There’s a course being taught at the University of Oregon that’s unlike any class offered there before — and possibly the first of its kind in the nation, according to UO. Now in its second year, the course on hostage diplomacy is attracting undergraduates interested in pursuing careers in journalism, public relations and advertising.
The students hear from guest speakers, including family members of current and former hostages and experts who’ve helped negotiate the release of hostages and journalists who have been wrongfully detained by foreign governments. In the spring, students travel to Washington, D.C. to meet with congressional staffers, U.S. State Department officials and NGOs like The James W. Foley Legacy Foundation and HostageUS.
The course is being co-taught by Jason Rezaian, the 2026 Eric W. Allen Faculty Fellow at UO and The Washington Post’s Director of Press Freedom Initiatives. While reporting in Tehran, Iran for The Washington Post, Rezaian was arrested by Iranian authorities in 2014 and wrongfully imprisoned for 544 days before the U.S. government secured his release in January 2016.
Rezaian joins us, along with three UO students who share their experiences with the course: Maren Fullerton, a senior double majoring in advertising and political science; Taylor Parker, a sophomore double majoring in advertising and cinema studies; and Aishiki Nag, a senior double majoring in political science and global studies.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Jason Rezaian was arrested by Iranian authorities in 2014 while reporting for The Washington Post. He was wrongfully imprisoned for 544 days before the U.S. government eventually secured his release. He is now The Washington Post’s Director of Press Freedom Initiatives and the co-teacher of a unique class at the University of Oregon. This focus is on what’s known as hostage diplomacy. Students hear from family members of current and former hostages, in addition to experts who’ve helped free them. Jason Rezaian joins us now along with three of his students. Taylor Parker is a sophomore double majoring in advertising and cinema studies. Maren Fullerton is a senior double majoring in advertising and political science, and Aishiki Nag is a senior double majoring in political science and global studies. Three double majors, that’s six majors total. Welcome to all four of you.
Guests: Thank you. Thanks, Dave.
Miller: Jason, I wanted to start with you. How did this class come to be?
Jason Rezaian: A couple of years ago at an event that’s held every year here in Washington, D.C. at the National Press Club by the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which is a leader in the hostage space, supporting families of people who’ve been held or are being held hostage.
I was approached by a gentleman who introduced himself as David Ewald, a professor of practice and advertising at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. And he asked me if I ever come to visit universities to speak with students, and I said, “I certainly do.”
That started a conversation which resulted in me going out to Oregon for a couple of days, and the conversations that I was having with students on campus were so different than the ones that I was having here in Washington, D.C. or in New York or San Francisco, where I visit colleges a lot. And I said to David, is there a way that we might be able to teach a class with me joining from afar where we could talk about these issues of hostage diplomacy and advocating for people who are wrongfully detained around the world? And I think we’re both the kind of guys that don’t really like to take no for an answer and like to create things, and here we are about two and a half years later.
Miller: Maren, what’s encompassed by the term “hostage diplomacy?”
Maren Fullerton: That means so many things. I mean, it’s international relations. For us, in our class, I think we really focus on the human aspect, understanding what families are going through when a loved one is detained. It’s a really traumatic experience and that’s something that we really tried to focus on; but there’s so much extra going on behind the scenes that people don’t know about in terms of political relations and international tensions.
Miller: Taylor, you served five years in the U.S. Navy before you attended the U of O. Now in your second year in Eugene, what made you want to take this class?
Taylor Parker: I think that gave me a really good perspective into geopolitics, especially with how countries interact with each other, and I had a little bit of experience with how we go about with prisoners of war, and that really opened my eyes to a very human-centric problem, which is hostage diplomacy.
Miller: But when you say prisoners of war, do you mean members of the armed forces who are captured, as opposed to the civilians, journalists or whoever, who are the focus of this class?
Parker: Yes, so to get an opportunity to experience the civilian side and the structures and foundations that are built to help those situations, was something I just had to be a part of. The interest was too important to me to pass up.
Miller: Aishiki, what about you? Why’d you want to take this class?
Aishiki Nag: A couple months ago, I was serving as a teacher at a refugee school on the border of Myanmar and Thailand, and one of my co-teachers was actually in a wrongful detainee situation for her work with conflict management and peacekeeping. And her story made me realize how important it is to have avenues of communication and a team that knows how to do hostage diplomacy. And I think it all starts with education.
Miller: Jason, can you give us a sense for how you and your co-teacher have structured this class? It’s sort of a sprawling topic.
Rezaian: Yeah, and it’s a sprawling way that we go about doing it. It’s sort of similar to how we might do the reporting of a big investigative story, but we’re really trying to piece various parts of the story together. And I think Maren can probably speak to it better than Taylor or Aishiki because she’s already gone through the class.
