We are delighted to announce the launch of a four-part winter lecture series on the theme of Empowering Young People Against Hate Speech. This series has been organised by Schools Beyond Regions and Borders, which aims to promote interaction and mutual understanding among European students and teachers by exchanging knowledge and best practices in education for active citizenship. This aim is achieved through year-long teaching modules based on one or more thematic areas which are explored in monthly online seminars held in English by university teachers or experts in the field. Each of the four lectures in this Winter series will be delivered by a member of the ARENAS consortium.
Schools Beyond Regions and Borders was launched in February 2021 with the support of Regione Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, the University of Trento, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, and the financial backing of a number of patrons. The first project phase saw the participation of schools based in Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. Since then, new countries have been joining, with the idea of gradually including at least two secondary schools per country on the continent in a few years’ time.
The next series of lectures begins on October 16th with a lecture by Professor Steven Forti from the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Dr. Forti will deliver a paper titled “From lies to post-truth. How have extremist narratives changed over the last century? A historical perspective.” Steven is the Leader of Work Package 3 in ARENAS, which examines the circulation of extremist narratives.
This will be followed by a lecture titled “The Spread of Extremist Narratives in Recent Scientific, political, and Social Discourses Online: how to Identify and Respond to Them?” which will be delivered by Professor Julien Longhi, Director of IDHN (institute of Digital Humanities) at CY Cergy Paris University. Julien is the Project leader of the ARENAS project and will deliver his lecture on November 9th.
On December 5th, Professor Katalin Miklossy, Jean Monnet Professor at the Aleksanteri Institute in the University of Helsinki will deliver the third lecture in the series. Her lecture is titled “Ethics and Everyday Democracy”. Katalin is the leader of Work Package 6 of ARENAS and coordinates research on the topics of Ethics, Norms and Politically Sensitive Science.
The final lecture of the series will be delivered by Professor Béatrice Fracchiolla of the Université de Lorraine on January 15th 2024. Béatrice’s lecture is titled “Mediating and remediating hate speech. How can we (re)write positive stories to help people live together better?
The lecture series, and the work of Schools Beyond Regions and Borders, target students between 16 and 18 years of age and the lectures are delivered in English. The audience for this lecture series will be drawn from Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom and you can download details of the Seminar Series here.
