ARQUS “MOBILITIES STUDIES” COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE
The Arqus European University Alliance brings together the universities of Granada, Graz, Leipzig, Lyon 1, Maynooth, Minho, Padova, Vilnius and Wroclaw, nine comprehensive research universities with deep regional engagement in medium-sized cities. Within the alliance, Arqus Communities of Practice (CoP) involve professionals or academics from at least four of the nine full members of Arqus to propose joint activities, discussions and information sharing channels.
Together with colleagues from Universidad de Granada, Universidade do Minho, Maynooth University and Universität Leipzig, in 2025 we established a new CoP on Mobilities Studies. This CoP configures itself as a place of mutual recognition, where academic staff with different disciplinary backgrounds (including, but not limited to, geography, history, economics, anthropology) from 5 universities of the Alliance have the opportunity to regularly meet in order to explore the possibilities of further collaboration.
In the spirit of the Arqus initiatives, this community will host conversations by CoP members inspired by common mobility-based thematic grounds to promote better reciprocal knowledge of the academic activities (scientific work, teaching, public engagement) as well as the institutional realities in which the community members work. This community, in fact, is partly animated by existing collaborations, but is mainly aimed, in an exploratory way, at conducting a pilot action to verify the possibility of collaborating on a multidisciplinary level among colleagues who have not yet collaborated together in a structured manner. It will serve not only to compare (through a cooperative-learning style) the academic and teaching practices carried out in the allied universities and departments around the common frame of Mobilities Studies, but also to find organizational ways to continue the dialogue with concrete actions.
The CoP runs an Arqus colloquium series in Mobilities hosted online by the MoHu. These colloquia will offer a learning and productive space where the community will share scientific knowledge, improve professional expertise, discuss methodological practices and exchange information about upcoming initiatives and opportunities in the field of mobilities research, thus developing further networking capacities and actions.
