Thanks to the agreement, concluded in July last year, the University and the Archdiocese were able to carry out many common projects, that Archbishop Lauro Tisi and Rector Paolo Collini recalled today in a meeting at the Rector’s Office.
This five year cooperation has already proven successful after the first year, with four conferences on the history of the Prince-Bishopric, the history of the Faculty of Sociology, intangible cultural heritage, and the role of collective memory to preserve knowledge and ensure education.
Trasformare, a shared research project, has been another positive outcome of the agreement: a journey between tradition and innovation to re-discover life in old times and collective knowledge that will change or be forgotten.
The project, in particular, explored a number of themes - people, food, the body, women - through literature. Researchers examined both private recounts from the correspondence of prominent local families (the Alberti Poja’s in particular), and public texts published in missionary publications, authentic and discrete testimonies of contacts with other cultures. The project, which involved different disciplines across several academic areas, was carried out together by University professors (Lucia Rodler of the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science and Casimira Grandi of the Department of Sociology and Social Research) and their colleagues from the Vigilianum (Katia Pizzini from the Archvio diocesano and Leonardo Paris, director of the Ufficio cultura).
Many collaborations were set up thanks to the agreement, for instance with the Centro di Ricerca sugli Epistolari del Settecento in Verona, and the online journal Griseldaonline.
“Trento: una città che si cancella. Declinazioni di memoria tra storia, urbanistica e urbanesimo” is a research project co-organized with the FAI delegation from Trentino which will investigate the “memory of place” through the documents stored at the Archivio Diocesano.
As regards internships, the collaboration between the Vigilianum and the Department of Sociology and Social Research was strengthened in the area of demographic history and bio-demography through research performed thanks to data included in parish registers.
The Vigilianum’s library is extremely interesting in itself, with its collection of missionary periodicals dating from 1927 until the early 2000s. This collection has enormous value, among other things, because it shows that the destinations of the missionaries in the past are the countries from which migrants originate today.
Thanks to the cooperation agreement, the parties took contacts to preserve several collections that are stored in the archives of the Vigilianum, like the Alberti Poja collection and the correspondence and private documents of father Girolamo Job, who was a missionary in Brazil in the first migrant communities in the second half of the twentieth century.
But there’s more than this. The partners will start a collaboration with the Club UNESCO per Trento in the next months, to promote public meetings to raise awareness on the UNESCO definition of “world heritage”. This will further encourage the work done so far on digital history with the Central University Library (BUC), which runs side by side with the Vigilianum library and archives, in the framework of Digital Cultural Heritage 2018.
As concerns education and training, in the fall the two institutions will organize a course on food education in a globalized world for school teachers, with the collaboration of Docenti senza frontiere.
And in the second semester a seminar will take place, whose title is “Paesaggio alimentare: uomini cultura territorio del patrimonio immateriale”, with speakers from outside of the University. In compliance with the provisions of the agreement, the objective of the cooperation is to encourage dialogue at local level, connecting institutions through “cross-sectoral and parallel education” for knowledge dissemination.
For more information: http://www.diocesitn.it/vigilianum/