Europe: 6 Transnational Courses Organised by CIVICA's 10 Universities

Sciences Po is a founding member of CIVICA - the European University of Social Sciences, created in March 2019. CIVICA brings together today ten leading European higher education institutions in the social sciences, humanities, business management and public policy, with a total of 72,000 students and 13,000 faculty members.

CIVICA has launched this academic year’s joint and multicampus courses for master's students, continuing the alliance’s work towards a true European campus. The courses are one of CIVICA’s many transnational experiences enabling students to pursue academic paths beyond any one institutional or national context.

3rd edition of the multicampus course “The Future of Europe”

This fall sees the return of the third edition of CIVICA’s flagship multi-campus course, “The Future of Europe”, which is taught jointly by a team of faculty from alliance universities, critically exploring European policy challenges. In addition to a series of live online lectures grouped into four modules, students work in transnational teams to complete a capstone assignment developing policy solutions to EU-relevant policy problems.

Arancha González (Dean of Sciences Po's Paris School of International Affairs) introduced the course with Carlo Altomonte (Bocconi University, Italy) and is teaching a module about “Globalisation and Economic shocks” with Cornelia Woll (Hertie School, Germany). 

Small teams of students from different universities work on finding a creative solution to a concrete ongoing problem. Excellent projects automatically participate in the Boroli Prize Competition (Bocconi University, Italy), which awards three prizes of 4,200 euros each, split evenly among the team members, to the teams with the best three capstone projects submitted in the course. More than 240 master’s students across the CIVICA alliance have benefitted from this cross-border interdisciplinary experience over the past two years and a new multicampus course on “The Road to the Green Transition” will be launched in spring 2025.

2 new joint courses about the history of globalisation and policy evaluation

This year’s suite of joint course offerings for master’s students includes two brand new courses:

• “The Making of the Present: A Global History of Globalisation from St. Helena to Davos” is taught jointly by Mario Del Pero (a professor at Sciences Po's Centre for History) and Andrea Colli (Bocconi University, Italy) and will examine the process of global integration and disintegration over the last two centuries.
• “Policy Evaluation: Praxis and Politics” is taught by Anne Revillard (Director of Sciences Po's Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policy), Thilo Bodenstein (Central European University - CEU, Austria and Hungary), Diane Stone and Gaia Taffoni (European University Institute, Intergovernmental). It will illuminate fundamentals of qualitative evaluations for public policy and cover the political preconditions for the implementation of evaluations.

3 returning joint courses about welfare states, data science and illiberalism

Three returning CIVICA joint courses throughout this academic year will also include:

• “Welfare States in Transition” with Bruno Palier (Research Director at Sciences Po's Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics) and Anke Hassel (Hertie School, Germany)
• “Diving into the Digital Public Space” with Jean Philippe Cointet (Sciences Po's médialab) and Marton Karsai (CEU, Austria and Hungary), which covers the use of data science methods to investigate a research question related to social and political dynamics at large
• “Gendering Illiberalism” taught by CEU’s Andrea Peto with Alina Dragolea from the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (SNSPA, Romania), unpacking the buzzword “illiberalism” and critically investigating the loopholes in the related literature. This year, the “Gendering Illiberalism” course is incorporating a new exchange visit for students to go to SNSPA in Bucharest, with travel for the participants funded by CIVICA.

You can view the list of upcoming courses on my.CIVICA.eu with your Sciences Po's email and password. You can also suscribe to CIVICA's newsletter to stay informed.