C-Urge Mid-Term Planning: Creating Participatory Learning Spaces

This 30th May, C-Urge Principal Investigators and Doctoral Candidates met to discuss the upcoming Mid-Term event in Catania and, most importantly, to create a dynamic where DCs can actively shape their own learning experience.

In early September, the C-Urge will embark on a six-day journey aboard two sailing boats managed by Ermenautica. Led by Matteo Aria—anthropologist, navigation trainer, and C-Urge advisory board member—this experience will immerse participants in a low-cost, low-carbon, slow-paced way of living and thinking together.  

The preparation meeting aimed to reaffirm a shared commitment: to consider the boat not only as a mode of transport, but as a learning space in itself. Designed as a horizontal environment, it invites everyone — DCs, supervisors, and advisory board members — to step out of conventional roles, rethink traditional hierarchies, and co-construct the learning experience. The unique setting of the sea enables more face-to-face, embodied, and authentic interaction. In this spirit, we aim to create not just an academic checkpoint, but a transformative experience.

For the second part of the Midterm event, DCs, supervisors, and available members of our interdisciplinary advisory board, will participate in a day-and-a-half symposium in Sicily, where workshops and discussions will be held around the topic of “Social Innovation for Climate Action”. These activities are being organized in collaboration with the Impact HUB Sicily (C-URGE associated partner), the HIMBY association – ‘Hot in My Backyard’, as well as citizen scientists and local activists and will explore how anthropological research can be translated into concrete actions for civil society, citizen science, and social innovation.