Arqus Student co-designed projects are innovative and collaborative initiatives that promote cultural exchange and the integration of international students across the Arqus member universities.
The contest aimed the promotion of projects that will shape the Alliance educational environment and will enhance student engagement, consolidate the community and support students personal and professional development.
In light of the 2020 UN Report on Trafficking in Persons, which underscored the exacerbation of economic vulnerabilities during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly affecting women and children in poverty who become more susceptible to trafficking, our project aims to delve into the responses of Italy and Spain to these challenges. Given their proximity and significant migration patterns, understanding their approaches is crucial.
Since the onset of the pandemic, there has been a stark increase in trafficking, particularly of women and children, necessitating thorough investigation. Our aim is to contribute fresh insights to the academic community, shedding light on the strategies employed by these states and proposing innovative solutions for the population to recognize human trafficking. This initial phase involves comprehensive data collection, analysis, and the creation of a report focusing on human trafficking, with a particular emphasis on the most vulnerable demographics.
Our goal is to provide timely and practical information for students and the citizens alike, create a final booklet that aims to help the population identify human trafficking situations and combat it at the local level. Furthermore the booklet will be translated in four languages: Italian, English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Moreover, we intend to use the findings and solutions generated from this research and provided in the booklet to develop, later on, a nuanced map of human trafficking in Italy initially. This map will delineate key issues in the different areas of the country (north, central, and south), identifying the profiles of the victims, the human rights violations suffered and how the state is dealing with the problem.
The proposed project is a sustainability initiative aimed at upcycling goods within the University of Padova community. Inspired by the ReStore initiative, this project focuses on reducing waste and supporting students in need by repurposing items that would otherwise be discarded.
The project seeks to collaborate with both the ESU and the Sustainable Office at the University of Padova, leveraging their endorsement to strengthen the project’s credibility and expand its reach. Key activities include securing a central hub for collecting, refurbishing, and distributing upcycled goods, exploring the possibility of receiving a grant or funding from ESU, and utilizing ESU channels for communication to inform students about this opportunity and recruit volunteers.
The pilot project will start in Padua with the aim of engaging more student partner universities in a second phase.
Intercultural Dialogue Circles is an initiative that aims to strengthen the bonds between Arqus students from different backgrounds, foster mutual understanding, and create a vibrant, inclusive academic community.
The project consists of informal meetings that bring together bachelor, master, and doctoral students, graduates, professors, professionals, and citizens who are interested in cultural topics while living abroad. These meetings help students develop a sense of belonging when studying at one of the Arqus universities. The topics covered include dealing with culture shock, cultural adaptation and integration, intercultural communication, raising cultural awareness about Arqus member countries, and other themes related to cultural diversity and inclusion.
Intercultural Dialogue Circles will be organized at the University of Wroclaw, the University of Padua, and Maynooth University by the end of 2024. The project at each university will include two phases:
1/ Online Preparatory Meetings: These meetings will gather Arqus members and ambassadors to share cultural experiences. They will be informal sessions where students can introduce themselves, discuss their fields of study, their countries of origin, and their motivations for choosing their study destinations.
2/ Arqus’ Intercultural Day: During this event, students will present and share their cultural identities with the broader university community by preparing and showcasing their country’s signature elements, such as food, gifts, and cultural customs.
By the end of Arqus’ Intercultural Day, we will choose the best performers for students’ dedication and passion for promoting their cultural identities.
The Human Rights Café is a student-led initiative by SET Padova that has been running for three years at UNIPD. Moreover, last year we were able to export it at University of Granada and University of Minho, thanks to the funding provided under this call.
The format consists of informal meetings that bring together bachelor, master’s and doctoral students, graduates, professors, professionals and citizens who are interested in human rights, regardless of their field of study and their level of education, to discuss human rights-related topics that vary from session to session.
This year we are proposing another transnational session involving also the University of Graz and Leipzig University. The theme is a development of the previous one, i.e., the threats to democracy and human rights in today’s Europe, starting from an historical reflection on the regimes of the 20th century.
The session will last about 2 weeks in the first semester of the 2024/2025. One or two representatives from each participating university will be present at all events to ensure cultural exchange and student mobility between the partner universities. In addition to the core team, a team of volunteers will be set up at each university to organise and manage the events.
