International Winter School on Borders, Memory and Territorial Transformations in the Alpine Region

From 9 to 11 February 2026, the international winter school Euregio Seminar 2026, titled Borders, Memory and Territorial Transformations in the Alpine Region, took place in Trento, Bolzano/Bozen and Bressanone/Brixen. The programme was jointly organised by the University of Trento and the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.

Špela Ledinek Lozej also took part in the school. In a round-table discussion, she presented the UNESCO Man and Biosphere (MAB) Transboundary Reserve Julian Alps; the efforts to inscribe the transboundary terraced cultural landscape of Brda/Collio on the UNESCO World Heritage List; the development of the Walk of Peace, from a local grassroots initiative and cross-border cooperation to international engagement; and the heritage-related activities within the cross-border European Capital of Culture Nova Gorica–Gorizia GO! 2025. She highlighted how heritage and borders are co-constituted at different scales and showed that heritage is simultaneously a means of connectivity and a means of drawing distinctions.

More on cross-border initiatives and on the relationship between heritage and borders can be found in her co-authored publications with Marjeta Pisk in the journal Traditiones and in the edited volumes Landscape as Heritage (ed. Giacomo Pettenati) and Border-Straddling Heritages (eds. Ali Mozaffari and David Harvey).