Public lecture by Aitor Zuberogoitia: «Cooperation, social transformation and transdisciplinarity in an urban context. A story about the Mondragon group, the Bilbao AS Fabrik campus and the BA Degree in Global Digital Humanities»

Aitor Zuberogoitia, Etxepare Euskal Institutua Elbira-Zipitria Chair in Basque Studies, will give a public lecture on October 11.

Entitled "Cooperation, social transformation and transdisciplinarity in an urban context. A story about the Mondragon group, the Bilbao AS Fabrik campus and the BA Degree in Global Digital Humanities", this talk will focus on a degree program of Mondragon Unibertsitatea (MU), a university created in 1997 in the Basque Autonomous Community in Spain through the union of three educational cooperatives belonging to the Mondragon Corporation, one of the largest groups of worker-owned and managed cooperatives in the world. Among the ten key principles of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation is social transformation for the development of the region. Although MU was mainly present in rural and small-town industrial areas, in the last decade it has recognized the growing importance of cities in the region. In response to this, MU decided to establish a new branch in Bilbao to give a greater boost to endogenous territorial development through an educational model based on collaboration through networks and Action-Research. This talk is presented as a journey from the origins of the cooperative movement of Mondragon to the consolidation of an innovation ecosystem in an urban environment (the Bilbao AS Fabrik campus) and the launch of the BA degree in Global Digital Humanities, which brings together Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), digital technologies and design thinking.