Brian Sandberg, Director of the Mediterranean Programme and Senior Fellow 2025-2026, will be taking part in the “ALTER – MÉDITERRANÉE Mediterranean Youth Workshop” on Wednesday May 20th, 2026 at the Pharo.
Alter-Méditerranée. Mediterranean Youth Workshops
Aix Marseille Université is proud to be taking part on May 18th and 20th in the Mediterranean Season 2026 with an ambitious, unifying project: “Alter-Méditerranée. Mediterranean Youth Workshops”.
This project highlights the richness of exchanges between young people, researchers and artists to imagine together the possible futures of the Mediterranean basin. Supported by laboratories and training courses specialising in the Mediterranean and Africa, the project explores the major challenges of our time – climate, health, migration, digital and social transformations, arts and heritage – with a resolutely open perspective on the future of Mediterranean youth.
Round tables, workshops, screenings, meetings, theatre readings, discussions, agoras… a rich and lively programme awaits you!
The creative Mediterranean
How can we invent other Mediterraneas today? How can we tell the story of this region, taking into account its history of conflict, its movements, its places of coexistence and its new forms of cultural cooperation?
Coordinated by Maryline Crivello, historian (TELEMMe, AMU-CNRS), co-editor of the Dictionnaire de la Méditerranée, the Creative Mediterranean round table will look at a number of issues:
- Nadia Shama, maîtresse de conférences at Ain Shams University (Cairo), specialising in rhetoric and discourse analysis. Her work focuses in particular on 17th-century literature. In recent years, she has also specialised in literary translation, as well as cultural and museum mediation, and in particular on the role of museums and cultural spaces in the construction of memory and social dialogue. Member of the FEF project: Égypte réinvente (2023–).
- Roxana Nadim, Head of Cultural Affairs and Co-Director of the Master’s programme in Cultural Policy and Philanthropy at Sciences Po Aix, who will present an exemplary Franco-Algerian partnership between Sciences Po Aix, the French Institute in Algeria and numerous educational and cultural partners, promoting the exchange of people, ideas and projects between the two shores.
- Brian Sandberg, historian at Northern Illinois University and director of Iméra’s Mediterranean programme, which examines the ideologies of the Crusades, religious violence and imperialism in the modern French Mediterranean, demonstrating how these legacies shaped early forms of globalisation and a relationship with the Mediterranean that has been permanently reshaped.
- Anthropologists Manoël Pénicaud (IDEAS, amU–CNRS, Centre Jacques Berque) and Dionigi Albera (IDEAS, amU–CNRS), co-director of the Dictionnaire de la Méditerranée, who will present their work on travelling exhibitions focusing on ‘Shared Holy Places’: sanctuaries frequented by worshippers of different religions, revealing a Mediterranean that is more fluid, organic and hospitable than the discourse of separation would suggest.
Through these presentations, Creative Mediterranean invites us to discover a sea shaped by intertwined histories, conflicts and shared experiences, and to consider how research, the arts and cultural cooperation can help shape a more open future for the Mediterranean.
Practical information
- Date: Wednesday May 20th 2026 at 9.15am
- Venue: Amphithéâtre Gastaut, Pharo, 58 bvd Charles Livon 13007 Marseille
