HUMANE Autumn Seminar, University of Trieste (IT), October 20-21, 2022

Where to from here? International partnerships in a post-pandemic world

Hosted by the University of Trieste

The Covid pandemic has, it is often said, on the one hand changed everything, and on the other, nothing.

International travel restrictions, slowdowns in student mobility and lab-based research collaborations unleashed an extraordinary level of innovation enabled largely by the shift to online education and research.

Virtual student mobility programmes, partners sharing experiences of their emergency response, and deepening bonds between strategic research partners were implemented quickly after the first lockdowns in the Spring of 2020. Far from slowing international engagement, many reported that the pandemic incentivised the imaginative development of new partnerships, the extension of existing ones and jettisoning of non-performing relationships.

Where to from here?

How much of this innovation and experimentation with new ways of fostering partnership will ‘stick’?

Have these changes been hard-wired into widespread institutional practice, or will they fall by the wayside with leadership changes and the collective yearning for a return to restrictions-free normalcy?

What are institutions’ experience of dealing with the barriers to the permanent adoption of these new models of international partnership? Or are they essentially the same barriers that existed before the pandemic struck?

And how have geopolitical tensions that have occurred in parallel with the pandemic and its aftershocks, influenced institutions’ approach to longer term partnerships?

Programme and speakers

Presentations