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Russia’s war in Ukraine and the Western response are producing spiking prices in tight markets in natural gas, oil, and food on the backdrop of global supply chain disruptions and a post-pandemic world. The result is an emerging inflection point for security in energy and food supplies. This eight-day course will delve into the changing geopolitical and institutional landscape of Europe at the grassroots level and in international relations.  

Course instructors will provide insight into how energy, food, and leadership foster instability or stability. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine broke an already tight energy market. This is dramatically altering both the scale and speed of the EU’s energy transition, now outlined in the RePowerEU plan which accelerates the Fit for 55 plan. This course delivers expert insight into the background and emerging solutions making our energy and food systems more resilient and sustainable.

Geospatial technologies and remote sensing are valuable resources to monitor the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their corresponding targets and indicators. They allow for unbiased observation and analysis across borders, administrative boundaries, and nations. Furthermore, geospatial information and technologies are particularly critical to strengthening urban and rural resilience, where economic, agricultural, and various social sectors intersect. This is particularly reflected through the mission of SDG-11 – to "Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable".

However, there is still a gap between the tremendous potential of these technologies and the world of environmental decision- and policy-makers. Not only can the immense realm of geospatial technologies seem daunting, it is also difficult to keep up with the ever-evolving applications of geospatial technologies.

This workshop aims to address this gap by providing in-service education and professional training for decision-makers and practitioners to assist them in making better informed data-driven decisions. Furthermore, the workshop looks towards the future, engaging youth and our future leaders in the current practices of evidence-based decision-making.

The target group for this workshop includes professionals from national agencies and international organizations, relevant NGO representatives, and academia, both students and faculty. Within academia, priority will be given to graduate students in public policy and environmental management from the OSUN and CIVICA partner institutions.

This year’s workshop explores the use of geospatial technologies for building and improving the resilience of communities to disasters and climate change. Keynote speakers will give theoretical presentations and share their best-use practices of geospatial technologies, which will be followed by practical sessions on their application.

Beliefs in witchcraft, the power of humans to intervene in the flow of life events and to harm others by supernatural means, is widely distributed both geographically and chronologically. How in European history the accusations were developed and put together with the elaboration of a sufficiently coherent framework of reference can be the focus of historical attention. This is indeed part of a wider process of formation of scapegoat images through time and on different social targets, from the heretics to the lepers, and from the Jews to ultimately witches. All this, along with the late medieval construction of the concept of the diabolic witches’ Sabbath, constitute a historical issue, the discussion and the understanding of which demand the involvement of a multidisciplinary way of approaching historical inquiry as well as an open-minded sight. 

This course aims to lay out the rise and downturn of witch beliefs in medieval and early modern Europe, tracing the multifaceted roots leading to their construction, from the Classical Greek and Roman literary traditions to medieval lore and popular beliefs, up to the outburst of the “witch-craze” in early modern Europe. In this iteration of the course, we will dedicate more attention to witchcraft prosecutions beyond the paradigmatic West-European persecution waves: Central and Eastern Europe and modern witch-hunts in the global South. We will dedicate a few sessions on contemporary witch-hunts in the Global South and will pay particular attention to contemporary witch persecutions in Africa. Discussing magic and witchcraft in a global context will bring us to issues that can help us understand modern witch-hunting waves, and the dangerous social psychological mechanisms leading to scapegoat persecutions. At the same time, we will present the persistence, the cultural heritage of beliefs in magic, fashionable resurgences of neo-paganism, shamanism, alternative medicine, and new age sectarianism. 

Ontology is currently booming in philosophy, and social ontology is especially booming—it is one of the fastest-growing subfields in philosophy.  Moreover, it is becoming one of the most important subfields in philosophy.  Philosophers are becoming increasingly interested in real-world problems and in how their discipline is relevant to these problems.  The recent explosion of interest in social ontology is part of a movement in philosophy to come down out of the ivory tower and engage with issues that actually matter—issues concerning, e.g., race and gender and social justice.

As social ontology investigates issues related to social structure, power, oppression, identity, decoloniality, and the metaphysics of race and class, it is often emancipatory, aiming not only to describe social reality but to transform it in order to bring about greater social justice.  Social ontology, then, is obviously important for understanding historical and contemporary issues in the Global South, which has a much higher percentage of non-white, working-class, and disempowered people, relative to the Global North. 

Ontology is a very broad area of philosophy, and the sub-area of social ontology is also very broad. It encompasses many different philosophical issues and questions and problems. This course will introduce students to ontology, and in particular to social ontology, by delving deeply into numerous important issues in the field.  Specific topics covered in the course will include the following: social justice, social construction, social constructionism, groups, and social structures, ideal vs. non-ideal social ontology, social power, essentialism as it relates to social groups and genders, issues related to mental health and moral responsibility, social theories of art, rationality, mental content, and issues in meta-social-ontology.

