'POSEIDON - Politics, society and the environment in the classroom' is a project built on existing agreements between UNIBO and UPES, Toyo University and Stellenbosch University.
The project aims to share crosscultural existing teaching projects and activities on the interplay between climate change and socio-environmental justice, across different Universities but also across different disciplines, in order to enhance and support innovative education and strengthen the multidisciplinary approach of all the partners involved. Students both in Global North and South are asking their professor to engage in meaningful discussion on the issues related to the climate crisis that it is perceived by younger generation as a matter to dealt with urgency. This project wants to address these needs by creating teaching opportunities (that can be replicated) and a platform for exchanging knowledge and ideas on how to deal with these crises among countries that are deeply affected.
Firstly, the project aims to discuss the concept of climate change and its connections to social justice from an historical standpoint, valorising the different regional and national contexts and their influence on the construction of the concept and its treatment in the political discourse.
The objective is to construct a leaming environment which analyses the concept of climate change and its connections with social justice. By framing this issue critically and with a multidisciplinary approach, we aim at showing students how such complex issues can be approached in a multidisciplinary way as well as cross-culturally, gathering contributions from disciplines as different as politica! science, anthropology, geography, law and media studies from four very different countries.
This diversified learning environment would tackle well-known topics with innovative methods and didactic approaches (serious games, creative methods, emotional mapping), and would fill a gap in the current didactic activities offered by the University of Bologna.
Secondly, the project is aimed at the teaching staff, allowing them to enhance their skills by experimenting theoretical and methodological frameworks in a highly multicultural learning context. This objective would be attained through the organization of faculty mobilities, a Winter School and an online students' conference. The teaching staff would also be in charge of managing an online platform in order to gather contributions from researchers and Ph.D. candidates and actively disseminating them, to foster collective knowledge on these topics.
Finally, the project aims to give MA degree program students criticai tools to analyse political, social and cultural effects of climate change in innovative ways, thanks to the interaction with students and teaching staff from India, Japan and South Africa. This will help them to broaden the picture and will allow them to criticize existing and/or enrich frameworks of discussion of climate change.