Social networks, sustainability and feminist policies take centre stage in the 1st edition of the CIDOB and Banco Sabadell Foundation’s “Programa Talent Global”
Lewin Schmitt, Lela Mélon and Inés Arco are the winners of the “Global Challenges Talent”, “21st Century Europe Talent” and “Junior Visiting Fellowship” prizes, for which 95 young people from around the world competed.
In November 2020, the Banco Sabadell Foundation and CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs) launched the Programa Talent Global with the aim of promoting quality work by young researchers through two prizes for applied research and a paid research stay at CIDOB.
The “Global Challenges Talent” and “21st Century Europe Talent” awards – the latter alongside Fundació Catalunya Europa – and the “Junior Visiting Fellowship” all emerged from a desire to stimulate excellence and promote dissemination, training and research activities in international relations, as well as to foster and support young talent.
The impact of Twitter on global public opinion and the European non-financial and diversity information directive were the subjects of the winning entries of the “Global Challenges Talent” and “21st Century Europe Talent” awards
The “Global Challenges Talent” and “21st Century Europe Talent” awards recognise quality research by rewarding high-level academic work that takes an original analytical approach and includes applied research. The winner of each prize receives €2,500 and, among other criteria, recipients were required to be under 45 years old and to submit only research written in the last year.
Lewin Schmitt, pre-doctoral researcher at IBEI, holder of a degree in European Economic Studies from the University of Bamberg and a master's in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford, won the “Global Challenges Talent Award” for his work What's in a tweet?Twitter's impact on public opinion and EU foreign affairs, which examines the effects of Twitter and other social networks on the construction of a global public opinion and public policy development.
Sofía Rodríguez, Chief Economist at Banco Sabadell; Patricia García-Durán, Associate Professor in the Department of Economic History, Institutions and World Economy at the University of Barcelona; Rafael Grasa, Lecturer in International Relations at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; and Xavier Mas de Xaxàs, diplomatic correspondent of La Vanguardia, formed the prize jury, which was chaired by Pol Morillas, Director of CIDOB.
Lela Mélon, PhD in Corporate Law from the University of Aberdeen, Executive Director of the Planetary Wellbeing Institutional Framework and Associate Professor in the Department of Law at Pompeu Fabra University won the “21st Century Europe Talent Award”. This prize, awarded jointly with Fundació Catalunya Europa, focusses on European policies in the social, economic and political spheres, and the winning work was The EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive and corporate narrative disclosure practices: The case of the fashion industry.
In this case, Pol Morillas, Director of CIDOB, and Pau Mas, Director of the Fundació Catalunya Europa, co-chaired the prize jury, which also included Sofía Rodríguez, Chief Economist at Banco Sabadell; Anna Terrón, Director of the FIIAPP; Eva Anduiza, Professor of Political Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; and Javier Arregui, Professor in the Department of Political Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University.
Feminist foreign policy, priority research field for the Junior Visiting Fellowship
The Programa Talent Global promoted by the Banco Sabadell Foundation and CIDOB also seeks to support the training of young international relations talent through a paid research stay. Inés Arco won this year’s prize for her proposal Feminist foreign policy: Paradigm shift or discursive instrumentalization? Holder of a degree in East Asian Studies from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a master's degree in International Relations from IBEI, Inés Arco will join CIDOB’s research team for a six-month period and participate in the institution's research activities.
A public presentation of the Programa Talent Global award winners will be made on June 30th 2021 as part of the CIDOB–Banco Sabadell Foundation Dialogues, which will take place in CIDOB's Sala Maragall and will be streamed live on YouTube.