• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Scribe

Literary genius. Academic prowess

  • In the Press
  • Student Articles
  • Editor Blogs
    • Extended Reality: Applications and Implications
    • An Introduction to Flight
    • A Retrospective on Film
    • Psychology: Controversies and Myths
  • About
    • Alumni
    • Staff
  • Contact

A-broadening Your Horizons: HONY Abroad

October 8, 2014 by Georgia Soares Leave a Comment

Travelv1

Brandon Stanton, the creator of Humans of New York (HONY), has recently spent fifty days abroad to expand his photography project in underdeveloped, war- and/or poverty-stricken countries as part of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. The goal was to depict people from countries such as Iraq, Ukraine, and Jordan through the emotional and humane lens of his photography, whose aim is to connect people from all over the world by showing that we are more similar than we may imagine.

Stanton visited countries that are often addressed solely when linked to war and political chaos mirrors, and the significance of his work is in his attempt to focus on breaking geopolitical barriers between Americans and these foreigners, and to hopefully connect them on a more human-to-human rather than nation-to-nation or issue-to-issue basis.

Creating this type of connection serves to many students as motivation to temporarily move to another country and assimilate to a new culture. By studying abroad, one not only gains a different educational experience and the chance to explore a new country, but also to meet foreigners in ways that render them less “foreign” and more “personally familiar.”

This type of relationship building serves to open people’s minds to the fact that regular Americans share similarities with regular Turkish people, for example, and that one culture and learn from the other. In today’s world, where global conflicts have been leading more and more towards military rather than diplomatic measures, it is essential for people from different countries to make such connections and thus possibly come to care more personally about these problems.

Certainly people need to acquire a certain level of political and cultural awareness to best understand foreigners, but a key component that HONY has sought to feature and that study abroad experiences may lead to is the connection to the more personal, human side to people who, from afar, may only be generalized into categories such as “war refugees” “extremists,” for example.

People’s invested interest grows the most when they create a personal, emotional connection to an issue. We may not react strongly to slave workers in Bangladesh, for instance, unless we personally know a victim or is somehow personally affected by it. HONY does not directly provide people with experiences, but it does create more emotional, personal ties among strangers. Although it is unlikely that study abroad programs would provide such serious connections among people, it is still one of the greatest chances college students would have to immerse themselves in a new culture and try to better understand and connect with foreigners on a more personal level.


Georgia Soares

View all posts

Filed Under: Featured Blogs

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Editor Blogs

  • An Introduction to Flight
  • Extended Reality: Applications and Implications
  • A Retrospective on Film
  • Psychology: Controversies and Myths

Recent Posts

  • Predicting the Path a Particle Will Take in a Fluid: A Brief Overview
    Oliver Khan
    February 16, 2023
  • MDMA and Psychotherapy
    Kaitlyn Woods
    February 16, 2023
  • Monocular Visual Cues and VR
    Shanna Finnigan
    February 16, 2023
  • A Guide Through the Proof of the (Second) Fundamental Theorem of Calculus
    Oliver Khan
    February 2, 2023
  • Innate Moral Core: Part 2 (Morality in Preverbal Children)
    Kaitlyn Woods
    February 2, 2023
  • Why I Write on XR
    Shanna Finnigan
    February 2, 2023
  • Constructing the Riemann Integral: A Brief Prelude to Real Analysis
    Oliver Khan
    November 11, 2022
  • Kiki’s Delivery Service: Emerging into Adulthood
    Dayvin Mendez
    November 11, 2022

Copyright © 2023 · Scribe on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in