Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill., United States of America), in partnership with the University of Sarajevo and Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, organizes the Study Abroad Program Comparative Public Health: Serbia & Bosnia and Herzegovina 2023, to be held in Sarajevo and other places in Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end of July through mid-August. The program is part of a broad range of study abroad programs implemented by Northwestern across the world. The selection of the University of Sarajevo as one of the partner-institutions in Southeast Europe, as well as “Professor Zdravko Grebo” Center for Interdisciplinary Studies as a host affirms the credibility of University of Sarajevo and its instructors from different study areas as dependable partners by a most prestigious US university such as Northwestern University.
The longstanding cooperation in the summer study abroad program Comparative Public Health: Serbia & Bosnia and Herzegovina entails a series of lectures, workshops, visits to museums, memorial centers, galleries, public health centers, therapeutic communities, along with study trips in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in order to familiarize Northwestern students with Bosnia and Herzegovina’s past, tradition and culture, but also with the public health system in an administratively complex country. Studied in a comparative perspective with the health system in Serbia, the program gives a broader picture of the ways in which the societies and formal legal institutions in the post-Yugoslav region have been transformed.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northwestern students will take active participation in two different yet complementary programs. The first set of activities will be focused on studying Slavic civilization, i.e. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s layered historical, cultural and traditional identities in the context of contemporary political relations, as well as the operation of the administrative system, while the other part of the program will be dedicated to exploring the health system in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the primary and secondary health systems and mental health programs, treatment of addiction diseases, including the mechanisms and modalities of treatment for traumatic experiences. Thanks to this comprehensive program, Northwestern students’ learning process will be enriched not only because of the instruction by University of Sarajevo’s leading professors but also through an on-site and hands-on understanding of institutions that safeguard both the historical memory and the improvement of mental health of the whole society.