The IDEAL project (Intercultural Dialogue in Europe through Active poLicies for integration) undertakes an additional course within the ordinary teaching supply of the Faculty of Education at Università Cattolica del Sacro cuore (Milan, Italy) aiming at fostering an European angle into educational and social studies. The topic focuses on European citizenship, social and cultural integration of migrants and the activation paradigm to design policies. Purposes: a) to contrast the current opinion against Europe and the link between skepticism towards European institutions and cultural/religious intolerance, increasingly widespread in Northern Italy; b) To sensitize university students and professors at the Faculty of Education to pay more attention to the normative, socio-political and institutional basis of European Union as a fundamental frame for intercultural competences. All activities are carried out in English. As the Faculty provides few courses addressing Eu-contents and none activity in English, then IDEAL could offer a first stage of a teaching renewal. Target groupsIDEAL is proposed on an optional base to all post-graduate and PhD students attending courses at the Faculty of education in Milan, Brescia and Piacenza. Few students enrolled in this Faculty apply for Erasmus exchanges then IDEAL contributes to elevate the demand for international and intercultural experiences. On a compulsory base IDEAL addresses to students attending the 1^ level academic Master in “Intercultural skills. Education for social integration” (embodied in the same Faculty). IDEAL activities are also opened to international students hosted by other faculties; also teachers and junior researchers of the faculty will participate in it.ActivitiesThe IDEAL foresees the realization of 3 additional courses (one per year) planned with the contribution of an inter-disciplinary team: Eu-law, History, Sociology, Psychology, Pedagogy and Philosophy. The attendance of IDEAL course will be recognized for 5 CFU/ECTS. IDEAL Activities are articulated in four sections: Opening conferences, Basic Module, Thematic Module, Study visit. The first three activities are academic lectures, while the Study visit is an inter-active experience. Every year the Basic module is repeated while the opening conferences, thematic Modules and Study visits change every year. The Basic Module includes elements in Law, History, Sociology of politics and Sociology of migrations and cultural processes, so to present the wider frame of Eu-policy for migration management and intercultural dialogue (through law, institutions, education system, NGOs, Civil society, lay people sensitization). The concept of European citizenship is also deepened across disciplines and related to the research work of the local Centre for the study of Migrations in Brescia. The 3 Thematic modules focuses on: (year1) International Education and Mediation, (year 2) Interreligious dialogue, (year 3) intercultural dialogue and the role of the family, each of those is deeply rooted in the research and disciplinary work of the participating Research Centers of the host institution: Centre for the study iof Intercultural relations (year 1), Centre for the study of Catholic Church social doctrine (year 2), Centre for the interdisciplinary studies of the Family (year 3). Participants are provided with insights on the potential of these contents in producing new educational policy-making, practices of cultural and religious mediation, new training methods for professionals. They interact with prominent lecturers, both foreigners and native, with a well-established international background, who might open their range of opportunities for following study or work experiences on a Eu-basis.

SEMENSUF is an interdisciplinary and collaborative project at the crossroads of philology, intellectual history, and material culture that adopts basic tools of digital humanities for Arabic literary and religious studies. It aims at providing an open-access scholarly edition and lucid, knowledge-sharing English annotated translation of the oldest extant encyclopaedia of Islamic Mysticism, the Book of Flashes in Sufism by Abū Nasr al-Sarrāj (d. 988). Through its innovative method, SEMENSUF aims at laying the foundations for a new historical and textual approach to the editing of early Sufi sources: the philological atomization of the work in textual units, the study of the manuscript transmission and material culture, and the digitization of later related sources are critical for shedding light on channels of knowledge transmission, centers of learning, and scholarly networks in early Sufism and more broadly in Islamic culture. SEMENSUF strongly believes that editing and translating a 1000-year-old work of mysticism can have a major impact on European multicultural and multifaith societies. In fact, the Book of Flashes tackles several intra- and extra Islamic issues that are still very much relevant to today’s Europe: it highlights how mysticism is and should be considered a genuinely component of Islam, invalidating most contemporary Neo-Salafi claims to the contrary; more importantly, the Book of Flashes reflects a strong concern for and appraisal of heterogeneity and pluralism within Islam. It is a hymn to diversity and to coexistence of different practices and sensibilities which collaborate rather than compete, resulting in a shared spirituality. SEMENSUF thus aims at having an impact on European pluralistic society by making available, to a wide audience, a universal text which will stimulate a reflection on mysticism as a safe space for intercultural and interfaith pluralism, dialogue, and inclusivity.

Although the research area dealing with building, sharing and exploiting linguistic resources and tools for automatic processing of Latin (and, more generally, of ancient languages) has seen a large growth across the last decade, linguistic resources for Latin are still not interoperable. This means that linguistic information is split up in many products that just do not talk to each other. Such a situation results in poor exploitation of the richness provided by all those digital objects for Latin that were produced across years of work. Since Latin is a dead language (thus missing native speakers), all we can and must do is to exploit to the best the information contained in those few and precious texts that survived from the past. This means: - to make the best possible organization and use of the available linguistic resources for Latin (enhanced with web-services for Natural Language Processing – NLP –) for a fruitful integration of the information they provide, i.e. to retrieve and combine information from different sources in the most efficient way; - to make it available linguistic resources whose quality is assessed (curated data sets). The objective of the LiLa project is to connect and, ultimately, to exploit the wealth of linguistic resources and NLP tools for Latin assembled so far, in order to bridge the gap between raw language data, NLP and knowledge descriptions, thus enabling scholars to exploit to the best the currently available resources and tools. To address such a challenge, LiLa intends to incorporate the linguistic resources for Latin into the Linked Data framework, making it possible for them to be published and interlinked on the web and to interact with each other. To this aim, the project will build an open-ended knowledge base for Latin by using the Linked Data paradigm to combine data from disparate linguistic resources, provide NLP web-services and include also Latin into the multilingual Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud.

