Today, the general meeting of UW took place. Peter Weiss, director of UW presented the annual report for 2023, which included an overview of positions, master's programs, marketing, distance learning, research and collaboration and much more at UW.

We recently wrote about UW’s summer school, which is an international cooperation. Each year, UW visits one of the partnering countries and learns about their approaches on "smart shrinking" as a development approach for de-populating regions. This year UW is the hosting country. The group, which consists of seven UW students in the Coastal Communities and Regional Development master's program, Matthias Kokorch academic director, and 24 students from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland, are currently travelling in north-Iceland, visiting small municipalities.

There have been many new faces at UW in the past few days. 13 students from SeaTech, the French school of engineering, are interns at UW for a total of 17 weeks. The interns are master’s students in marine engineering and are undergoing training here under the guidance of Björn Erlingsson.

On Friday, May 17th, the permanent online exhibition of the SeaGirls project opens. The SeaGirls project gave girls in Iceland disposable film cameras for the summer to understand their relationships and perspectives of the ocean. This project was a collaboration between the University Centre of the Westfjords, Vestfjörður Regional Museum, Hversdagsafnið and funding was provided from Rannís Nýsköpunarsjóður and Uppbyggðingarsjóður as part of the growing international dialogue on gender and the ocean.

UW is part of an international cooperation, which organizes annual summer schools. Each year we visit one of the partnering countries and learn about their approaches on "smart shrinking" as a development approach for de-populating regions. "smart shrinking" is an approach that accepts depopulation and employs it actively to create smaller but better living places.This year UW is the hosting country and the group, seven CRD students, Matthias, and 24 students from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland, has been in Akureyri since Sunday.