"Apulian psychologist Gianmichele Laquale joins the Board of UWC Dilijan College (Armenia)" by Carlo Coppola

There is a thread linking Bari to the wooded mountains of Armenia's Tavush Province. It is held by Gianmichele Laquale, an Apulian psychologist and psychotherapist, who is joining the board of UWC Dilijan, the prestigious international college set in the Armenian spa town.

UWC Dilijan is an international boarding school, the fourteenth college of the United World Colleges movement and the first international boarding school in Armenia. It is the only UWC in the post-Soviet space, and its mission is to contribute, through education, to peace and sustainable development in the region. Students from different cultures and countries live and study together, a choice that makes the College a daily laboratory of dialogue in a region where peacebuilding is a concrete, pressing matter.

Laquale knows this world from the inside, from both sides. A UWC alumnus, he graduated from UWC of the Adriatic in Duino. He then studied psychology in Bari, where he earned his degree in Clinical Psychology and his PhD in Dynamic Psychology, and trained in group analysis with COIRAG. He began his career at the Psychological Counseling Service of the University of Bari and as an honorary fellow (cultore della materia) in dynamic psychology. He has also worked in several secondary schools in Apulia and as a group dynamics trainer for public and private organizations.

Then came the decision to leave. For seven years he was the College's psychologist in Dilijan, and he worked as a consultant with Peace Corps Armenia and with Rise, an initiative of Schmidt Futures and the Rhodes Trust. He has also served on UWC selection committees in Italy, Armenia, Georgia and Uzbekistan, and has collaborated with the Global Selection Programme.

In a 2019 interview with the Armenian daily Aravot, conducted by Gohar Hakobyan and republished by the Hrand Nazariantz Study Centre, Laquale explained that the UWC movement values not only the cognitive dimension but also students' emotional development and wellbeing, and that education can bring people together. He described adolescents' emotional growth as a non-linear, "rhizomatic" process, and named the integration of clinical practice and research as his passion. It is a valuable sensibility in a college where sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds face, together, distance from home, academic pressure and intercultural encounters.

Laquale is currently a senior clinical psychologist (psicologo clinico dirigente) at the ASL of Foggia, following his time at ASL Roma 5. He is a member of the board of Il Cerchio, the Italian Association of Group Analysis, and a full member of COIRAG and of the Group Analytic Society International.

Laquale's story confirms once again that the ties between Apulia and Armenia are not only a matter of historical memory, but of the present. Bari, which welcomed Armenian cultural vitality and the figure of the poet Hrand Nazariantz, which trained one of the most recent Italians to receive an Armenian presidential honor, prof. Carlo Coppola, and which hosts the third Honorary Consulate of the Republic of Armenia in Italy, now finds in one of its own professionals a new bridge to Dilijan. His entry onto the board brings to the College's governance a rare competence: that of someone who knows campus life as a student, as a psychologist and now as a board member.