Inspired by the student-led Advocacy Hub initiative on human rights at the University of Padova, our idea is to create a similar platform in Graz, Austria. This student-run initiative will collaborate with the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz and the Human Rights Centre in Padova, using their expertise while prioritizing student voices and their research.
The inaugural event of this platform will be the ARQUS Student Conference, focusing on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and human rights. This hybrid conference (online and in-person) will welcome students from across ARQUS universities. To structure the panels, we will be putting out a call for both student presenters and guest speakers. This will ensure that the conference is a space for the research interests of ARQUS students.
By attending, students will be able to present their research and increase their network and academic visibility. The conference also aims to build a sense of community and collaboration among ARQUS students, strengthening their academic and social networks.
In addition, the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz is open to publishing outstanding student research produced for the conference. We’ll also explore publication opportunities with other research centres at partner universities for Master’s and PhD students. Ultimately, these initiatives aim to create a sustainable platform for ARQUS students to exchange ideas, collaborate, and contribute meaningfully to the discourse on human rights and sustainable development in the context of emerging technologies.
As the title suggests, this project is inspired by the old phenomenon of clerici vagantes, university students who, at the beginning of late Middle Age, moved from campus to campus looking for the best learning opportunities in Europe.
Following this frame, this project has the purpose of putting in contact and creating interaction between two very distant realities which share several similarities, namely “Coro de la Facultad de Ciencias” (from now on CFC) of Granada and “Corollario” of Padua.
Both choirs were born in scientific contexts: CFC was founded in 2006 inside of the faculty of science of the university of Granada thanks to the dean’s contribution while Corollario emerged spontaneously between students of the math department of the University of Padua unofficially in the 2014 and was founded and named officially in the 2015.
What does it mean for a student in STEM to take part in a university choir? Although it is well known that scientific careers nurture the development of both hard and soft skills, sometimes little emphasis is put on the growth of very important abilities – such as cooperating in a team and coordinating actions with other people – or even just on the need to cultivate self esteem and self awareness via activities that bring to relaxation, delight and enrichment of the soul – such as art.
In which way this sensibility is transduced into the fashion in which the choral life and expression is conducted? The choir environment favors the process of non-formal learning, giving the opportunity to deliver and build these skills through activities that are perceived as lighter and funnier.
Moreover, the community and network itself has a positive impact on academic life, providing an environment in which to share thoughts, difficulties, passions, and learning opportunities in an “edutainment” framework. In the historical moment we are living, in which frenzy, speed and productivity seem to chase young students, this music oriented meeting is a chance to share visions about the future, the role that art will take in our lives, and how to be able to conciliate all our passions
The Human Rights Café is a student-led initiative that has been running for two years at the University of Padova and is now aiming to expand abroad.
It is organized by SET Padova, an association of cultural promotion that was funded in 2020 by Human Rights and Multilevel Governance students and is still fully managed by students and graduates from various courses of the Political Science, Law and International Studies department. In both years the project was financed by UniPd through the funds intended for Students’ Cultural Initiatives.
The format is simple: it consists of informal meetings that bring together bachelor, master and doctoral students, graduates, professors, professionals and citizens who are interested in human rights, regardless of their field of studies and their level of education, in order to have a discussion about human rights-related topics that vary at every session. A large variety of topics has been covered so far: how to get a job in human rights; how to export the human rights culture in non-human rights related working fields; how to be an efficient networker to get a job in international relations; shaping human-rights oriented communities; freedom of expression; the impact of thesis writing-related stress on students’ mental health (as a part of the right to health and the right to education); raising awareness on mental health being a part of the right to health in order to break the stigma around mental health issues; challenging the human rights paradigm in the fight for recognition of LGBTQIA+ rights.
The project, initiated by an international team of students and former delegates of the Padova Model UPR, aims to harness the collective expertise of students of the Arqus alliance universities to collect and elaborate data on the human rights performance of their respective states that may be relevant for the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) conducted by the UN Human Rights Council. This collaborative project designed and promoted across Arqus universities, aims at involving Arqus students in doing research on the UPR process of their own countries. A catalyst for this is the a UNIPD activity already scheduled in Autumn 2023, namely the 6th edition of the Model UPR (a simulation of the UN UPR procedure) and the Implementing UPR exercise, involving 15 first-year students from the Human Rights and Multi-Level Governance MA program in reviewing the human rights status of selected countries.