But on day one, everybody comes up with a very limited amount of knowledge but a lot of passion and almost, I think, of the two cohorts that we’ve had so far, no one has had direct relations to anybody who’s been wrongfully detained or held hostage.
But part of the idea is to cultivate a sense of empathy and a drive around this scourge, and do that through storytelling. So, I ask the students to think about, what are the parts of a hostage case that you’ve read about in class or outside of class that’s missing? What are the questions that you have? What are the things that you want to know about this story? And then dive into that.
And we came up with some incredible projects last year and this year. Taylor can tell you about what he’s gonna do, which I think is pretty incredible. Maren can talk about what she did last year, and it’s just really trying to activate people’s creativity to create awareness around an issue that affects a small number of Americans, but really cuts at the core of what it means to be a citizen of this country.
Miller: I do want to hear more about the three of your projects, but Maren, I mentioned at the beginning that among the guest speakers that you all learn from are family members of people who either were, or are still being held hostage. I’m curious what you learned about how to talk to them.
Fullerton: I think that’s really the most valuable thing that I got out of the course is all the soft skills, like in the university we’re always talking about what sort of skills you have, and I think nobody can teach you how to have an empathetic conversation with family members who are going through a really traumatic experience with their loved one who is detained. That’s just something you have to learn by being in those situations. And it’s a really cool environment that this class cultivates and gives students an opportunity to experience that sort of environment where we might otherwise not get it.
So I personally think that just conveying sincerity and showing families that there’s somebody there who cares about their issue is so huge. And that was always just a goal of mine is to help families feel empowered and feel like somebody cared about their struggles.
Miller: Aishiki, can you tell us about the student project that you’re working on now?
Nag: I am planning on proposing an amendment to a current law, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which would take some definitions of torture and detainment from definitions that we have in American law and use the ones that we’ve already agreed to, but it’s an international legal setting.
Miller: So this is a current U.S. federal law, and you want to change it so that it conforms to an international definition of torture or mistreatment as opposed to a U.S. one.
Nag: Yeah, what the FSIA does, it allows you to do lawsuits against foreign states in U.S. courts, but since it’s a foreign state, if both states have already agreed to a definition of torture, it would be that much more powerful in holding them accountable.
Miller: I have to say I’m curious what it’s like to be working towards a goal like that, that’s rooted in some belief in international law, at a time when our own country is explicitly putting forward a kind of “might is right” vision of the world.
Nag: I think when it comes to international relations, there’s two types of diplomacy. You have, oh, we have so many guns, we can go to war, but there’s only so much you can do with a gun. What soft power does is that it allows you to have positive relationships with different countries around the world. And that’s a huge part in prevention of hostage taking and detention. So when you start cutting off those channels of communication, you create these asymmetrical powers between countries, which only urges countries to take not positive routes for diplomacy.
Miller: Maren, can you tell us about your project?
Fullerton: My project used the symbol of a key as home and freedom to really humanize hostages to people who might not otherwise know about the issue. We sourced 500 keys and we painted them yellow, which is the color of hostage diplomacy. And we dropped those keys around D.C. at universities and for government officials.
We really wanted to invite these people into the issue to understand it more and to understand how a normal person who hasn’t done anything wrong could find themselves in a wrongful detention situation. And our project was really focused on advertising advocacy, rather than a journalistic stance, which was a really cool way to approach the issue, I think.
Miller: Jason, I’ve seen this course described as giving students experience in real-world advocacy, storytelling, and press freedom work. What does advocacy mean to you in this context?
Rezaian: The advocacy around these cases and the journalism around these cases has evolved so much in the 10 years since I was released. When I came out of prison in 2016, I recognized that more and more states – Iran certainly, but Russia, Venezuela, the Syrian government, even some of our friends, Turkey, Saudi Arabia – were taking in Americans and using them for leverage.
But I also saw that when these stories broke, the narrative was oftentimes from the perspective of the captor: “American journalists detained and accused of espionage.” That’s not true. I mean, yeah, that’s the official narrative of the Iranian government when they took me, or the Russian government when they took my buddy, Evan Gershkovich. But the reality is, the real story here is: “Authoritarian state takes another American hostage to use as leverage in political dialogue.”
And I think we’ve come a very, very far way, especially in the news industry, to be able to say, hey look, when one of our own is taken and their voice has been stripped of them, their liberties have been stripped of them, we can’t communicate with them, and they’re not in a position to defend themselves against spurious claims, we have to do that for them.
We still live in a democracy where you have a presumption of innocence. That needs to be protected in these cases, and I don’t think most hostages have gotten that benefit of the doubt for a very long time. So we’re really just trying to
bring it around to another angle, show every aspect of these stories, to humanize and bring the people who are being held hostage and their families into full view as four-dimensional people with concerns with the past, with the future, and not just a headline.
