Lecture Series

Thanks to the support of our Trustee Laurent Belet, Prof. Bucher and the politics faculty regularly organize public lectures focusing on contemporary challenges and possible solutions. Over the course of each academic year, we invite leading scholars from diverse disciplines which addressed not only Franklin students and faculty, but Alumni and the Lugano community at large.

Some of our past speakers include:

• Prof. Dr. Jean-Patrick Villeneuve (USI): Managing in a Glass House - The Limits of Transparency
• Prof. James W. Davis PhD (University of St. Gallen): The Future of War
• Dr. Beatrice Eugster (University of Bern): Are Swiss islamophobic?  A description and explanation of anti-Muslim attitudes in Switzerland
• Stephen Browne (FUNDS): Can the UN be reformed?
• PD Dr. Martin Beckstein (University of Zurich): How to Immunize the Democratic Community
• Dr. Julian Eckl (University of St. Gallen): Zooming in on the Challenges of Global Health Governance Practitioners
• Dr. Sarah Son (University of Sheffield): Looking at North Korea from the Sky: Geospatial Mapping in North Korean Human Rights Monitoring

Open Divisional meetings and the Research Forum

The Division of Communication, History and Politics now regularly conducts divisional meetings that focus on faculty research projects and that are open to students and faculty from other divisions.

At a broader level, we also traditionally organize the FUS Research Forum which aims to provide FUS faculty members across disciplines with a platform to discuss research in its early stages and to enter into an ongoing intellectual exchange. Over the years we have had many contributions with topics ranging from a comparative lexical-stylistic analysis of William Shakespeare and John Florio to grasping the development of voter behavior in Germany, to empirically measuring how European Banks work in practice.

Should you be interested in setting up a Research Forum, please contact: bbucher@faculty.fus.edu

Profs Bernd Bucher and Juliette Schwak are collaborating with Prof. Giulia Miniero (Division of Business and Economics) on a research project focused on the role of (negative) emotions in group formation processes. Adopting a discourse analysis methodology, this project takes a processual-relational perspective and specifically focuses on ‘practices of hating’ in online forums to better understand the relationship of cognitive and emotional dimensions of actions and their role in generating and upholding group cohesion. Research workshops with invited participants are currently planned for the 2021-2022 academic year.

Prof. Roberto Cordon has contributed a chapter entitled Globalization and Economic Transformation in Brazil: The Role of Human Capital (co-written with Prof. Nicolas Depetris Chauvin of the Haute École de Gestion, Geneva) to a research project on “Trends in the Global Political Economy and their Impact on Management Policies and Human Resources Practices in the BRICS Countries". This research project is sponsored by the International Labor Organization (ILO), and the resulting book is currently in the final stages of editing. Prof. Cordon presented his work at the World Congress of the International Labor and Employment Relations Association (ILERA) in June 2021, and addressed related issues at the India Global Dialogue in February 2021, sponsored by The Diplomatist magazine.

Prof. Fintan Hoey is currently part of an exciting global research consortium on the Constitutional History of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to which I will be contributing a study of Japan’s role in the emergence of the treaty regime. The project will involve workshops in Southhampton, UK and Washington DC and will result in a major publication on the NPT as well as a series of policy background briefing papers for participants in the Treaty’s Review Conference. 

Professor Schwak interviewed on the French national radio station ‘France Culture’ 

Professor Juliette Schwak from the Division of Communication, History and Politics at Franklin has recently been interviewed in the ‘Cultures Monde’ program of the French national radio "France Culture." 

The episode was part of a series on the politics of Made in Asia focusing on South Korean industrial dynasties, the chaebol. Professor Schwak is a specialist in South Korea’s political economy, and she has published several articles in leading outlets on state-business relationships in South Korea. In particular, she has recently explored the challenges of reforming the chaebol to limit their dominance over South Korea’s economy. 

In the program, she discusses chaebol’s weight in South Korea’s economy and the criticisms and reform attempts faced since the country’s democratization in the late 1980s. As she explains in the program: "The chaebol benefit from a certain aura because they embody South Korea’s economic miracle, and many South Koreans are proud of their achievements. At the same time there is strong public resentment against the chaebol: they make up more than 80% of Korea’s GDP but they only create about 10% of all jobs in the country. Many South Koreans also see them as concentrating economic opportunities and creating social inequalities. And on the other side of the political spectrum, economic liberals accuse the chaebol of hindering industrial innovation." French-speakers can listen to the program’s podcast: Corée du Sud: le pouvoir des dynasties industrielles - Ép. 4/4 - La force du Made in Asia (franceculture.fr)

Dr. Schwak was invited to give a guest lecture at University of York.  

 In February 2021, the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at the University of York (UK) welcomed Dr. Schwak from Franklin University Switzerland for a guest lecture. In this lecture entitled ‘Exporting K- quarantine: Korea’s promotion of its COVID management strategy’, Dr. Schwak explored the South Korean government’s recent strategy to share its COVID-19 policies with foreign counterparts. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Korea has initially been one of the few countries to limit the spread of the disease. Many state leaders have turned to the Moon government to ask for help in dealing with the health crisis. The Korean government has expressed its formula for fighting the disease as ‘trace, test and treat’ (TTT), and it is currently devising a strategy to export this approach through the ‘K-Quarantine’ model. This talk discussed how the export of ‘K-Quarantine’ fits Moon Jae-in’s strategy of technological leadership and how it responds to Korean administrations’ decades-old export of Korea’s economic development experience. It also showed that ‘K-quarantine’ is a commercial strategy to secure markets for Korea’s health industries, and a promotional strategy in line with Korea’s competitiveness and nation branding concerns. The talk was followed by a Q&A session with faculty and graduate students from the Department.  

Prof. Satomi Sugiyama: Adding touch to our repertoire of everyday mediated interactions?

Mobile communication technologies, from smartphones to wearables, made it possible for us to communicate with our loved ones beyond geographical constraints. We can talk to them, hear them, see them, and feel their presence through technologies on the move even if they are physically absent. Although these technologies largely rely on the interface that we touch as exemplified by the now so familiar touch screen, technological mediation of our touch is still not commonly practiced. Do we desire to communicate our touch, a sense that is heavily intertwined with our affective, emotional experiences, over distance? I am currently exploring why we want or don’t want to add our touch to our repertoire of everyday mediated interactions. This ongoing research has been presented in several conferences in the past year including the “Socially Useful Robots in the era of social distancing and new normal - The needs, applications, barriers and solutions,” European Robotics Forum in April 2021.