Campus of International Excellence – Aristos Campus Mundus 2015

The research will be presented at the international seminar “Social Sciences research to improve society”, which will be held on September 16 and 17 at the Pere Tarrés Faculty of Social Education and Social Work at Ramon Llull University.

The fight against social exclusion raises one of the main challenges for local, national and international governments. Children, adolescents and young people are often the most severely affected by alienation. Leisure education activities and sociocultural actions, such as taking part in free time or leisure centres, make it possible to stop social exclusion among children and young people. How do leisure education centres contribute to social cohesion in regions? This is the question that a research project being started up by the Pere Tarrés Foundation aims to answer.

The research, conducted by the Ramon Llull University research group (GIASA) at the Pere Tarrés-RLU Faculty of Social Education and Social Work will be presented at the international seminar “Social Sciences research to improve society”, which will be held on September 16 and 17. The research project “Leisure, cultural action and social cohesion” will study the realities of neighbourhoods in Catalonia and the Basque Country to evaluate the role of leisure education in social cohesion-building in these regions.

The seminar will be attended by Spanish and international experts in fields such as distribution of social capital as a factor for inclusion and overcoming inequalities, evaluation of drug use prevention programmes, social policy design to improve social cohesion and evaluation of the social impact of research in the European Union. Some of the most outstanding speakers are: Barbara Kail, of the Graduate School of Social Services at Fordham University in New York; James Lubben, of the Graduate School of Social Work at Boston College; Chairs Ramon Flecha (Sociology – UB) and Joan Subirats (Political Science – AUB); and Fernando Fantova, former Councillor of Social Affairs in the Basque Country.

Josep Maria Garrell, Rector of Ramon Llull University and Josep Oriol Pujol, Director General of the Pere Tarrés Foundation, will deliver the welcoming address at the seminar. The closing speech will be delivered by Anna Berga, Secretary General of RLU, and Paco Lopez, Dean of the Peres Tarrés Faculty of Social Education and Social Work-RLU.