Individual and collective traumas are increasingly at the heart of social and political decision-making in different parts of the world. Different forms of trauma shape our perception of social reality, ranging from #MeToo and BlackLivesMatter to the Stolen Generations and the Holocaust, the pandemic, and climate catastrophes. They impact the ways we recognize and remember but also forget and silence past and present injustices. The divergent attitudes towards these traumatic experiences determine both how our societies currently look and how they will look in the future. The comprehensive assessment of different facets of trauma is thus urgent.  

The field of Transdisciplinary Trauma Studies represents the new tendencies in the intersecting areas studying trauma in the 21st century. The necessity to incorporate diverse perspectives on trauma coming from different cultures as well as different academic disciplines prompts the need for re-conceptualizing the field of trauma studies.   

The proposed course is part of a longer curricular/training initiative; the initiative of a new program in Transdisciplinary Trauma Studies. The course thus is mapping the results of a new research field in teaching, providing information on the newest developments of trauma research, and bringing together approaches from across disciplines such as cultural studies, psychology, history, computer science, gender studies, human rights, and beyond.

This program will introduce participants to conflict resolution theory and, even more importantly, skills. We will examine the impact of culture and context on conflict and the process adopted to handle the conflict.  Students will study conflict resolution and negotiation processes through multinational examples and perspectives and will examine challenges in designing and delivering dispute resolution initiatives in the dynamic context of emerging democracies, as well as mature, but adversarial, legal cultures.  As dangerous conflicts continue to proliferate, the relevance of this program, which addresses the development of collaborative dispute resolution processes, becomes more and more heightened.   

On the first day of the program, we will work with the students in developing a clearer understanding of how conflicts escalate and what can be done to de-escalate the conflict, with an emphasis on negotiation. Starting on the second day of the program, the students will be introduced to mediation, the conflict resolution process often described as a negotiation assisted by a third-party neutral. We will spend two days on the various skills mediators utilize both to promote discussions of people in conflict and to facilitate collaborative decision-making. On the fourth day of the program, we will cover international and cross-cultural impacts on conflicts as well as, the uses of international commercial arbitration. On the final day of the program, students will learn restorative practice skills where the focus is not just on ending a conflict, but also on repairing harm between and among those involved in the conflict.  
 
Participants seeking to be enrolled in this course will be asked to identify a civic issue or problem in their neighborhood, city, region, or country which they wish to present to the class or to write a paper on.  During the course, each student will be assigned a faculty member to help them apply the course material to the issue they raised.

This two-week, intensive summer course will investigate the genealogy of the era of the witness, focusing on the emergence of Holocaust testimony as the model for eyewitness documentation of 20th and 21st-century atrocities, and its impact on efforts to record and represent subsequent human rights abuses and acts of mass violence.

The course will feature a series of workshops, seminars, public lectures, film screenings, and even a concert. The goal of the course is to bring together leading scholars of testimony and oral history, who engage in highly interdisciplinary approaches to documenting, studying, and interpreting the Holocaust and other genocides and mass atrocities through the lens of first-person accounts.

Participants will explore the vast genre of Holocaust testimony through readings, lectures, and hands-on work with a variety of primary sources. The course interrogates testimonies from historical, legal, and moral perspectives, raising theoretical and methodological questions about the "afterlife" of these sources, which are highly relevant for a wide variety of scholarly fields, including History, Jewish Studies, Nationalism Studies, Genocide Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural and Literary Studies, Memory Studies and Legal Studies.

The course provides a platform to connect student leaders from around the globe and build their capacity to work on solutions for social issues by contextualizing their own leadership experiences within a transnational framework.  Exploring historical, philosophical, and practical elements of civic engagement, students will consider the underlying question of what it means to be an engaged citizen in the early 21st century.  Focusing on issues related to political participation, civil society, associational life, social justice, and personal responsibility, the class balances the study of theoretical notions of civic life while empowering students to be active participants in the communities in which they are situated. 

Taking advantage of the international diversity of the faculty and students, the course reflects on the causes of social, political, economic, and environmental issues and explores potential solutions through a series of lectures, workshops, discussions, and reflections.  Together students will learn how to articulate their responsibilities toward their local, national, and global communities to help “foster a sense of the “we” and encourage them to bring their talents, viewpoints, and skills to community work” regardless of the local context.  The course enhances the skills and knowledge of students to help them become engaged citizens. 

