Reflecting on 2015: Personal and PASCAL challenges for 2016

Sitting in Paris, where I live, the end of 2015 is just a few days short of the anniversary of the assassinations on 7 January of the editors of Charlie Hebdo, police, and hostages taken in the Hyper Casher in St. Mandé two days later. What can we do, once the demonstrations and marches are over?

Each of us has something to contribute to illuminate the dark corners where ignorance and indifference slumber undisturbed.  In 2016 I will be researching and writing about what it means to be Jewish in contemporary France, a story more full of hope and confidence that what the journalists who specialise in superficial but spectacular stories would have you believe.  

I hope to join an association called Cordoba that is based in St Mandé and Vincennes that brings Christians, Moslems and Jews together.  We must, each of us, lead by example.  And there is more that we can do as part of PASCAL, reinforced in 2015 by two new centres at Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico, a multi-ethnic, young and dynamic society, and at the University of Johannesburg, in South Africa’s largest city and also in a large multi-racial society.  

The 12th PASCAL Conference in Catania, so ably co-ordinated by Roberta Piazza, included many presentations on migration linked to our themes of learning city, culture, diversity and environmental sustainability.  The 13th PASCAL Conference to be held in Glasgow in early June 2016 will embrace an even larger audience and more themes. The much-expanded learning city network, led by Peter Kearns and Mike Osborne, will be very prominent in Glasgow: some dozen cities are already expected to attend.

But what we need next are more projects on the ground that come out of these events and the flow of papers, blogs and other communications. For this we need your ideas, and especially your efforts to promote what PASCAL can uniquely deliver. 

With best wishes for the new year,

Josef Konvitz
Chair, PASCAL International Observatory