Last Call for VIU Intensive Graduate Activities closing in March

📅 July 6-10, 2026

🎓 Who can apply? PhD students, young researchers and practitioners working in mental health, international relations, law, gender and race studies, social work, education, psychology, psychiatry, environmental and climate studies, political science, public health, nursing, global health and mental health. The school is also open to activist individuals and groups, policy and decision-makers, NGOs and CBOs, stakeholders and influencers seeking to strengthen their knowledge and know-how on global mental health, human rights, and allied disciplines.

‼️ Application deadline: March 10, 2026 

Amid the prevailing global instability, the immediate repercussions of warfare and political violence have echoed, sparking conflicts and precipitating substantial forced migration. This reality is starkly manifest across the globe, epitomized by the enduring conflict and extensive displacement observed in the war-ravaged region of Gaza. Furthermore, the conflict in Ukraine serves as another poignant manifestation of this tumult, highlighting the widespread prevalence of violence and displacement in modern society. Conflicts and wars have plunged the planet into a vortex of environmental, climate, societal, gender, and racial crises, undermining human rights and self-determination on a global scale. Mental health and human rights are dramatically interlocked constructs. There is no mental well-being without peace and equity and vice versa. Mental prosperity seems to be thought of as a consolidated right just for privileged groups; in contrast, oppressed and marginalized individuals most often resulted in being blamed for their incapability to handle their living conditions and adjust to challenges and adversities because of a lack of civilization, poor personal and social capital or inadequate relational skills.
Our approach is to foster a psychology of liberation that will provide theoretical and practical participatory tools to enable the adaptation and control of indigenous and self-determined models to understand mental health in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) and societies undergoing or coming to terms with political turbulence, war, and social upheaval.

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📅 June 29-July 3, 2026

🎓 Who can apply? Undergraduates in their final year (finalists, BA3), MA and MPhil/PhD Students in Linguistics, Sociology, Classical Studies, (Business) Communication Studies, History, Cultural Studies, Political Studies, Translation Studies or any other related discipline.

‼️ Application deadline: March 15, 2026

This course focuses on the growing interdisciplinary field of Linguistic Landscapes (LL), which traditionally analyses “language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings”, as they usually occur in urban spaces.

More recently, LL research has evolved beyond studying only verbal signs into the realm of semiotics, thus extending the analytical scope into the multimodal domain of images, sounds, drawings, movements, visuals, graffiti, tattoos, colours, smells as well as people.

Students will be informed about multiple aspects of modern LL research including an overview of different types of signs, their formal features as well as their functions.

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📅 July 13-17, 2026

🎓 Who can apply? PhD students, early postdoctoral fellows and junior researchers, working in areas related to Algebraic Geometry, Representation Theory, and Topology.

‼️ Application deadline: March 15, 2026 

The use of perverse sheaves lies at the core of Geometric Representation Theory. It has allowed mathematicians to solve hard algebraic or representation-theoretic problems by identifying suitable spaces that encode crucial information and by using them to translate the initial problem into geometric terms. The aim of this Summmer School is to introduce graduate students working in Algebraic Geometry, Representation Theory, or Topology to perverse sheaves and their categorification (perverse schobers), and some of their recent important applications.

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📅 June 22-25, 2026

🎓 Who is it for? PhD students, post-doc scholars and young researchers in Management, Strategy, Organization Theory, Finance, Economic Sociology, Political Science, Philosophy, Psychology, and related disciplines from universities worldwide. Applications from high level policy makers and officials in public and private institutions will be considered if their background is adequate.

‼️ Application deadline extended to: March 15, 2026

In its tenth edition, the Summer School aims at the development of ideas that promote a more sustainable future by bringing together young scholars from all over the world to discuss their ideas on the Grand Transition of our society from the microlevel of individual decision-making to the organizational and the societal level.

The school gives young scholars the opportunity to discuss with eminent scholars in management theory and to test their ideas and present their work. Participants will become familiar with recent research from a broad set of disciplines. They will work on their ability to engage in the transdisciplinary discourse which is required for the development of innovative answers to the grand challenges of sustainability, equality and democracy. Participants may also learn from leading scholars the ways in which business can undermine democratic principles, processes and values, or contribute to them through new business models.

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