This is an intensive, eight-day course where student leaders from around the globe will strengthen their skills, knowledge, and understanding of civil society; expand their understanding of global threats to civil society outside of their own communities and share experiences and learn from their international colleagues.  Students must demonstrate engagement in community work through student-led initiatives, community-based work, or other leadership experience.

Around the world, democracies are breaking down. Many are being dismantled from within while others face attacks from without. In both cases, the issues underlying democracy’s erosion are not superficial but deeply entrenched and complex. As a result, democracies will not be renewed without considerable effort. Technical fixes imposed from above may slow democratic degeneration, but they cannot reverse it. Rebuilding democracy—fortifying its institutions and advancing its project—takes a movement from below.

Yet, when it comes to social mobilization, democratic societies tend to be apprehensive. A handful of exceptionally civil, organized, and focused social movements may serve as evidence of a dynamic public sphere and a healthy democratic culture. But far more often, democratic governments respond to social mobilization with less enthusiasm, treating it as anything from a nuisance to a threat. After all, what democratic purpose could social mobilization fulfill in a society with fair elections, democratic representation, and independent courts? Given the growing frequency, intensity, scale, and volatility of twenty-first century social mobilizations in democratic societies, it is difficult to see them simply as a confirmation of democratic flourishing or evidence of its undoing. Instead, from Indian farmers to Canadian truckers and Colombian taxpayers, from the Black Lives Matter movement to the Yellow Vests, these mobilizations index social, political, cultural, and economic crises that democratic governments have failed to address. In this context, what is the relationship between social mobilization and democracy? Do loosely networked local protests in disparate contexts share a global anatomy? When are social mobilizations a threat to democracy and when are they the foundation of its renewal?

The aim of It Takes a Movement is to re-examine the relationship between social mobilization and democracy by attending to the stunning complexity and diversity of twenty-first century protests and social movements. The course will employ a global perspective, comparing social mobilizations across different democratic contexts, tracing transnational connections and fissures, and establishing common features. To this end, the course will foster a robust dialogue among students, activists, and scholars assembled from all over the world. Students will leave the course with a deeper understanding of the fraught relationship between democracy and social mobilization as well as new questions and ideas about how it might be productively addressed.

History has seen several waves of constitution-making since the start of the 20th century with an unparalleled boom starting in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And while experts recently announced the end of this boom in new constitutions, constitution-making and remaking have continued, particularly in Africa. In a number of the countries affected by the Arab Spring, constitutional arrangements remain unsettled and contested; Sudan and South Sudan are struggling to start constitution-making processes; and elsewhere in Africa including Somalia, The Gambia, Kenya, and Botswana, constitution-making is high on the political agenda.  This activity and struggles to bring constitution-making processes to successful conclusions has given rise to a range of new ideas about the nature and purpose of constitutions and constitution-making, constitutional solutions tailored to local problems, the proper role of international and local actors in the constitution-building process as well as the value of having a dedicated implementation process for a newly adopted constitution. Therefore, we are again offering a summer course on constitution building with a focus on Africa that engages with these problems, building on the experience of nine successful courses organized annually in the SUN framework from 2013.

At its core, the course intends to tackle complex social, political, and legal problems in constitution-building from an interdisciplinary perspective, informed by field experience. In order to understand and contextualize practitioners’ experiences, we seek to combine different disciplines (mostly comparative law and political science) and perspectives (comparative governmental systems; electoral systems; decentralization; human rights; comparative constitutional law; good governance; etc.) to offer new insights on a subject of the highest academic and practical relevance.

What does it mean to be a scholar committed to the pursuit of global justice through, for example, combatting climate change, rising economic inequality, and racial and gendered violence and domination?

This Summer School engages with the challenges of global injustice as it manifests across the Global North/South divide, and the role of the university in both addressing and reproducing these injustices. We will explore whether and how global injustices might be addressed through knowledges, traditions, and practices within and beyond the university.

How is thinking and working with a manuscript different from working with an edited text? What challenges arise from a codex containing multiple texts with different dates and authors? How does ‘archival turn’ and social history of the collections inform how we approach manuscripts contained in them? How can digital tools be helpful in editing a text that differs from manuscript to manuscript? These are just some of the important methodological questions that students hoping to work with Islamic manuscripts face when embarking on research or while in the field, often without any recourse to practical guidance.