"L’anno accademico 2018/19 ha visto un incremento dei numeri generali della mobilità inbound e outbound di Università Cattolica, in linea con gli obiettivi stabiliti dall’Ateneo e dalle singole Facoltà nell’ambito del Piano Strategico.A tal riguardo i programmi di ERASMUS+ hanno contribuito positivamente, avendo registrato numeri molto alti di mobilità studenti (studio e traineeship), conservando altresì i risultati soddisfacenti ottenuti per la mobilità docenti e staff.Dal punto di vista del network internazionale, ERASMUS+ rimane la base per il mantenimento della più ampia parte di relazioni con Atenei che condividono obiettivi scientifici e didattici, funzionali all’avanzamento dei progetti di inclusione e di crescita.In continuità con i dati raccolti lo scorso anno, si registra un ulteriore aumento del numero di studenti partecipanti a programmi di stage all’estero, che anche quest’anno superano quota 100. Sebbene il programma di mobilità per studio abbia visto un leggero calo, anche nel 2018/19 si attesta ad una quota superiore ai 500 studenti. Oltre a Spagna, Francia, Germania e Paesi Bassi, che da anni attraggono il numero più alto di studenti in mobilità, va segnalata la crescita dei flussi verso l’Irlanda, particolarmente ambita dagli studenti in mobilità per traineeship, evidentemente attratti da questo Paese anglofono perfettamente integrato nel contesto (anche lavorativo) europeo.Significativo è anche il dato di mobilità verso destinazioni dell’Est Europa, quali Polonia e Ungheria. Questo dato si inserisce nell’ambito di un’apertura strategica verso Est di Università Cattolica coinvolta in un progetto International Credit Mobility 2018 con la Russia, rappresentata da 2 Atenei uno di Mosca e l’altro di Novosibirsk. Non va certamente dimenticato che il programma ERASMUS+ è affiancato da numerosi altri programmi finalizzati alla mobilità per studio e stage verso destinazioni Extra-UE (oltre 1000 studenti) o verso ulteriori destinazioni UE attraverso opportunità di differente natura, quali ad esempio i Summer Programs, i Faculty-led o gli Study Tours (ulteriori 1000 studenti). In questo caso i Paesi più attrattivi sono USA, Australia, Cina, Brasile.Un’attenzione particolare è stata data al miglioramento dei servizi e dei processi pre-partenza e post-rientro, sempre più supportati da applicativi dedicati e sviluppati in maniera custom con un significativo sforzo di collaborazione tra Accademia e Amministrazione. Un particolare sforzo è stato profuso nell’aggiornamento delle politiche di gestione della sicurezza (stipula di polizze adeguate, contatti di emergenza, servizi collegati). Questo è altresì riscontrabile nei surveys di valutazione dove oltre l’80% degli studenti outbound segnala di aver ricevuto adeguato supporto al riguardo. Confermato è l’interesse per le opportunità di percorsi di Doppio Titolo costruiti su una varietà di modelli sviluppati sia per mobilità outbound che inbound, sia per corsi di LT che per LM. Questo anno accademico sono stati 124 gli studenti outbound coinvolti in tali programmi, di cui 70 in Europa, e 42 gli studenti inbound, di cui 19 provenienti da Paesi Europei.Per quanto riguarda la mobilità docenti e staff, Università Cattolica si ritiene soddisfatta dell’andamento del 2018/19, visto che questa iniziativa permane integrata ad altre iniziative legate all’internazionalizzazione della Faculty (mobilità in e out), presenti all’interno del Piano Strategico dell’Ateneo. In tal senso, e in un’ottica di sostegno alle politiche di ""Internationalisation at home"", grazie alla competente collaborazione del CHEI-Centre for Higher Education Internationalisation dell’Università Cattolica, numerose sono state le nuove iniziative formative finalizzate all’internazionalizzazione dell’offerta formativa o le metodologie d’insegnamento. Quest’anno la destinazione più frequente è stata la Spagna, seguita dalla Germania, ma diverse sono state le occasioni di mobilità svolte in Paesi Extra-EU alle quali i docenti di Università Cattolica hanno preso parte.Per quanto riguarda la mobilità dello staff, abbiamo potuto beneficiare di diverse opportunità di formazione per il personale tecnico-amministrativo, sia per l'Area Sviluppo Internazionale che per altre Units.Particolarmente significativo è stato anche quest’anno l’impegno per facilitare l’accesso ai programmi di mobilità a studenti appartenenti a fasce di reddito basse (tramite fondi MIUR) o con bisogni speciali, seguendo l’ispirazione dei propri principi fondativi e di missione. Concludendo, ERASMUS+ conferma il ruolo chiave svolto nei processi di internazionalizzazione di Università Cattolica: valorizzando la più che consolidata rete di partnerships, riesce a coinvolgere un numero sempre elevato di studenti che impattano positivamente su strutture, processi e metodologie d’insegnamento, favorendo altresì il coinvolgimento di docenti e staff in attività e iniziative che ambiscono ad internazionalizzare l’intero Ateneo."