In June 2025, I was meant to travel to Cape Town, South Africa. I was directing a study-abroad programme in which biology undergraduates would learn how biomedical research is affected by social policy and ethical considerations across borders and cultures. The course, called ‘From Lab to Governance’, would be the highlight of my teaching portfolio as a biologist with an interest in ethics and social inequalities: an opportunity to mentor students and to witness their curiosity unfold while they attended museums and spoke to representatives of biomedical organizations.
Then, two weeks before my scheduled departure from the United States, an e-mail arrived. My visa had been denied by the South African authorities. They didn’t provide a reason, and I still don’t really know why it happened.
As course director, I had already taught introductory bioethics during the spring semester of 2025 at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. I had planned every site visit meticulously, to places including the Aurum Institute, a health-care organization based in Johannesburg that focuses on HIV and tuberculosis, as well as the offices of the South African Medical Research Council in Cape Town. I’d scheduled social excursions in coordination with South African partners and the William & Mary study-abroad office, including a trip to the District Six Museum, which commemorates the forced removal of Black South Africans and people of mixed ancestry from this Cape Town neighbourhood when the area was designated ‘whites only’ in 1959. Overnight, my plans collapsed.
Quick change
My initial response was a mixture of professional embarrassment and personal frustration. All 15 of my undergraduate students had already booked their travel. They were US citizens and did not require a visa, but I, as citizen of India, did. It was much too late to cancel accommodation and other prepaid services. What would the study-abroad office think? Had I made an error in my visa application? I knew I had applied correctly, and well in advance — two months ahead, with the typical turnaround at the time being two weeks — yet the uncertainty about what had gone wrong was deeply unsettling.
I also felt huge guilt. Would this affect how future field-trip proposals from international faculty members were judged? And how could I credibly teach a course built around immersion in a place I could not enter? I pictured myself on an iPad screen, carried around and attempting to lecture students through a tiny speaker as they wandered the museum archives.
In the end, to best serve the students’ education and experience, I had to rethink the course. At the last moment, my institution found a colleague, linguist Iyabo Osiapem, whose research differed substantially from mine, but who could support students on-site in Cape Town. The programme proceeded mostly as planned. The students explored South Africa’s rugged nature, learned from local people about their experiences, visited non-profit organizations and interacted with partners and colleagues at South African biomedical institutions. For me, however, Zoom replaced classroom conversations; I used Google Earth to explore neighbourhoods; and I watched live-recorded tours from colleagues instead of attending in-person museum and site visits.
Mayank Chugh’s class at a beach in Cape Town, South Africa — without him.Credit: Qhawe Mkebe
I found the pivot uncomfortable and instructive. I learnt to design live polls, facilitate extended discussions about site visits and invite local experts to be guest speakers — all of which added depth to the course. Coordinating across time zones and institutional cultures sharpened my skills in digital pedagogy and international collaboration much more quickly than any workshop ever could.
Unexpectedly, the course flourished. Discussions deepened. Students read about and analysed historical factors and contemporary debates in bioethics with a sophistication I had hoped for but not taken for granted. For instance, using HIV case studies, we did a deep dive into how the idea of informed consent in biomedical studies with human participants differs between wealthy countries and poorer ones; in the latter, community tends to take priority over individual autonomy.
Of course, the programme’s success would not have been possible without the extraordinary flexibility and student-centred support of Osiapem in South Africa and William & Mary’s study-abroad office.
Some losses, however, were unavoidable. I did not absorb the texture of place, I missed informal conversations and I did not get to visit the art galleries I had hoped to see in my free time. But the experience revealed something surprising: study abroad is not only about physical presence. It is also about attention, interpretation and perspective. Teaching remotely forced me to experience Cape Town and Johannesburg through my students’ eyes — and to pay closer attention as a result.
