CROSS-BORDER ARTISTIC EXCHANGES
CROSS-BORDER ARTISTIC EXCHANGE - PRISTINA, KOSOVO
In May of 2015 five students from the University of Belgrade, Serbia traveled to Kosovo for an exchange program with twenty students from the University of Pristina, Kosovo. The program was an exchange for writers to share their work and learn about each other’s culture. Living segregated from each other they learned about the history of both the Albanian and the Serbian communities in Kosovo with a tour of Pristina, a traditional ethnic Albianian village, and the Gračanica Monastery- an important site to Serbian Orthodoxy. Later, students participated in a joint reading of their writing at Kosovo’s ESL teacher conference. That night they came together for a 'Writers Dinner' to celebrate their accomplishments and participate in 'flash-writing' activities. This highly successful exchange shows the importance of bringing young people together from across the region to begin a new, positive conversation for a new generation.
CROSS-BORDER ARTISTIC EXCHANGE - BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA
Building on the previous year's artistic exchange on March 17, 2016 EL Fellow Nathan William Meyer and seven members of the Balkan Writers Project (BWP) traveled to Bosnia and Herzegovina to lead three days of intercultural exchange activities. These events promoted English through creative projects and citizen diplomacy by collaborating with young English students from Bosnia and Kosovo. They presented their projects at International Burch University's student symposium in Sarajevo and held a public event and joint round-table reading with writers from Kosovo. In Mostar they led a flash fiction writing workshop for aspiring Bosnian writers. This successful exchange spanned cultural, national, and religious divides to continue the positive cross-border dialogue and collaboration mission of the Balkan Writers Project to use English to build peace and understanding between young people in post-conflict environments.
