It has been a very busy summer here at VIU!
Here is a round-up of the Summer Schools, a PhD Academy and the Summer Session of the Globalization Program that ran from June through August.
Overall we have welcomed more than 200 students and 80 professors to the Academic Programs since June, and we will have another two Summer Schools, a PhD Academy, and a new GP semester kicking off in September.
In its seventh edition, the summer school aims to develop thinking on a more sustainable future through the Grand Transition of our society, from the microlevel of individual decision-making to the organizational, and the societal level. The PhD students and post-docs who attended this year's edition had the opportunity to engage with eminent scholars in management theory, to discuss their ideas, and present their research while engaging in transdisciplinary discourse and exploring innovative answers to grand sustainability challenges.
Some of the sessions in the Summer School were: Understanding the Evolution of Transnational Governance and Social Movement Dynamics; Irresponsible Decision-making in the Network Firm; Transforming into a Circular Economy: Hybridity of Organizations and Related Challenges;
15 young scholars participated, hailing from various universities, including those of Lausanne, Venice, Innsbruck, Nurnberg, Edinburgh, Aarhus, Pisa, Vienna, Exeter, Bergamo, and the Copenhagen Business School.
In addition to the more discipline-focused doctoral programs in Economics, Management, Business Administration, Economics and Finance, many of the students are pursuing doctoral degrees in programs such as Strategy, Globalization and Society, Corporate Sustainability Management, Change Management, and Management Development, which reflects the increasing attention given to interdisciplinary approaches to global challenges across many universities today.
This summer school will be offered in 2024.
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Summer Institute on Ageing, June 5-9, 2023
This was the 10th edition of the Summer Institute on Ageing which continues to attract scholars from around the world to participate in this annual event where PhD students, researchers, and professors discuss the latest advances in research at the intersection of medicine, epidemiology, economics, sociology, and public policy related to ageing in contemporary society.
This year's edition focused on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic in old age, with sessions that included: The Geroscience Paradigm: a Public Health Imperative; Causes and Consequences of Cognitive Ageing; Studying the Brain, Dementia, and COVID in the HRS and HRS International Network of Surveys; The Impact of Covid-19 on Older Workers’ Employment and Social Security Spillovers; Policies for the Protection of Older People and the Mental Health of Older Adults during the Covid-19 Pandemic. In hands-on sessions, the participants engaged with large micro-data sets from the international family of health and retirement studies (SHARE, HRS, ELSA, CHARLS, MHAS, etc.). More than 50 scholars participated in the 2023 edition.
Participants of Summer Institute on Ageing
This VIU Summer School will be offered in 2024.
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Questions of how classed, racialized, and gendered individuals and social groups are erased in standard art histories or dealt with as difficult topics were the focus of discussions in this program. This theme is central to current concerns in shifting art historical questions to a broader and more critical range of historical and cultural subjects.
The Summer School sought applications from established multidisciplinary teams working in the field of digital art history or cultural heritage. They were expected to involve members at different levels of their research careers, ranging from doctoral students to established scholars in the field.
The group considered how to work with, and convey, difficult and hidden histories, and how to thoughtfully incorporate experiential, affective, and contradictory evidence into geospatial, immersive, and interactive narrative practices (XR) for analytic and interpretive scholarship (including public humanities), while also considering questions of scalability, sustainability, and community engagement in relation to their digital practices.
This is a two-year program with the same participants returning to VIU in 2024.
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Ethics and Health Care | Organ Transplant Ethics, June 12-16, 2023
The program offered professionals, students and early career researchers the opportunity to critically reflect on topical issues that raise ethical and deontological dilemmas, relating to health care ethics. In this Summer School, in its third edition, the highly qualified experts addressed the complex circumstances of organ transplants. A fundamental feature of the School is the continuous and intense interdisciplinary exchange among doctors, philosophers, economists, jurists, psychiatrists, and sociologists.
