"Visions for the Future" Festival: 22 Undergraduate Students Invited to the LSE

My presentation was quite unique. I shared the findings of my Capstone Project (Civic Learning Programme) on education through art, based on a volunteer project I founded in Peru. This project works with children and adolescents in shelters, using artistic activities to foster both personal and professional development.

The presentation took the form of a poetic performance and a video compilation that documented the project’s evolution over three years. The issue I addressed was the lack of quality education for vulnerable populations.

My main proposal was to address this gap through creative, artistic, and holistic development programs. The findings highlighted how artistic expression can be an effective educational tool to foster empowerment, engagement, and learning.

My research project addresses the digital poverty that migrant women can face. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak works were pivotal for my research. Her postcolonial approach to gender-related matters is illuminating and thought-provoking, especially in her conception of situated knowledge, which truly resonates with the question of digital inclusion.

I tackled the issue of the digital divide with an emphasis on the individuals most at risk. Contrary to common assumptions, it is not merely a question of generation or age, but rather a social and gender-related matter. Migrant women, being disproportionately more vulnerable to economic precariousness, lacking access to education, and being invisibilised by public policymaking, find themselves more exposed to digital anxiety and to a lack of access to devices.

Therefore, I wished to emphasize the relevance of a horizontal approach to teaching digital skills, of incorporating them into language classes, but also sought to go beyond merely bridging the divide by considering digital inclusion as a means of emancipation—most notably through socially-oriented outsourcing practices.
 

I presented a comparative analysis of how heritage protection and energy efficiency can be reconciled, using the cross-border Upper Rhine region (France, Germany, Switzerland) as a case study.

This analysis is in line with Sciences Po's curriculum, in particular the courses on the territorial dimension of cross-border governance. I'm thinking in particular of the “Elaboration of a strategy for the balanced development of territories between France and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg” course, where we were required to conduct research and interviews.

As far as methodology is concerned, I found it very useful to pay close attention to the link between theoretical reflections on public policy analysis and field studies rooted in the local dimension and the search for first-hand documentation.