Following a highly successful inaugural iteration held in the Caribbean, two leading higher education institutions — The University of the West Indies Five Islands Campus, based in Antigua and Barbuda, and Canada’s University of Toronto — are moving forward to turn their collaborative summer study abroad programme into a permanent annual offering.
Hosted across three weeks at UWI’s Five Islands Campus, the first edition of the programme centered on the specialized interdisciplinary course “Rethinking Crime, Law and Power in the Caribbean.” University representatives note that the programme marks a key step in reviving cross-institutional exchange opportunities between the two schools, with a formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) already structured to enable ongoing reciprocal exchanges of both students and faculty members for years to come.
This year’s inaugural cohort brought together a diverse group of learners pursuing studies across a wide range of fields, including pre-law, prison reform, criminology, public policy, computer science, and mathematics. Leading academics who facilitated the course say the hands-on, immersive experience pushed participants to re-examine long-held assumptions about deeply interconnected social issues shaping the Caribbean region: systemic race relations, structural poverty, patterns of criminal activity, and systemic dispossession of marginalized communities.
“All, if not the majority of our students, have profoundly changed the way that they think about the nature of race relations [and] the nature of poverty,” one senior academic involved in the programme shared.
Unlike traditional classroom-only courses, the programme blended traditional lectures and in-depth seminar discussions with immersive field trips across Antigua and Barbuda. Students visited sites including the island of Barbuda, Betty’s Hope — a historic former sugar plantation that offers key context for the region’s colonial history — the Dennis Bowers Rehabilitation Centre, and His Majesty’s Prison, giving learners first-hand insight into the criminal justice and social systems the course explored.
Programme organizers report that the experience left a lasting impact on all participants. Many students were so transformed by their time in Antigua and Barbuda that a group has already begun organizing an independent reunion trip scheduled for within the next two years.
Beyond the benefits for international students visiting the Caribbean, the cross-institutional collaboration also opens new doors for UWI Five Islands students to gain broader exposure to Canadian educational systems and social issues. As one UWI official explained, the small Caribbean nation’s geography, economy, and culture are all deeply shaped by global dynamics. Giving local students the chance to engage with perspectives from a country like Canada is a critical step in expanding their worldviews and knowledge bases.
The official added that University of Toronto’s robust, widely recognized criminology programme creates a strong foundation for deepened academic collaboration between the two institutions in coming years, opening doors for joint research, curriculum development, and additional exchange opportunities beyond the annual summer programme.