25 students from Italy, Slovenia, South Africa, Poland, Brazil, Singapore, Sweden, the Netherlands, United Kingdom participated, representing a range of disciplines, including philosophy, medicine, sociology, law, nursing, medical ethics, and economics.
The sessions included: Organ Donation and Donor Cconsent; Interpretation of the Dead Donor Rule; Patient Selection and Priority Access to Transplants; The Allocation of Organs and the Criterion of Justice; The Experience of the Waiting Patient and of the Transplant Patient; A Personalistic Ethical Framework for Organ Transplantation.
This Summer School will be offered in 2024.
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PhD Academy | Practicing New Imaginaries: ‘Re-presencing’ Venice in the Time of Climate Change, July 3-8, 2023
We welcomed 15 PhD students to VIU to interrogate the contribution of the performing arts towards building an understanding of the climate crisis, as observed from the viewpoint of the city of Venice, and to gain a nuanced understanding of the skills and competencies in environmental humanities (in theory and practice) that can help us to tackle the communication, mitigation, and adaptation to climate change.
Sessions included: Re-presencing Venice in the Time of Climate Change; Art and Climate Change: the Theme of Water; Performing the Future of the Planet; Ecocritical Art Practices and Histories in the Anthropocene; and Choreography as Epistemology.
A key feature of the VIU PhD Academy is the opportunity for the students to present their research, and gain valuable feedback from both their peers and the professors contributing to the program. They also conducted group work and participated in field trips, including to the Biennale of Architecture.
Visit the PhD Academy section of our website to see upcoming opportunities.
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The 2nd edition of the Summer School was held in Naples, in partnership with Federico II University.
The 40 participants, students and faculty combined, had explored the latest innovations in technology, business models, and policy-making and discussed their own research. The faculty included academics and professionals with experience in both public and private sectors.
Through rigorous and non-conventional empirical and theoretical approaches the group explored emerging trends, strategic scenarios, IT and modeling tools, methods, case studies, and applied projects, and discussed how these can support business and policy-makers to achieve environmental sustainability and socio-economic efficiency.
The fields of study of the participants included: transportation Engineering, Transport Modeling, Civil Engineering, International Relations, Infrastructure and Transport, Industrial Engineering, Economics, Management, Urban Planning, and Supply Chain Management.
This Summer School will be offered in 2024.
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Linguistic Landscapes: Using Signs and Symbols to Translate Cities, June 26-30, 2023
This program focused on the growing interdisciplinary field of Linguistic Landscapes (LL), which traditionally analyzes the “language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings”, usually as they occur in urban spaces.
The Summer School aimed to familiarize students with the standard tools and concepts required for collecting, annotating, and analyzing data in Linguistic Landscapes research and to enable them to carry out and present LL research in situ in Venice;
The 25 students who attended the program explored the cultural profile of our cities (and Venice in particular) and discussed the way we interact with the urban environment, and how social, economic, and political issues such as diversity, racism and discrimination, in- and exclusion, activism and glocal controversies, ideologies and justice, sexual identity, gender equality, etc. impact our interactions.
This Summer School will be offered in 2024.
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Science Diplomacy in the Age of Climate Change, July 17-22, 2023
While academia includes specialties in translational science, public policy, health policy, and other policy-related fields, these programs do not address the needs of the vast matrix of other scientific disciplines to provide students with training and tools to effectively partner and communicate with non-scientists, whether they are policy-makers, community leaders or the general public. This is Science Diplomacy at its core: partnerships to eliminate cultural, sectoral, and knowledge barriers.
Through this Summer School, the participants gained skills in stakeholder assessment, science communication and negotiation; explored case studies on air pollution (e.g., Padova), Sea Level Rise (e.g., Venice), gold mining and mercury pollution (e.g., Amazon), and emerging diseases (e.g., COVID-19), and returned home with a deeper understanding of how to identify and communicate with stakeholders connected to their research.
Science Diplomacy group on a field trip.
This Summer School will be offered in 2024.
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