Can I Make a Difference? An Example from Myanmar on the Global Impact of Student Engagement
Can I make a difference?' This is a question that many students ask themselves. The Erasmus+ BRIGHTS project (2021–2024) developed innovative educational and training pathways to enable universities to contribute to the global transition towards sustainability. The handbook “Sustainability Offices and Global Sustainability Strategies” highlights the importance of linking the sustainability, transfer and internationalisation strategies of universities, in order to enable researchers and students to address global challenges and create an impact.
The film shows how students can create a meaningful impact through university cooperation, presenting the Cologne International Forum cluster project, 'Conflict-Induced Displacement and Socio-Economic Resilience: Learning from Neglected Conflicts in Cameroon and Myanmar'. This project enabled students from the universities of Cologne (Germany), Bamenda (Cameroon) and Chulalongkorn (Bangkok, Thailand) to conduct research into the situation of refugees from Myanmar in Thailand and internally displaced persons in Cameroon. The film emphasises the importance of knowledge co-production, whereby knowledge is 'co-produced' by academics and non-academics to address global challenges, for example through fieldwork carried out by students for their master's theses.
You can find more information here:
Erasmus+ BRIGHTS Project
Further Global Responsibility Projects
A further movie on the fieldwork in Cameroon