Dartmouth College Using ‘Black Panther’ & Wakanda To Teach Foreign Policy Class

Dartmouth College Using ‘Black Panther’ & Wakanda To Teach Foreign Policy Class

“Black Panther” is the gift that keeps on giving! It’s the highest grossing superhero movie of all time, inspired a pro-Black cosplay movement and now it’s helping teach foreign policy.

Students enrolled in the“Students in The Challenge of Global Poverty: Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It” class at Dartmouth College are studying how to apply and implement foreign policy by reimagining how character T’Challa could have used the resources of Wakanda in neighboring countries. Their professor, former deputy administrator for the United States Agency for International Development, Donald Steinberg, says the idea of their Wakanda-themed 120-page report wasn’t immediately well-received. He explained, 

Everyone looked at me like I was crazy. By the end of the class, though, I had four people come up and volunteer to be ‘deputy ministers’ to put the process together.

Senior student Caroline Hsu says she, too, was skeptical about using “Black Panther” as a reference, but was soon on-board. She commented,

It was kind of absurd at first, to be honest…But tying it to a movie made it more applicable to us because everyone in the class had basically seen the movie.

If a Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan movie were used as teaching tools while we we’re in school, we’d all be straight-A students!

By: Miata Shanay