The proposed course will explore these and other questions by focusing specifically on how to think and work with Islamicate manuscripts, with an emphasis on the sources in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian from Central Asia and the Middle East (c. 1200-c. 1700). It will address cutting-edge methodological issues in the cross-section of Islamic and manuscripts studies, ‘archival turn’ in the histories of Eurasia, and digital humanities to offer a unique hands-on training experience for graduate students embarking on or already in the midst of fieldwork, researchers, as well as archival professionals. It aims to equip participants with methodological and conceptual insights (through readings, lectures, and discussions) as well as practical experience (through workshop sessions) in thinking and working with manuscripts, and also to provide feedback on participants’ projects by leading experts in the field (in seminars devoted to project presentations).

In the fast-changing higher education landscape and the context of new approaches to learning and teaching at universities, there is a growing need for professional development for teaching faculty. New initiatives that emphasize teaching excellence have encouraged universities worldwide to look at possible ways to further develop the teaching skills of their faculty members. Universities - particularly those in Central and Eastern Europe and the Global South – often lack sufficient experts who can engage as higher education advisors or trainers in the areas of teaching and learning. 

This course aims to help universities of the OSUN network and beyond conceptualize and design their own, in-house professional development and other initiatives that improve teaching and learning (across the disciplines) and bring the quality of their education to high international standards. It is designed for representatives of universities where educational development is an emerging area of practice and therefore there is a need for peers who could design, implement and evaluate professional development initiatives in teaching and learning. 

The course intends to bring together two larger groups of university staff: teachers and (current or future) agents of change in professional development activities (consisting of department or unit heads, and trainers (we plan to accept approximately 25 participants).

Each day of the course will consist of a morning session that discusses with all participants the most important issues, concepts, approaches, best practices, and guiding principles in a given aspect of teaching and learning, and professional development. 

In the afternoons, participants will be divided into groups, on one hand, to delve deeper into the topic of the day in a smaller group of peers and course facilitators, and on the other hand, to receive further guidance on how to design possible professional development activities, what training materials to use, what the challenges are.

The general purpose of this course is to provide an insight into the methods and approaches of modern musicology as an integral part of heritage studies, using music as a tool for analyzing and describing social changes, the interaction of state policies, cultural heritage, and audience, as well as for describing social identities.

The other main objective of the course is to explore various aspects of musical heritage management with an emphasis on creating audience development, and focused, yet socially conscious business policies. In order to react to the major, contemporary social, and sustainability challenges, in the fifth edition, we will concentrate on migration and music, the music of diasporas, and the connection between the movement of people and the movement of music.

The course builds on a highly interdisciplinary academic approach to modern musicology. The purpose is to provide an insight into the methods and approaches of musicology as an integral part of heritage studies, using music as a tool for analyzing and describing social changes, and identities, as well as to examine the ethnomusicological aspects of migration.

Due to the recent regional and international political crises, populism, war, economic and social inequalities, and climate changes, we experience increased migration and events of forced displacement. There have been many examples of movement/displacement of large groups of people throughout history, in the course of which the migrating cultural heritage interacts with the heritage of the new location, preserves certain elements, and creates new, independent phenomena. This is very notable in music: the mutual influence of different types of music from different places brings about innovative fusions and hybrids, as well as the need to preserve (and define) heritage.

Ethnomusicology traditionally deals with such processes and changes, however, due to recent global events, research on migration and diaspora has gained increased relevance and importance in ethnomusicology. Not only shall previously established notions be reinterpreted, and new migration processes examined, but the question of migrant creativity and survival, mobility, and integration should also be raised and examined.

Lectures and case study analysis of our course will focus on the above topics and aspects, complemented with seminar discussions, workshops, library research, and a field trip to Vienna.

Based on the feedback from last year’s courses, we plan to place more emphasis on students’ own research during the course: we will organize a workshop with a group of Iranian – Turkish – Syrian – Serbian musicians, giving an insight into the life of migrant musicians in Vienna, as well as a workshop with an Ukrainian musician.

We will continue our highly successful project development program: participants will be assisted by tutors in preparing a short presentation on a chosen subject relating to their cultural heritage, migration, and diaspora during the course.

The course examines the complex challenges of translating education policies for promoting access and equity into tangible outcomes through program design and implementation. Specifically, the course will focus on the policy-implementation nexus in the complexities of resource-constrained contexts of the global south. With theoretical and experiential insights from cases of actual education policy successes and failures in the global south, this course will provide the participants with a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of policy implementation for achieving desired outcomes in low-resource contexts.

The course builds on the knowledge foundation of the OSUN Certificate in Global Educational Development (GLOBALED), a network course bringing together students from diverse OSUN-affiliated institutions from four continents and was piloted as a summer course in 2023. The course will draw upon bodies of scholarship in education policy, public administration, and international development to offer the participants a nuanced understanding of processes and factors that shape education policy implementation in low-resource contexts in the global south and for under-served populations in the global north.