This blended mobility CIVIS course will introduce participating students to the field of Public Social Sciences and Humanities, with an emphasis on Anthropology, Ethnography, Literary and Folklore Studies and Education (AELFE).

The ‘Public’ here means a shift in the dissemination of the knowledge that these disciplines produce, especially concerning issues of wider public interest, such as:

• inequalities and inequities regarding access to resources,
• participation and recognition,
• belonging and homemaking,
• discrimination and racism.

How do people and communities respond to these issues? How do they create belonging and acceptance or build communities around these issues? How do public state and non state institutions and organisations support community building? What can critical Human/ Social sciences contribute to enable processes of community-building? These are some of the questions we will address in this program.

The ‘Public’ also means to not just work with and speak about communities, but to actively engage with stakeholders and members of the civil society and work jointly on solutions. These are e.g. museums, NGOs, local communities or neighbourhood associations.

AELFE, with their theoretical foundations and methodological apparatuses, are ideally placed to explore these social and communal issues as mentioned above. Yet, the challenge that these disciplines face today is to turn this potential into reality, return their knowledge to people and communities and engage with them once more, as scholars and partners.

Throughout this course, we will discuss how the concepts and methods of these different disciplines can contribute to this endeavour. Students will work in small groups on projects with an applied character. They will gain hands-on experience and learn how to work in an inter- and transdisciplinary fashion in order to achieve a better understanding of the contemporary societies we live in and the changes they undergo.

The members of our dynamic team of academics have had a long-term and productive collaboration relating to this BIP, which has been running for the past four years. We are combining our efforts to teach jointly the three streams into which our programme will be divided, so that our students may have the benefit of truly interdisciplinary perspectives, aligned with CIVIS’ strategic goals, such as inclusiveness, collaboration, a well-balanced geographical distribution of students and staff, and co-creation of knowledge and skills, proven by the extensive interaction with stake holders that we are planning to have.

The physical mobility part will take place between 20-24 April 2026 and will be held in Athens, Greece. It will consist of lectures, workshops and visits to various places of interest, in which students will practice field research techniques, such as participant observation and interviews. There will also be times for study and co-creation of their projects, which they will present at the conclusion of the programme.

All students will visit the Acropolis and the Athens University History Museum in the historical area of Plaka, Athens, to be given the opportunity to reflect on different types of heritage.

Students will visit public institutions, museums, organisations and NGOs as well as local urban areas and enterprises, according to their streams:

1. Stream One students will visit museums, such as the Museum of Modern Greek Culture and the Museum of Folk Art and Tradition "Aggeliki Chatzimichali" and will employ ethnographic walking in various districts of Athens, observing the interior and exterior of houses, galleries and cultural centres.
2. Stream Two students will also practice ethnographic walking through the central markets and visit various shops with local and ethnic products, where they will conduct fieldwork and interviews.
3. Stream Three students will visit the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and NGOs' learning centres, where they will interact with migrants and refugees and with their teachers. They will participate in a workshop employing the world cafe methodology, entitled "Exploring Refugee and Migrant Subjectivity (Life Worlds) through Narratives", to become acquainted with the impact of education on the formation of heritage and social identities. 

The students of each stream will work in smaller groups (around 3-5 students) on designated projects, which involve training fieldwork exercises, e.g. in the form of interviews and participant observation. The information gathered during this practice will be critically reflected, assessed and analysed in class and developed into group project presentations, taking place at the end of the week.

Collaboration among students and self-directed learning is employed in both our virtual and physical phases of the BIP. The hands-on element is present in their visits to museums and ethnographic experience and they are connected with real-world challenges during their visits and participation in the learning activities of the NGOs catering for migrants and refugees.

The virtual part of the course will consist of 5 consecutive online sessions, held between 20 February - 3 April 2026, during which the main theoretical approaches of each stream will be dealt with. Teaching dates and hours are to be further decided on the basis of the number of students enrolled and their preferences for the streams. Possible problems on specific dates due to the university schedules of participant students will be dealt with accordingly. 

In the virtual component, we start with a kick-off meeting, in which teachers and students are introduced to each other and the entire BIP (aims, streams, objectives etc.) is presented to the students through a power point. This is followed by another 4 online sessions for each stream conducted by members of the teaching staff who deliver lectures introducing the topics, basic concepts, theories and methodologies employed by each stream, i.e. material culture and museums, local cultures, urban folklore and orality, and migration and diversity.

They also discuss the projects the students will have to deliver at the end of the physical phase of the course and provide bibliographical resources for their study. The students make acquaintances with their instructors and with each other. They may work in small mixed teams, read and discuss texts and develop their knowledge about the topics they study. They may also start preparing the practical component of their chosen stream.

The hosting University (NKUA) provides free access to the Webex platform for teaching. A Google classroom will be created to allow instructors to upload any information and academic material necessary for our teaching. The flipped classroom design of the virtual classes will allow the uploading of prerequisite texts to the GC page of each stream, together with a set of questions indicating the most relevant parts of the textual inputs.

We will collect students' answers to these questions via Google Forms (GF) so as to enable the teacher to get an in depths understanding of the level of comprehension students acquired during the individual reading tasks. Based on the answers received, we will be able to plan the teaching activity for the virtual classes and, additionally, to spot the level of understanding the references and, more importantly, the white spots in comprehension as derived from individual reading.

After class, students will be encouraged to revisit the texts in the light of the debates organized during the virtual session. In preparation for the physical activity, which will consist of mainly field work related to each stream’s theme, a short quiz will be developed, also using GF to check the post-class class understanding of the theoretical framework. This way we will be able to foster peer learning as a core feature of the physical phase, which constitutes student-centered learning by partaking in real field research activities.