The 4th International Transdisciplinary Research and Practice Online Conference Connect-Universum-2018, held at TSU last week, focused on the issues of place branding. More than 30 researchers and practitioners interested in digital brand management presented their reports in Russian and English.
This year, the Conference became a part of the University Cities Forum; the theme of the Conference was Digital Place Brand Management: Global and Local Aspects. During two days, the participants of Connect-Universum have discussed the issues of place branding and management with the use of digital and Internet technologies.
– As we know, if people want to go somewhere, first of all, they check this place on the Internet. Their decision to travel largely depends on how the place of their interest is represented there. The digital brand of a place is important for tourists, students, scientists, entrepreneurs, and investors. That is why the problem discussed at the Conference is relevant to all regions of the world, – said Irina Kuzheleva-Sagan, the Chairperson of the Conference Organizing Committee, and the Head of the Department of Social Communication (Faculty of Psychology, TSU).
The Conference was transdisciplinary; this means that researchers and practitioners interested in various scientific areas could participate in it. Among the Conference participants, there are researchers and practitioners from the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, the US, Canada, France, New Zealand, Poland, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Russia.
The first day of Connect-Universum started with the presentation of the Russian edition of the book Knowmad Society: Borderless Work and Education (edited by Professor John Moravec). In this book, the international group of authors tackles a number of urgent issues concerning today’s school and university education and suggests their scenarios of its development in the future. The Russian version of the book was prepared by the Department of Social Communication and issued by the TSU Publishing House as a part of the series Monographs of Outstanding Foreign Researchers: First Time in Russian. The idea to translate the book has appeared as a result of the previous conference Connect-Universum-2016, which was devoted to the topic of digital nomads. At that conference, John Moravec was one of the key speakers and told the audience about “knowmads”.
– Any translated book is a super quest to convey the author’s meanings, – explained Irina Kuzheleva-Sagan as a scientific editor of the translation. – In terms of the book Knowmad Society, it was a mega quest, because all its chapters were written by different authors and its content is interdisciplinary. The book contains a lot of new terms, neologisms, and metaphors. We had to add about 50 references that did not exist in the original book.
