More than 40 people from international institutions gather at the URV for a week of academic sessions, workshops and discussions

This week the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) is hosting the Autumn School ‘Invisible Injustices: Combating Structural and Systemic Violence’. It is an initiative that brings together new researchers and specialist speakers to reflect on forms of structural and systemic violence and to delve deeper into inequalities and injustices from an interdisciplinary and intersectional perspective.

Over the course of this week, the programme will hold academic sessions, workshops and discussions involving more than 40 researchers from various international institutions and fields of knowledge. The aim is to foster the exchange of perspectives and tools to understand how different forms of oppression intersect and contribute to generating inequalities, vulnerabilities and forms of injustice that often remain invisible.

The Autumn School also aims to help new researchers from the Aurora Alliance of European Universities (of which the URV is a member) to expand their collaborative networks. In fact, the event is one of the winning projects of the 2025 Aurora Incentive Research Collaboration call, which aims to promote collaborative, interdisciplinary research focused on the Sustainable Development Goals. It is also closely linked to the Gender Studies research line of the URV’s consolidated research group on Territory, Citizenship and Sustainability, which studies gender issues and inequalities from a critical and interdisciplinary perspective.

The activities began on 26 October in the Seminar Room of the Faculty of Law at the URV’s Catalunya Campus, with an informal introductory session and coffee led by Janaina Minelli de Oliveira from the URV’s Department of Pedagogy, followed by the official opening of the Autumn School.

The first academic session, “Violence: Histories, Structures and Utopias”, featured Gundula Ludwig and Muriel González Athenas from the University of Innsbruck, who addressed violence from different historical and structural perspectives and reflected on the possibilities for transformation and new social imaginaries. The day also included the session ‘Intersectional Understanding of Gender-Based Violences’, led by Barbara Biglia from the URV’s Department of Pedagogy.

The Autumn School itself runs until Thursday, 29 October, with new sessions and discussion spaces throughout the week, but the initiative will culminate on Friday 30 October with the international seminar ‘Invisible Injustices: Interdisciplinary Dialogues through an Intersectional Lens’.

The project is coordinated by Víctor Merino with the support of Núria Torres-Rosell, both professors in the URV’s Department of Public Law and members of the Research Group on Territory, Citizenship and Sustainability.