Science Diplomacy is a tool that recognizes science as a process for pursuing evidence and diplomacy as a process for dialogue and cooperation between different stakeholders. In our increasingly interconnected world, there is a growing need for science diplomacy as we are confronted by issues concerning agriculture or trade, automation or cryptocurrencies, peace & security, global health pandemics, and climate change, among many other complex challenges. Our decision-making power is strengthened or weakened by the relevance, timeliness, reliability, and communication of information in a fast-paced changing environment. While academia includes specialties in translational science, public policy, health policy and other policy-related fields, these programs do not address the needs of the vast matrix of other scientific disciplines to provide students with training and tools to effectively partner and communicate with non-scientists, whether they are policy-makers, community leaders or the general public. This is Science Diplomacy at its core—partnerships to eliminate cultural, sectoral, and knowledge barriers. 

This course focuses on the growing interdisciplinary field of Linguistic Landscapes (LL), which traditionally analyses “language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings”, usually as they occur in urban spaces. More recently, LL research has evolved beyond studying only verbal signs into the realm of semiotics, thus extending the analytical scope into the multimodal domain of images, sounds, drawings, movements, visuals, graffiti, tattoos, colours, smells as well as people. 

Students will be informed about multiple aspects of modern LL research including an overview of different types of signs, their formal features as well as their functions.

With the generous support of the Getty Foundation, Duke University’s Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab (DAHVCR Lab), in partnership with colleagues from the Università degli Studi di Padova, the University of Exeter, and Venice International University, will be offering a two-year Advanced Topics in Digital Art History Summer Institute on the topic “Exhibiting Hidden Histories: Bringing Art History Projects to Publics through Digital Exhibitions and XR.” Led by representatives from Duke University and the partner institutions, interdisciplinary teams consisting of faculty and staff leaders, graduate students, postdocs, and other project collaborators will gather from June 5-16, 2023, in Venice, Italy at Venice International University, with follow-up activities taking place over the course of the 2023-24 academic year, and leading into a follow-on gathering in Summer of 2024.

After six editions of two-week summer workshops introducing concepts and methods for digital art and architectural history through hands-on tutorials and collaborative project development, this Institute draws upon several years of research-institute development collaboration within the Visualizing Cities consortium, most recently with a Summer Institute in Venice June 2018-19, an international Symposium at Duke University in 2020, followed by a collective gathering at the Università degli Studi di Padova in June 2022.

In its seventh edition, the summer school aims at the development of ideas that promote a more sustainable future by bringing together young scholars from all over the world to discuss their ideas on the Grand Transition of our society from the microlevel of individual decision-making to the organizational and the societal level.

It gives young scholars the opportunity to discuss with eminent scholars in management theory and to test their ideas and present their work. Participants will become familiar with recent research from a broad set of disciplines.

They will work on their ability to engage in the transdisciplinary discourse which is required for the development of innovative answers to grand sustainability challenges.

VIU Scientific Coordinator: Agar Brugiavini, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice & Venice International University (VIU)

The Summer Institute provides students and early-career researchers with a multidisciplinary and rigorous understanding of the ageing process, ranging from some basic notions of the medical and epidemiological literature, to key concepts in the economics and sociology of ageing.
A special focus is the use of large micro-data sets from the international family of health and retirement studies (SHARE, HRS, ELSA, CHARLS, MHAS, etc.).

In 2023 the Summer Institute on Ageing will reach its tenth edition with a new format, which includes two types of activities:

- three full days of lectures, testimonials and hands-on sessions;
- two days workshop where scientific papers will be presented and discussed.

Digital Technologies for Historical and Cultural visualization are transforming the ways that scholars can study and represent works of art, as well as growth and change in urban spaces and buildings.

With the generous support of the Getty Foundation, Duke University’s Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab (DAHVCR Lab), in partnership with colleagues from the University of Padua, the University of Exeter, and Venice International University, will be offering a two-year Digital Art History Summer Institute on the topic “Exhibiting Hidden Histories: Bringing Art History Projects to Publics through Digital Exhibitions and XR.” Led by representatives from Duke University and the partner institutions, interdisciplinary teams consisting of faculty and staff leaders, graduate students, postdocs, and other project collaborators will gather from June 5-16, 2023, in Venice, Italy at Venice International University, with follow-up activities taking place over the course of the 2023-24 academic year, and leading into a follow-on gathering in Summer of 2024.

After six editions of two-week summer workshops introducing concepts and methods for digital art and architectural history through hands-on tutorials and collaborative project development, this Institute draws upon several years of research-institute development collaboration within the Visualizing Cities consortium, most recently with a Summer Institute in Venice June 2018-19, an international Symposium at Duke University in 2020, followed by a collective gathering at the Università degli Studi di Padova in June 2022.

The program offers professionals, students and early career researchers the opportunity to critically reflect, with the help of highly qualified experts, on topical issues that raise ethical and deontological dilemmas, relating to health care ethics.

A fundamental feature of the School concerns its method, which is characterized by a continuous and intense interdisciplinary exchange between doctors, philosophers, economists, jurists, psychiatrists and sociologists.

During this third edition, the course will focus on the problem of organ transplant ethics: the different questions it raises require interdisciplinary reflection. In the procurement phase, it is necessary to know how to interpret and apply the "dead donor rule". Moreover, a certain definition of death can encounter resistance and opposition in some ethnic and cultural contexts. Another problem, in this phase, may be that of the correct collection of consent and the possible management of intra-family conflicts regarding donation. Various difficulties may also arise at the transplant stage. For example, the refusal (for non-medical reason) of a blood transfusion of a transplant candidate, or the use and discarding of the so-called "marginal organs", also difficult to solve. Can everyone be a donor? Is it ethically acceptable for a young child to donate the organ to an elderly parent? Are there any risks of donor conditioning? How to define therapeutic obstinacy in a field where we are dealing with complex patients whose possible outcome is not known with certainty? How to select patients? How to prioritize access to transplants?
The Summer School will allow the participants to reflect on all these questions, through intense debates.

