Timed for World Refugee Day, the webinar is open to university faculty, staff and students to drive positive change in higher education settings.
The SMILE project (Social Meaning Impact through LLL Universities in Europe), co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme, organizes the webinar “Cultivating Inclusion: Inspiring Change at Universities on World Refugee Day”.
The activity will take place on Tuesday 20 June 2023, from 10:00 to 11:00 CET, in English, via Zoom. Prior registration is required by noon on Saturday 17 June.
The aim of the webinar is to bring together university faculty, staff and students to explore strategies for fostering inclusivity and driving positive change in higher education settings.
To this end, the seminar will have Dr. Rachel Baldacchino and Professor Carmel Borg, from the University of Malta, and Cati Jerez, coordinator of the University of Barcelona’s Support program for refugees and people from conflict areas. The panelists will offer the presentation “Training Universities for Inclusion in Higher Education” and the discussion “Best Practices for Promoting Refugee Inclusion on Campus”, as well as a Q&A session.
Through this agenda, the SMILE project invites the university community to learn from experts in the field and engage in meaningful discussions, providing them with valuable insights and actionable strategies that can be implemented to create more inclusive environments for refugees and displaced individuals within universities.
Contributions on university diversity and inclusion and Diversity Award
Moreover, SMILE calls for contributions on university diversity and inclusion for its final symposium, that will take place in Barcelona on 16 November 2023, followed by the 2023 eucen Autumn Seminar, on 16-17 November 2023. Both events want to give visibility to the way universities are (or should be) addressing diversity and inclusion, and celebrate the growth and evolvement in importance of the third mission of universities.
The abstracts submitted for these events must address one of the three blocks of inequity: migrant background students, women in leadership or ‘low socio-economic status’ students, and must connected to at least one of these challenges: understanding diversity, collaborating towards diversity, embedding diversity or facilitating diversity. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 15 September 2023.
The authors of the strongest abstracts will be invited to present their work during the symposium in Barcelona, and they will also opt to win one of the three SMILE Awards on Diversity 2023.
SMILE partners
The Solidarity Foundation of the University of Barcelona is one of the four civil society organisations from Belgium and Spain that participate in the SMILE project, together with six European universities from Germany, Ireland, Italy, Finland, Malta and Romania. The project is coordinated by eucen (European university continuing education network).
This news is related to the following SDG of 2030 Agenda:
