DIES IDC LA:
International Deans' Training Course Latin America

Funded by DAAD and HRK

The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK), Saarland University (Germany) and the University of Alicante (Spain) are jointly organising the International Deans’ Course Latin America (IDC LA). This intensive training course is part of the DIES Program (Dialogue on Innovative Higher Education Strategies), which has been jointly coordinated by DAAD and HRK and funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) since 2001 (www.daad.de/dies/en). The DIES IDC LA is jointly organized by teams at Saarland University (UdS) and the University of Alicante (UA). Both institutions have been cooperating for a long period of time in projects focused on the evaluation, development, and improvement of university management in higher education institutions. The DIES IDC LA aims to bring together a group of about 25 newly elected Deans and Vice-Deans from higher education institutions in Latin America to enable participants to tackle the challenges posed by their new positions.

Distance Education for Future:
Best EU Practices in Response to the Requests of Modern Higher Education Seekers and Labor Market

We are proud to be partners of the DEFEP project - Distance Education for Future of the Black Sea National University Petro Mohyla, Ukraine. The main goal of the project is to improve and ensure the sustainability of the distance education system on the basis of the best European practices, in order to strengthen the capacity of higher education institutions of the Eastern Partnership countries in the formation of the competencies of students, in accordance with cognitive, behavioral and technologicaltransformations of the individual, society and the labor market.

More Information

Main Project Website

Program: Erasmus+ KA2 (cooperation projects)
Direction: Development of the potential of higher education with the support of the European Union.
Duration of the project: January 1, 2023 - December 31, 2025

#DEFEP #DEFEPproject #EUProject #ErasmusUA #Erasmus+ #DistanceEducation #ErasmusProject #CapacityBuildingProject #CBHE #CBHE_DEFEP #DEFEP_CBHE

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Supported by EU funding, the universities of the group “University of the Greater Region – UniGR” are implementing a European Center for Border Studies. The cross-border cooperation project runs for three years and is supposed to promote research in the field of border studies in the Greater Region and to make this research more visible internationally. As a broad and  interdisciplinary research area, researchers from the humanities and social sciences work on a wide range of topics related to borders areas, such as the significance of bordersand their impact on the economy, politics, social life or culture.
 
The ambitious three-year work program is being implemented from 1st January 2018. It closely brings together the researchers of the partner universities, ensures optimal research conditions, and promotes dialogue between academia and politics. Students from the partner universities will benefit from the project as well. For example, in a trilingual glossary, key concepts of border studies are compiled and in an online database, important border research documents are bundled in three languages (DE/FR/EN). In addition, the UniGR-Center for Border Studies also organizes scientific seminars and public panel discussions on borders and its challenges. It also simplifies cross-border and multilingual teaching and develops modern blended learning solutions.

More information: borderstudies.org

Partner universities and institutions involved in this project: University of the Greater Region, University of Luxemburg (LUX), University of Lorraine (FRA), University of Liège (BEL), University of Trier (GER), and University of Kaiserslautern (GER)

Funding line: Interreg VA Greater Region

NamLitCult is part of the new joint research project "Linking Borderlands: The Dynamics of Border-Regional Peripheries" (2021-2024).

Prof. Fellner is the project leader of the subproject "Hybrid Borderlands." More info and website coming soon!

More information on the roof project: linking-borderlands.eu

Partner universities and institutions involved in this project: Saarland University, University of Kaiserslautern, European University Viadrina Frankfurt/Oder, and Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg

The project is associated with the UniGR-Center for Border Studies and Viadrina Center B/Orders in Motion.

- BMBF fundig reference number ("Förderkennzeichen"): 01UC2104A -

Borderland Stories is a multilateral, transnational, interdisciplinary two-class module of Saarland University’s MA Border Studies, which combines ethnographic analysis and creative work in the visual arts to facilitate intercultural communication across two distinct European borderlands. Borderland Stories brings together students of Saarland University and Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University of Mykolaiv (Ukraine) in critical discussions about Border Studies research as well as lived experiences in the borderlands of the Greater Region and the Black Sea.

The module comprises a preparatory phase with online classes taught by experts from both institutions (14-17 and 24 September 2021) and a second phase, wherein students are invited to produce multimedia products (such as podcasts, short films, graphic novels, photo-stories) in small groups (27 September – 19 November 2021). The first part of this two-class module, HS Cultural Encounters in Europe chaired by Prof. Astrid M. Fellner, will provide a theoretical framework as well as a platform for students to engage in serious, productive dialogue about living in borderlands. Students will be invited to exchange subjective experiences and critically reflect upon the idiosyncrasies and similarities of border regions. This will entail a discussion of cross-border or other identity conflicts and power differentials. The practical intercultural knowledge acquired in this course will enable students to learn from each other and empower them to intervene critically in real-life situations. Drawing on that intercultural exchange, the second class, UE Borderland Stories: Ethnography, Film, and Photography chaired by Mag. Klaus Heissenberger, will task students with conducting ethnographic field work and, subsequently, with creating visual products (films, photo series, graphic novels, etc.) reflecting their research. This class employs a hands-on approach to doing Border Studies, encouraging students to get together in small groups of 3-4 participants from both universities, collect data as participant-observers about border experiences, and translate their results into visual art. Students will be guided in both their academic and creative work by a team of experts and supervisors throughout the module.

