Trilateral “Villa Vigoni” Workshops (Germany, Italy, France)
With the trilateral “Villa Vigoni” workshops program, the German Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Villa Vigoni – Centro Italo-Tedesco, the University of Trento, and the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme offer researchers from France, Germany, and Italy a unique format for scientific collaboration. It has two main characteristics:
A “Villa Vigoni” workshop includes three scientific meetings of a small group composed of Italian, German, and French researchers. The meetings are organized over two or three years. During each of the three meetings, the core group will invite a few other participants, especially young researchers. The number of participants per country for each meeting is around 4 or 5.
Vigoni workshops were designed as a tool for cooperating in the humanities and social sciences. In this framework, using national languages is, for conceptual reasons, of capital importance for scientific collaboration. For this reason, the workshops are held in the three languages with each participant speaking in his/her own language. Passive knowledge of the two other languages is therefore an important criterion when building the three teams. Simultaneous translation or interpreting is not used. However, workshop coordinators can use loose consecutive translations or any other internal arrangement that may be of practical use.
Special attention is given to projects proposed by researchers and professors in the early stages of their careers, as well as groups that have a high proportion of young researchers.
Under certain conditions, researchers from other countries may be allowed to participate.
In some rare cases, a project may get underway bilaterally, so long as the second stage will include researchers from the third country.






