Faculty: EUR-wide (Erasmus Initiative Vital Cities and Citizens)
Educational theme: Student competences
Project lead: Els Leclercq
Liaison: Jiska Engelbert
Duration: December 2020 – June 2021
Status: Running
Mission
Tackling Inequalities is a multidisciplinary honours programme for master students at EUR. In the programme, students explore the kinds of inequalities that are produced or exacerbated in a digital society. They research how digitalization of government, economies and health care negatively impacts urban residents and communities. With this programme, we challenge them to design and produce actual interventions to help tackle such negative impacts.
Through Tackling Inequalities, students learn to be critical and creative, and how to collaborate and communicate with students from other disciplines and people outside academia.
Implementation
Tackling Inequalities ran a pilot edition in 2018/2019. Now, together with Impact at the Core, the programme is further developed. It consists of two tracks: a knowledge track and an impact track. The knowledge track encompasses masterclasses in which researchers from the Erasmus Initiatives share their experience with urban inequalities. During the impact track, students work in interdisciplinary teams on one of three themes: local government in Rotterdam, the Rotterdam economy, or health care in Rotterdam. The process is an iterative co-creation process, meaning that it involves a non-established problem and outcome of the project. At the start of this process, students explore their expectations and personal challenges for entering into a process without a fixed starting point and outcome.
Tackling Inequalities reflects the principles of the Theory of Change. It is based on ‘productive interactions’ in which students exchange knowledge among themselves and with stakeholders that is both scientifically and socially relevant.