On May 9, 2019 (Europe Day), Dr. Svitlana Buko and Eithne Knappitsch, along with a group of junior researchers--undergraduates at a business school in Austria--set out on a 24-hour field study tour with the key goal of showcasing how to develop and strengthen intercultural cross-border competencies necessary for living and working in the territory of the tri-border region: Southern Austria, Northern Italy, and Southern Slovenia.
The project was organized as part of the business curriculum of the Bachelor program “Intercultural Management” run by the School of Management at Carinthia University of Applied Sciences, which is located in Villach on the border with Italy and Slovenia.
This full immersion experience took the researchers to Villach (Austria) in the early morning, onto a train to Udine (Italy), back on the train to Gorizia (Italy), and finally to the Slovenian border city of Nova Gorica. The 24hr Cross-Border Challenge aimed to illustrate the proximity of borders, languages and histories to a group of junior researchers by exploring local transportation systems (buses, trains, local city transportation), organizations from different sectors, and via onsite meetings with local leaders from three countries. You can learn more about the 2019 iteration of the 24hr Cross-Border Challenge here.
2020, of course, brought the challenges of the pandemic, which made travel inadvisable if not impossible. You will not want to miss the opportunity to hear how Drs. Buko and Knappitsch turned the 24hr Cross-Border Challenge experience into a hackathon in May 2020.
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
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Buko, S., Knappitsch, E. (2020). Transforming a 24-Hour Field Study Tour into a Hackathon.
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