Tra I Leoni Magazine Goes Global to Share Coronavirus Experiences

The coronavirus has affected everyone, but everyone has experienced it in their own way. What were the feelings of students from other countries? What happened on Chinese campuses? And in those of South Africa? Inspired by these questions, one day after the start of the pandemic in Italy, Barbara Balcon, in the second year of BIEF and deputy director of Tra i Leoni, proposed to set up a completely new project. Her idea was a global edition of the newspaper that could collect contributions from student journalists all over the world and report the lockdown at universities through their own eyes. The result was this issue, an output that is as global in content as in distribution: it will be published simultaneously in all the student newspapers that have been involved in its creation.

In concrete terms, the issue collects 14 different testimonials from as many cities around the world, from Wuhan to Capetown, from Edinburgh to Singapore, Mannheim, Toronto, Seoul andParis (to name a few). Behind all this, together with Barbara, worked a team formed of Matteo Cremonesi, Francesca Sofia Cocco, Cecilia Gadina, Xuequiao Li, Julia Maria Galusiakowska.

"This issue was born from the desire to investigate how the pandemic was experienced and managed by students from different universities," says Barbara. A task that allowed all participants to confront the similarities and differences of the experiences of others. For example, "the deep reflection on the compression of personal freedoms during the lockdown, which emerged from the students of HEC Paris, the city and the country of freedoms, or the testimony of the Wuhan student who tells how they were literally locked in the campus. Furthermore, all foreign students were very apprehensive about our Italian situation. They all asked was if we were well. "

The edition, conceived and created in a few weeks, is an absolute first time for Tra i Leoni. "We wanted to bring to the world the experiences of our peers that would normally not be read and known, because they are published in student newspapers that only have local circulation ", concludes Barbara.