The MigraCinEs project aims to bring together the study of the representation of religious diversity in Spain, Lithuania and Austria and the awareness for the recognition of this diversity in a single space. To achieve this, we intend to use a tool that is rarely employed in such cases: cinema. Although cinema has always been used for dissemination, entertainment, and raising awareness, it has not been combined in the way we intend to do in this case: the representation of religious diversity in film. In our case, we will focus on Spanish, Lithuanian and Austrian migration cinema, which is closely linked to the growing religious diversity resulting from the significant influx of immigration to Europe.
When bell hooks called for “teaching to transgress” in 1994, she addressed the urgency to re-think educational practices that relied heavily on what Paulo Freire called a “banking system of education” that only stores knowledge without thriving for societal transgressions. In our complex times of global interdependencies, hook’s call is ever more important. Thus, this project aims at developing what we call “IntergenerationaLabs” at the University of Graz and the University of Granada where students come together with researchers to work on transnational literatures as a tool to negotiate the complexities and uncertainties of our current times and thus, following the mission of the Arqus Alliance to share a common vision of higher education based on academic, scientific, and cultural objectives.
Predicting election results in Europe can be daunting. In many EU countries, we are witnessing a political turmoil with very affirmed and long-standing parties being replaced by new emergent parties (for example in the 2015 Spanish Elections or the 2018 Italian Elections, Lithuanian 2020 Elections). This rapid change means that established voting patterns might not hold any longer, making election results more unpredictable.
To add to this problem, the validity and accuracy of electoral polls has been recently put in doubt. Famously, polls couldn’t predict Trump 2016, Brexit 2016 or Erdogan 2023. Why is that the case? Polls often use non-representative samples, therefore suffer from selection bias, which in turn harm estimates. Therefore, methods for bias correction are fundamental in order to ensure validity. Although many methods exist, they seem to improve the situation only in some limited cases and can also make it worse in others.
This project aims at evaluating current bias correction methods for election polls, with a focus on emergent parties: parties that gained popularity quickly between one election and the other. To do so, either existing electoral poll samples from past national elections in Europe are going to be collected. Subsequently, a comparison of different correction techniques will be carried out, in order to understand which method is most robust in providing the best estimates with respect to the election outcomes. The project will focus on bias correction for emergent parties, and will provide the scientific community with useful tools to make more valid and accurate predictions when analysing polls.
When striving for more relevant research outcomes, in today’s globalized and digitalized world, it is vital to seek multiperspectivity in research and this can be fostered via interdisciplinary exchange. We believe that linguistic methods could benefit from other disciplines, just as we believe that linguistics has always benefitted from methods of other research disciplines.
To promote interdisciplinarity, the proposed project aims at creating an online video conferencing platform for PhD candidates and other young researchers from various disciplines. By creating such a platform, participants would not only present their methods to peers from the same or similar fields, but also allow cross-fertilization between the various disciplines.
The project seeks to apply co-design practices not only in its conception and its management, but also in the implementation of seminars which will be held in collaboration with and for other students. “AL4ALL” wishes to create a space for discussion and growth in all stages of education in doctoral studies. In doing so, it aims to catalyze the potential of applied linguistic methodologies and other methodologies and thus reduce the distance between different fields of research.
Previous research has established a connection between people’s ideologies and the justification of economic inequality (Jost et al., 2009). For instance, the endorsement of meritocratic beliefs, which emphasize the role of talent and hard work in social advancement (Mijs, 2021), can serve as an ideology that supports maintaining economic inequality by opposing redistributive policies (García-Sánchez et al., 2020). Conversely, literature revealed a positive relationship between meritocratic beliefs and political orientation, with people self-positioning themselves to the right of the political spectrum, being more likely to hold meritocracy beliefs (Echebarría Echabe, 2014).
Our primary objective is to examine the association between social mobility beliefs and different types of meritocratic beliefs, based on effort or talent, while also investigating the potential influence of political orientation. The results of this research would enable us to deepen knowledge about the underpinnings of belief in meritocracy, offering valuable insights for future psychological research in the field of economic inequality.
