Global health and development as an interdisciplinary and intercultural opportunity for interuniversity cooperation

Global Health (GH) is an emerging area of study, research and interdisciplinary practices which considers the effects of globalization on health, having the ultimate objective of achieving equity in the pursuit of health for all, with particular attention to health determinants and issues, transnational health initiatives, and their interactions with national and local systems. Thanks to the work of the Italian Global Health Watch (OISG), GH related courses were pushed forward in a growing number of Italian medicine and health science faculties and the Italian Network for Education in Global Health Education (RIISG) was established. GH teaching in non-health faculties is less common, though in these contexts, the interdisciplinary nature of the approach becomes more evident. GH courses in non-health faculties are carried out in the Faculty of Sociology (Master’s course in Programming and Management of Social Policies) at Bicocca University, where a GH course was introduced for the first time in Italy since 2001, and at Bocconi University, where it is taught in English and offered internationally, both at the SDA Bocconi School of Management since 2002 and in the undergraduate program of economics since 2010. In the context of a partnership project between different universities financed by Fondazione CARIPLO, in the academic year 2010-2011, Bicocca University inaugurated a 160 hours bilingual workshop, taught simultaneously in Italian and Spanish. Professors and students (20) had a diverse background (sociology, anthropology, medicine, economics, political science, informatics, statistics, intercultural communication, psychology, and public health) and were evenly distributed between Italians and Latinamericans from universities in Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Italy, and Nicaragua. The experience, which contributed to the consolidation of the pre-existing collaborations and fostered new ones, demonstrated, among other things, the ease of interactions between the participants, without resorting to systematic translation or to a third, working language (i.e. English). Through an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach, it offered new, extraordinary opportunities of learning and human progress. The workshop, in turn, inserts into a program of action research which offers to the students and professors of the participating universities a chance to interact, also through fieldwork, in the context of integrated local development activities, collaborating with institutional actors and civil society organizations. In particular, the action research project between Universities and local communities has seen the first, experimental interdisciplinary investigation, conducted in the Barrio Carlo Fonseca a Managua, which involved students and professors of Bicocca and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua, with the contribution of all departments and all faculties of the latter university to the design and implementation of the project. The program of the Interuniversity and Intercultural Network, foresees that this experience, along with that of the workshop in Bicocca, could extend to all the universities of the network and their territories, under the broad idea that the universities should increasingly act as agents for local development