Ca'Foscari University of Venice Summer Schools 2023

The VIU Summer School on Ethics and Health Care is an initiative of VIU in partnership with multiple partner universities and the Ca'Foscari University of Venice is a significant member of the same. Agar Brugiavini and Fabrizio Turoldo of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice are the Scientific Coordinators of this summer school. The program offers students and early career researchers the opportunity to critically reflect, with the help of highly qualified experts, on topical issues that raise ethical and deontological dilemmas, relating to health care ethics. A fundamental feature of the School concerns its method, which is characterised by a continuous and intense interdisciplinary exchange between doctors, philosophers, economists, jurists, psychiatrists and sociologists. 


During this third edition, the course will focus on the problem of organ transplant ethics. Organ transplants raise many questions, which require interdisciplinary reflection. In the procurement phase, it is necessary to know how to interpret and apply the “dead donor rule”. Moreover, a certain definition of death can encounter resistance and opposition in some ethnic and cultural contexts. Another problem, in the procurement phase, may be the correct collection of consent and the possible management of intra-family conflicts regarding donation. 

Deadline for applications: March 18, 2023

Please access the brochure here and visit the official website for more information. 

Why a Summer School in Venice?

Venice is a gauge whereby to measure the problems involved when building a global future capable of combining liveability and beauty and the relevant solutions, which is why Study in Venice has chosen to offer a Summer School centred on the lagoon city.

As a candidate for World Capital of Sustainability, Venice boasts a unique artistic, musical and urban heritage and a major international role as a centre for the promotion and dissemination of contemporary art and culture.

Its dimension as a globally interconnected microcosm, the complexity of the lagoon ecosystem – which is threatened by climate change –, the socio-economic problems linked to tourist flows and their impact on urban liveability, and above all its 'liquid' nature as a city founded on and influenced by water, make the city of Venice a fascinating case study that offers those who live there and study it the measure of the paradoxes and contemporary difficulties inherent in the search for cultural, ecological and social models.

The project: multidisciplinarity, workshops and international atmosphere

THE SHAPE OF WATER is an experimental, multidisciplinary training project that aims at welcoming diverse students from all over the world who wish to experience Venice together in order to draw inspiration from it and build an original narrative vision of the lagoon city.
The students will be guided by professors from the four partner institutions on a journey combining the hands-on exploration of the city with guided tours and university lectures on Archaeology, Architecture, Art and Music History, Performing Arts and Environmental Science.

The Summer School will be curated by Giorgio Andreotta Calò (Venice, 1979), an artist who combines great international experience with a profound knowledge of the city. The 'Souvenise' programme designed by Andreotta Calò for the Summer School sees the city of Venice as a privileged observatory from which to try to understand the changes that are taking place on a macroscopic scale. The focus of the investigation will be water, which, with its cadenced variations in level dictated by tides, is the element that most characterises the territory, thereby governing its flows and most manifest phenomena.

The practice of walking, which is a fundamental element in the artist's research, will become an instrument for exploring the city and its immediate surroundings. During the planned collective walks, the students will be invited to collaborate actively through visual, tactile and sound practices and exercises. Said practices will be useful in informing the students’ own unprecedented vision of the city, regardless of the trajectories defined by mass tourism, which often does not take into account the complexity and fragility that characterise this place.

The final part of the workshop will enable the participants to synthesise their experiences in the field and the theoretical courses into an intensive workshop that will see them create a 'souvenir' based on a project or a music text, which will represent their personal experience of the city and its ecosystem, including artistic performances. The materials collected during the workshop will thus be studied with the intention of transforming and overturning the rationale underlying souvenirs, that is, objects symbolic of the city and the tourist monoculture that defines it in the eyes of the world.

The experience of the Summer School will be compiled in video/sound recordings that will document the two weeks of research on Venice.

• When: July 3rd-14th, 2023 Where: Venice, Italy
• Application deadline: March 20th, 2023
• Fee: 700€
• Contact: info@studyinvenice.it

Read all details in the call for application and follow the instructions you will find in the online application form.