Siena Maymester & Winter Term

45 total contact hours) Through a full integration of experiential approaches, service-learning and reflective education, this interdisciplinary course offers the possibility to explore Italy’s migration history in an active and participatory way.

The course runs on two parallel tracks: the past and the present. The departure point of the largest emigration from any country in recorded world history, seeing more than 13 million Italians leaving their homeland between 1880 and 1915, Italy represents an ideal laboratory to learn about the many facets of the migration issue. Against this historic backdrop of emigration, newer patterns have manifested, making Italy a destination for migrants from various regions, whether for permanent settlement or as a way station. Furthermore, by accident of geography, Italy has played an outsized role in the current European migration crisis, receiving vast numbers of migrant arrivals via the Mediterranean and the Balkan route over the last 10 years which present Italy and the European Union with new challenges in curbing asylum seeker and migrant journeys across the often treacherous sea.

This course is taught by experts in the field who will analyze these socio-anthropological, historical, political and economic aspects related to Italy as a theater of migration. Students will also have the opportunity to meet with representatives of local NGOs involved in the reception of migrants in the local context. While learning all this, students will also participate in service-learning in the “Home 4 the World” project, organized and hosted by “Nuova Associazione Culturale Ulisse” — a SIS Institutional partner with the aim of helping migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. The project was born in Spring 2022 and soon developed from a service for refugees to a service for Pakistani refugees, given the large number of Pakistani people who arrived in the area of Siena between June and December 2022 (around 600 hundred people). SIS, Associazione Ulisse and several other organizations of the territory of Siena have joined forces to cope with the lack of structures that could host such big numbers. In this context “Home 4 the World” has become a reference point for Italian and English Language classes, linguistic support for the driving license test, intercultural education, development of democratic competences and citizenship education.

While serving the Pakistani refugees, students will also have a chance to meet with all the different stakeholders involved in the resolution of this crisis and to participate in town assemblies, meetings and activities, contributing with solidarity and towards inclusive communities.

Being a fully integrated service-learning course, all students will keep a journal that will be shared with the peers and the instructors with the goal of critically evaluating the course, the service provided, the personal difficulties encountered and the development of intercultural dialogue and mutual understanding among the different parties involved.

This course will analyze the main issues related to Sustainable Development, based on the idea that no growth process can be considered authentically sustainable without considering the interactions between the evolution of the economic system and the evolution of the natural environment. Only after a careful analysis of traditional economic theory, of ethical issues and of the contributions of ecology and thermodynamics, will it be possible to define the importance of safeguarding the stock of natural capital and the need for a transition from the traditional approach linked to the concept of growth to the new approach oriented towards sustainable development. We will also briefly present the international debate, both in official institutions, such as the UN (with UN 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals) and the European Union, and in civil society. Everything will be seen in a positive light, thanks also to the presentation of the case studies of Siena and Tuscany, taken as a feasible and exportable example of a virtuous relationship between community and territory. In this analysis we will try to clearly highlight the three economic functions of the environment: that of a supplier of resources, that of a receiver of waste and that of a direct source of utility. An important sustainability indicator, the Ecological Footprint, will also be presented with the aim of measuring the sustainability of our economy on the basis of the study of the impacts it causes on the environment. The course will be completed by excursions, service-learning activities, visits and meetings with important local organizations that will present us with studies, projects and good practices present in our territory.

Calculus is a very important branch of mathematics because of the various fields in which it is applied. As you learn the techniques of calculus in this course, you will also see a variety of applications for them, and you will finally begin to experience the payoff for your years of diligent study while being told that the algebraic techniques you were learning would be applied in later mathematics courses. In calculus, we see some immediate, powerful applications. This course begins the study of the most important functions you will use in this course. It is followed by an exploration of the important concepts of limit and continuity. The major focus for this course is the concept of the derivative of a function and several applications in various fields of science.

Archaeology, as historical anthropology, is a discipline falling between the humanities (given the research subject) and the sciences (given the peculiar materials and methods of research). Modern interdisciplinary and contextual approaches are the outcome of the rich debate in the second half of the last century (between the ‘60s and ‘80s) and of the consequent methodological and theoretical rethinking of discipline. Simultaneously, the outstanding development of technology allowed us to reach impressive results (unthinkable only a few decades ago) and, perspectively, new advances will be achieved in the near future.

This course will introduce students to the discipline’s theoretical evolution and current approach, focusing both on multidisciplinary and interconnections between different research fields. This course will follow the main steps of theoretical and methodological evolution of archaeological thinking (e.g. New/Processual Archaeology vs Post-processualism). It will frame the main methods (e.g. survey and excavation) and “lineages” of discipline, focusing the interconnection between the different fields of research “in action” (e.g. anthropology, zooarchaeology, paleobotany, sedimentology and archaeological stratigraphy, lithic technology, pottery analysis, quantitative and spatial archaeology, excavation/survey approach, dating methods, geophysics, etc.). Moreover, special attention will be placed on specific themes of the Past, as the reconstruction of social and economic structures of societies, behaviors and production organization, mobility, exchanges, and the cognitive world. Practical activities will be also included in this course, allowing to better understand how archaeology works (e.g. reading and documentation of the stratigraphy by drawing, profiles, forms, reports and Harris’ matrix, analysis of archaeological materials, experimental archaeology). Some of the practical activities will be carried out to the Department of Earth, Environmental and Physical Sciences of University of Siena, where students will get in touch with research, and they will observe archaeological materials from the didactic collection of the Research Unit of Prehistory and Anthropology.