender.

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As I was raised abroad and came to the U.S. with little understanding of its history, this class was instrumental in helping me contextualize the United States we see today.  Part of our assignments included writing essays to discuss a particular question and "gobbets", wherein we analyzed primacy sources.  Here, I included two documents illustrating the final work of this class.

INR 4075 International Protection of Human Rights

INR 4075 highlights the development of the concern of the international community with human rights and the institutional mechanisms which have been set up for their protection.  This is a more interactive course, where, students discuss various human  rights cases related to the topic of the week.

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Through this course, I delved deeper into nuances regarding human rights.  How does religion inform our concepts of human rights, and where does it cause conflict?  What do we think human rights issues will look like in the future?  Our discussions, essays, and exams all required critical thinking to reach a cohesive, sound argument.  Here, I have attached the essay I wrote on the plight of the Uyghurs.