The finished student media products will be published on a joint website and presented in UdS American Studies Graduate Forum on 2-4 December, 2021.

Borderland Stories is funded by the grant program “MEET UP! Youth for Partnership” by the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (EVZ) Foundation and the Federal Foreign Office.

To sign up, please send an email to Prof Astrid Fellner or Tobias Schank. You do not have to sign up via LSF for this module.

Diversity is a central issue in current discussions about cultures and societies. Bringing together scholars and PhD students from Montréal, Saarbrücken, and Trier, our International Research Training Group pursues an innovative research program in the contested fields of diversity, multiculturalism, and transnationalism. We do so by examining paradigmatic changes and historical transformations in interpreting multicultural realities in North America (Québec and Canada in particular) and Europe (Germany and France in particular) since the 18th century.

More information: www.irtg-diversity.com

Partner universities and institutions involved in this project: University of Montreal (CAN) and University of Trier (GER)

Funding line: DFG Research Training Group

The borders of our time are arguably more complex than ever: on the one hand, they are unstable concepts with shifting meanings, metaphors, and paradigms of thinking; on the other, they are hard facts, fortified geographical shells, hard to penetrate and often deadly. Furthermore, it is safe to say that the borders of our time are in crisis. From the porous interior boundaries of the Schengen space, to the mass migration crisis challenging the external limits of the European Union, to the post-soviet military conflict zone in Ukraine, to the isolationist thrust of Brexit: After a period of de-bordering, we are facing a re-bordering, and the meanings of Europe and the ideals of democracy and civil society they stand for are being challenged. At the same time, much of the recent election season in the United States was built around the idea of borders, whether it is the infamous wall between the US and Mexico, or the popular discourse of American people fleeing the impending Trump regime by crossing the border to Canada (the Immigration Canada website famously crashed on the night of US presidential elections, unable to handle the sheer volume of inquiries). Generally speaking, the dream and ideal of open borders seems poised on the brink of extinction: building walls is increasingly becoming the dominant narrative of today’s politics, institutional as well as cultural.

While cultural critics like Gloria Anzaldúa and Walter Mignolo speak of the liberating potential of “border thinking” and “dwelling in the borders,” refugees risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean or taking the Balkan route, and so do migrants riding the Beast, “the infamous freight train that trundles through the country from near the Guatemalan border all the way to the US and has traditionally been the route of choice for the poorest and most vulnerable” (Jo Tuckman for The Guardian). This tension between the physical and the lyrical is one of the greatest potentials of border discourses, and one of their toughest political challenges: while for some borders are spaces of myth, for others they are places of death, at least potentially; and sometimes, they are both. Art and artistic discourses, ethnic and minority literatures, as well as alternative theoretical frameworks, like Anzaldúa’s “theory in the flesh,” straddle this tension in order to expose borders, what they are and what they do, their perverse beauty and blatant brutality of “una herida abierta” (Anzaldúa) - “an open wound.” In this project, we will also attempt to straddle this tension, exploring the physical and the lyrical of borders, European as well as inter- and intra-American.         

In order to critically engage all these themes in the context of this collaboration, we propose to structure the discussion according to following fields of inquiry:

I.      Border Crises and Race, Gender, and Sexuality
II.     Border Crises and Civil Society
III.    Border Crises and Trauma
IV.    Border Crises and Environment
V.     Border Art: Border Crises through Artists’ Eyes

More information: borders-in-crisis.eu

Partner universities and institutions involved in this project: Petro Mohyla Black Sea State University (UKR)

Funding line: DAAD Eastpartnership Program

We are an interregional working group within the framework of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies. Our focus is on cultural studies approaches to border studies with the aim of gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the (re)production of borders and their (re)presentations, and thus enriching the often over-simplified discussions about border (region) issues.

The concept of bordertextures developed by the working group is located between geopolitical and socio-scientific analyses of materially manifested structures, on the one hand, and investigations from cultural studies of ideally effective constructions, on the other. The analyses of the working group aim at the respective complex ‘textures’ of the research object that have formed out of attributions, ideas, or bodily representations in their mutual interweavings and influences.

Partner universities and institutions involved in this project: University of the Greater Region, University of Luxemburg (LUX), UniGR-Center for Border Studies

American / Cultural Studies as a Transnational Project

Transatlantic Dialogues (TAD) is a transnational project situated at the intersections of American and Cultural Studies. It brings together students and faculty from 3 different universities to explore American Studies topics from a Cultural Studies perspective, making use of e-learning and team-teaching and organizing on-site student team projects.

Partner universities and institutions involved in this project: University of Vienna (AUT) and Bradley University (USA)