Monday morning was the opening of the weeklong World Humanities Expo at Santa Fe College, where exhibits, speakers, food and performances give visitors a glimpse of cultures from around the world.
The large activity room is sectioned into areas, with Asia, Latin America, the U.S., Africa, Europe and world religions each getting a display with a variety of student-created exhibits, including models, pictures, paintings and other creative displays.
Rafael Ramos, a 20-year-old English major at SFC, said he liked the diversity of the projects.
“I think it’s just to expose people more to different cultures,” Ramos said. “By doing that, they help to prevent prejudices because they give people an understanding of what other cultures might be thinking.”
Event organizer William Little, chairman of the Humanities and Foreign Languages Department at Santa Fe, said the main purpose of the expo is to inspire, educate and entertain.
“My sense is that people don’t have a real feeling for what the humanities are,” Little said. “So this is meant to concentrate what they are.”
Little said the displays are all graded projects created by Santa Fe students in humanities classes, and he said this is the seventh year for the expo but the first year it has been opened up to the local community.
Little said the rest of the week will feature prominent speakers such as Dr. Philip Williams, director of Latin American studies at UF, and Nobuho Nagasawa, an international artist and professor at Stony Brook University.
The expo is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in room R-01.
