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.
Check the information of the past Call for for Arqus Student Co-designed Projects HERE.
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 at expanding 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.
