IFE: A European actor
As a structure composed of three not-for-profit educational organizations, one each in France, Belgium, and Spain IFE’s hallmark is its local rootedness. IFE can be seen as a network of European practitioners and academic figures, working in various roles to provide students from American universities detailed exposure to European reality in five cities through direct, sustained, local engagement. This network is engaged in a permanent process of evaluation/reflection/innovation in cross-cultural pedagogy in a contemporary European context.
IFE’s core actors – administrators, teachers, research advisors, mentors – are Europeans committed to the notion that all IFE students, regardless of their varied fields, are also anthropologists, studying to discover and understand difference as encountered on the ground, including in their field, and to place it in a larger – historical, European – context.