Miller: Taylor, can you tell us about your project?
Parker: Yes, very early on I knew I wanted to do something with the theme of running, especially long distance running. I feel like there’s a lot of metaphors for endurance, especially with the endurance families face as they deal with some of these prolonged issues that could be anywhere between a couple of months to a couple of years, even longer in some cases.
Me and another classmate of mine are working to run the Eugene marathon in honor of this issue. We were really inspired by a guest speaker that we talked to who started running in a small courtyard during his confinement, and I think the resiliency and the mental fortitude of that feat; he challenged himself to run the London Marathon after he got out, and that was the story that really inspired me.
I really want to take those themes, and maybe give a positive, not necessarily a solution, but something to really encapsulate the issue in a metaphorical sense, while also bringing light to current cases and what we’re doing as a class.
Miller: Jason, I feel like this language is a little bit inelegant, given the sheer horror involved for individuals and their families, but from the perspective of nations who are doing this, does hostage taking work?
Rezaian: It does. It does for a couple of reasons. One, when you take an American citizen or an Israeli citizen, in particular, but also citizens of other democracies like the United Kingdom or Japan, or a lot of countries in Western Europe, Canada, your government has a vested interest in returning you home. Your liberty and your life matter to your government. And so it is an issue that I think these foreign states are really taking advantage of. They know that they can get something in return for an innocent American, for example, taken hostage.
Miller: Often, many more people may be being returned who were imprisoned, perhaps after some version of due process. I’m curious how you all think about swaps at this point. The human reality of them for the families of people who are perhaps going to be returned. The geopolitical realities of them in terms of questions of the effectiveness of hostage taking to begin with. Aishiki, how do you think about that?
Nag: I think it’s definitely a complex issue. There’s multiple sides to it. I think when it comes to swaps, it looks at point A versus point B, and I think hostage diplomacy has so many factors to it. I think when it came to stories, oftentimes the media doesn’t hear the relentless struggles of hostage families. And I think that’s a really important and valuable side. People need to hear when they see who they’re being swapped for.
I think when it comes to the effectiveness of this as a diplomatic standard, I would like to reiterate the point that if there were more channels of communication on an international diplomatic level, I believe that there would be less hostage taking. And if more countries banded together to form coalitions to pressure a country, one of the things that is on the table is sanctions. There would be other things that we could be using other than prisoner swaps.
Miller: Maren, how do you think about these questions?
Fullerton: I think at the heart of it the issue is they’re humans, and it does get into really deep political tensions, but that’s why deterrence is such a huge issue that Jason has worked really hard on. And internationally, that’s something that a lot of people have focused on. And in the U.S. as well, Diane Foley works on this with the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation and there’s people who are really looking hard at how we can use international relations as deterrents to stop people from taking hostages.
But ultimately we live in a democracy where we care about the citizens of our country, and that’s something we’ve built our country on, and at the heart of it, there are humans who are suffering for no reason. They don’t have proper charges against them, and there’s no reason for them to be imprisoned. And I think that is a human rights issue. Hostage diplomacy is a human rights issue.
Miller: Jason, how does the current war in Iran complicate efforts to free hostages?
Rezaian: It complicates it tremendously, but it also opens up other pathways of conversation, as Maren and Aishiki talked about. Look, there’s currently at least six U.S. nationals who are being held hostage in Iran… the number could be more now. That’s from before the war started. But there are also Japanese citizens, Australian citizens, British citizens, and I think that this is going to be an important component of any dealings with Iran, and I fear that those people in some cases, and any new ones who get abducted in the coming days, are going to be used as human shields.
And this is a very, very, very contentious issue. I mean, it’s not personal, but it becomes intensely personal when you become a stand-in for your home government. It’s an incredibly unjust phenomenon and an impossible reality for families to have to traverse.
Miller: Maren, before we say goodbye, am I right that you switched your major from journalism to advertising, because of this course?
Fullerton: Yeah, I came in as a journalism major, I wanted to do investigative journalism and I switched to advertising because I thought that advertising had a mode of advocacy and strategies. I didn’t want to be objective, as journalism asks us to be, and I wanted to say what I wanted to say. I wanted to advocate for people who I believed needed more of a voice in the media.
So that’s why I switched over to advertising. And this course has given me a really cool mode to explore what advertising advocacy can look like and saying what you want to say and advocating for people without being objective.
Miller: Maren, Taylor, Aishiki and Jason, thanks very much.
Guests: Thank you.
Miller: Maren Fullerton, Taylor Parker and Aishiki Nag are all students at the University of Oregon. They took a class that’s co-taught by Jason Rezaian, who is the Director of Press Freedom Initiatives now at The Washington Post.
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