Societing Summer School 2nd Edition Social Movements and Social Innovation in the Mediterranean.

[Chris Pinchen]

Societing Summer School2nd Edition Social Movements and Social Innovation in the Mediterranean. In many ways, the Mediterranean has been in the shadow of the history of 20th century. But now it emerges anew. The uprisings in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt surprised everyone with the vigor and energy. They might very well spread to Greece, Italy and Spain.

At any rate these countries seem to be at the vanguard of a future marked by precarity, economic decline sovereign default and moral collapse of the state. (In Lombardy, Italy’s most prosperous region, only 20 per cent of university graduates are able to land a permanent employment contract).

At the same time the diffusion of social media has been extremely quick in these countries. (Facebook grew by 2000 per cent in Italy in 2009.) And this has had profound consequences. For young people in Tunisia and Egypt, Facebook and Twitter have provided new means of staying in touch and remaining connected to the world.

In Italy Facebook provides a way to mobilize and organize in a situation where the traditional public spaces are in decline. At the same time social media point at new ways of facilitating economic processes, making possible new ways of doing business and creating wealth, like Social Entrepreneurship, crowd- sourcing, micro-finance, and new forms of social innovation from below. This second edition of the Societing Summer School wants to focus on the role of new media in the changing Mediterranean (broadly defined).

We want to discuss and analyze what new ways of doing business, politics and life in general that Social Media have facilitated, and how they play out within overall political and economic changes in the Mediterranean region. What is the strategic perspective for the Meditteranean region for the next decade? What implications does this have for politics, business and society?

And how do New Media play into these scenarios of change? What new kinds of social innovation can we imagine in the region? The school will last for 6 days The program will combine morning seminars in which we explore, in the company of experts, issues like new media and politics, social entrepreneurship and sustainability, new business forms and the geopolitics and history of the Mediterranean, with a rich cultural program in the evenings, devoted to exploring in loco the culture and history of the Mediterranean region.

The last day of the school will be devoted to presenting the results of our discussions in a public event. A Summer School is supposed to be fun, and despite an intense program we will cater to ludic aspects with a rich cultural program, dinners parties and midnight seminars. We do not intend to replicate the experience of university or school, but rather to provide an interactive context for collective knowledge creation where we all participate as equals.

The working language will be English, and the summer school is open to students from all around the world, as well as for managers, academics, professionals and other interested and interesting individuals.

 

More info here