The VIU Summer School on Advanced Transportation, Logistics and Supply Chain Management is an initiative of VIU in partnership with its member universities Iuav, Ca’ Foscari, the University of Padova, KU Leuven, Stellenbosch, and Tsinghua, in cooperation with the University of Naples Federico II. This edition will take place in Napoli, Italy.

The program develops an original comprehensive approach, bringing into focus the need for synergic engagement among policy-makers, planners, and private and public actors in transport, logistics and supply chain management.

The participants will explore the latest innovations in technology, business models, and policy-making. Through rigorous and non-conventional empirical and theoretical approaches we will explore emerging trends, strategic scenarios, IT and modelling tools (including demo labs), methods, case studies, and applied projects, and discuss how these can support business and policy-makers, achieve environmental sustainability, and socio-economic efficiency. Disruptive digital trends will be confronted with the physical impacts on the territory (“bits vs bricks” perspective).

This course focuses on the growing interdisciplinary field of Linguistic Landscapes (LL), which traditionally analyses “language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings”, usually as they occur in urban spaces. More recently, LL research has evolved beyond studying only verbal signs into the realm of semiotics, thus extending the analytical scope into the multimodal domain of images, sounds, drawings, movements, visuals, graffiti, tattoos, colours, smells as well as people. 

Students will be informed about multiple aspects of modern LL research including an overview of different types of signs, their formal features as well as their functions.

The aim of the Summer School is to gather an international cohort of graduate students for a week-long, multi-faceted exploration of one of the most timely topics in the interdisciplinary humanities: Shakespeare’s global contexts and futures. In order to provide focus and coherence, the play Othello, set in multicultural Venice, will be taken as a case study throughout the summer school.

“Shakespeare” is now a global vernacular—a resonant language available throughout the world as a form of self-expression and enquiry. Written at a time of incipient globalisation, Othello both represents and challenges the fraught dynamics of international cultural contact. By offering troubling insights into the development of the discourse of race, and by coupling that discourse to an unstable conflict between Christianity and Islam, the play speaks powerfully to our own world of religious, ethnic, and national antagonism.

“Global Shakespeare” invites students to imagine alternatives to this increasingly fractured world. Using Shakespeare’s poetry and dramaturgy as a resource, it asks participants to consider how connections can be made across languages, religions, and nation states. The school’s multi-disciplined approach will involve students in literary analysis, politics, and theatrical performance by focusing on the intersection of (1) Shakespeare’s England and its growing interest in global connections; (2) Venice as a Renaissance site of global interaction; and (3) a twentieth-century world increasing riven, especially in the Mediterranean and its adjoining regions, by racial and religious antagonisms.

This interdisciplinary Summer School will take its cues from a short selection of accessible texts to explore Ernest Hemingway’s presence and influence in Venice and beyond. As for other places where he lived and worked—Pamplona, Key West, Paris, Havana—, Hemingway contributed to the international aura of Venice. Reading his works in the Venetian context will not only give students access to one of the most important Modernist writers, but it will also lead them to an examination of history, geography, cultural critique, language, and culture centered in Venice. With his ubiquitous presence in Venice and in the World, Hemingway offers us a key to many an aspect of modern literature and culture.

Reading Hemingway today in the privileged context where these texts take place or were created will enable students to discover a master of style of the English language and understand why Hemingway may be one of the most influential western authors in modern literature. As an American author in Venice, he sheds light on the complicated relations US culture has entertained with Italian culture and world cultures. His relation to languages is particularly interesting, and many things are gained in translation when we read him in such an interdisciplinary and international context.

The VIU Summer School on Films in Venice and Filming Venice is an initiative of Venice International University, in partnership with its member universities Ca' Foscari, Iuav, Tel Aviv, Waseda, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, and Exeter, organized to coincide with the 80th International Venice Film Festival.

The aim is to combine film theory and practice, applying them to representations of Venice, through a multidisciplinary and multicultural approach, reflected both in the composition of the faculty and the student body. In one part of the program, students will be introduced to the history, culture and anthropology of Venice and its relation to visual media. They will be offered basic notions of film analysis and film-making theory. The other part will be devoted to film-making practice. Students will be encouraged to develop a team project on Venice: a film, which will be screened and collectively discussed and analyzed at the end of the Summer School. Deserving projects will be screened at the Ca' Foscari Short Film Festival in 2024.

The VIU Summer School on Migration and Gender: Legal, Sociolinguistic and Literary Perspectives offers a legal-literary approach to the ways in which migration influences gender. Gender is a constitutive element of migration. The course will discuss both this idea, and reversing the formula, it will examine the role of migration in shaping gender, understood as relational and performative. A particular focus will be on identity in relation to human rights and law, labor and culture. The course is innovative and will combine the contribution of three scholars, in legal studies and literature.

The program is particularly timely in this moment of history in which migration is transforming societies and shaping gender.

The course will model the ways in which the humanities and the imagination might inform legal processes or contour legal decisions. This will play out in two ways: first through the integration of literature and law in our class discussions, and second through the students’ experiences of rewriting a legal decision from the perspective of what they have learned and discussed. In short, we hope that this course will educate a young generation of lawyers, academics and activists by raising awareness of many issues at the intersection of gender, migration and law