Time: Thursday, April 26, 2018
Location: International Culture xSpace, New Tsinghua Xuetang
Thursday, April 26th, 2018, Tsinghua's International Students' Educational Society (ISES), in partnership with the League of Romanian Students (LSRS) in China, hosted a public lecture entitled "Community Building and Cultural Awareness". The event aimed to initiate a dialogue between both local and international students of Tsinghua University, meant to encourage cultural participation.
The lecture, hosted in light of the upcoming Global Village event at Tsinghua, explored and debated how can communities may become aware of their cultural potential, and how these can translate their potential from theory into practice. A main secondary feature of this talk revolved around education, social responsibility and educational cohesion.
Practices of community building were also disseminated, while the students had the opportunity to find out various strategies of promoting community cohesion and cultural aspects within a Chinese academic environment.
Furthermore, discussions about successful representations of community building and cultural awareness have been also touched throughout the lecture. Therefore, the guest speaker, Radu Sava, Coordinator of LSRS, presented the League as a best practice model, based on his experience within this organization since 2015. LSRS was founded in 2010, in China, and it represented a pillar of empiricism for this lecture, because one of LSRS's core mission is to connect young people and students through a global network of over 40 countries in order to encourage both professional and personal growth of those involved, meritocracy and academic accomplishments.
Debates were encouraged to take place. Thus, a series of students shared their opinion with the audience, and created a peer know-how transfer. Coming from the audience, one of the main ideas has been that without education there will be a constant barrier for the advancement of a beneficial globalization as well as for a uniform application of this concept throughout the world. Nonetheless, attendees were interested to find out those applied LSRS mechanisms that foster community cohesion and had questioned whether or not such mechanisms are applicable to their own communities.
In the aftermath of the lecture, the guest speaker, Radu Sava, shared: "I hope that indeed this lecture has given participants a new horizon, a minimum set of knowledge in terms of community building but, more importantly, on how to keep a community together after its establishment".
To sum up, the lecture provided attendees with basic ideas and theories on how to attract people through the power of culture, how to establish mechanisms and refurbish tools that may facilitate the process of cultural awareness and community building. The lecture has pursued to promote universal values and principles, such as solidarity, creativity, innovation or respect. Moreover, as one of the concluding ideas, it has been particularly expressed that, without education, there is no potential of pursuing cohesion within a given community context.
By Radu Sava
