Agus Morales, renowned journalist, visited the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the beginning of April for three days. He is the editor of the magazine 5W and writer of several books, including “We are not refugees”. He is also the winner of the 2019 prestigious Ortega y Gasset Prize and has collaborated with several news outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Gatopardo. He has spent many years working with victims of wars and displaced communities, writing humanizing stories about them.

On April 1st he gave a talk for SPA207, coordinated by Anais Holgado Lage, in which he put a focus on his chronicle “Olas libias”, an important reading for the course about his experiences on a rescue boat in the Mediterranean Sea. Then he visited SPA205, Medical Spanish, coordinated by Paloma Moscardó Vallés, to talk about his most recent field of study: the relationship between Mental Health and Migration.

He dedicated the next day to giving two presentations for SPA 107, the course coordinated by Iris Hauser, in front of a larger audience of students. Through ten photographs, he shared powerful stories of migration, displacement, spoke of refugees and borders, and discussed his work documenting these stories. Finally, on April 3rd he gave a talk for SPA206, Legal and Business Spanish, coordinated by Anna Alsina Naudi, about the process of asylum petition throughout the world, from a legal point of view.

It was an absolute pleasure to have Agus Morales with us and we were lucky that his broad expertise and life experiences allowed him to collaborate with a variety of our courses, reach so many of our students and engage in conversation with several instructors in the department.

Check out more photos on SPO's Instagram!