The “Challenges of Interculturalism” course is supported by the Council of Europe’s Intercultural Cities programme, an initiative that manages more than 100 cities around Europe (and worldwide) with the general aim to promote the intercultural approach at the local level.
Through the sessions, the lecturers -Dani de Torres and Gemma Pinyol, both of them high-level experts of the Council of Europe- share their international and local expertise on public management of immigration and diversity policies, to offer a comprehensive approach of intercultural policies to the Master students. They offer practical tools and approaches on evidence-based policy making. The link between knowledge formation and intercultural decision-making process and the link between intercultural policy design and its implementation is examined through concrete case studies.
Dani de Torres is also director of the Spanish Network of Intercultural Cities (RECI) and Gemma Pinyol is its coordinator. The RECI is part of the Intercultural Cities programme and it is currently composed of 16 Spanish cities which share methodologies and best practices and promote the debate and innovative policies to implement the intercultural approach at the city level.
Conceptual frameworks, debates and analysis of political strategies and best practices will be included in the sessions, and special attention will be paid to how local authorities deal with diversity from an intercultural perspective to strengthen social cohesion and promote development. The students will virtually become local authorities during the sessions, to finally design intercultural public policies and actions. Real local experiences and theoretical discussions will help them in this challenging task.
The collaboration between GRITIM-UPF, RECI and the Council of Europe aims to improve the necessary links between the academia and policy making, and it is a great example of how cooperation between different actors is crucial to enrich both academic research and concrete policies at the highest level, combining the global and the local.
At the conceptual level, the main objective of the course is to provide a broad perspective of the intercultural approach and to bridge the gap between the theoretical framework and the design, implementation and evaluation of concrete public policies that pursue to build more intercultural societies.
In view of the problems suffered by the traditional models of integration and accommodation of diversity, the interculturalist approach has gradually gained ground in certain academic, political and social fields. The fact that the Master in Immigration Studies pays attention to this path-breaking new policy paradigm contributes to fulfil the training aims of GRITIM-UPF by putting Master students in contact with new theoretical and policy debates. The high-level experts teaching at the course will certainly contribute to develop skills to understand the process of policy paradigm change that we are currently experiencing in our super-diverse societies, mainly at the local level.