What are the challenges of the shift project?

01.

How can we imagine a sustainable future?

02.

How can desirable changes be upscaled and expanded?

03.

What forms of transformative education and learning (both formal and informal) are emerging?

04.

What methods and approaches from within the Social Sciences and Humanities domain can be used to support dialogue?

05.

How can we give a voice to marginalised groups and future generations?

06.

How can we debate the future of our planet and desirable connections between society, technology and nature?

07.

What skills do we need to make sense of complexity and to champion deliberate transformation in practice?

MISSION

  • Raising awareness to Climate Change societal transition and transformation;
  • Minimising the impact of Climate Change in our lives and communities;
  • Redirecting a wide variety of actors towards sustainability through the Arts and Social Sciences and Humanities;
  • Expanding the universe of artists and researchers to focus on Climate Change;
  • Generating innovative and actionable pathways by engaging with the ‘critical practice’ dimensions of transformation.

VISION

  • Fostering more creative, future-oriented and tangible solutions for connecting and mobilising Social Sciences and Humanities research in order to address the challenge of accelerating change in an inclusive and responsible manner
  • Deepen our understanding of practices involved in ‘doing transformation’ and to promote a shift in thinking with regards to the role of transdisciplinary Social Sciences and Humanities research in these emerging and evolving spaces.

SHIFT WILL FOCUS ON

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Knowledge exchange and shared learning

about ‘critical practice’, achieved by identifying and engaging with ‘real-world’ problem-solving that promote flexible, adaptive, multi-scalar and multiple time-frame terminologies drawing from learning by doing in action approaches, tacit and experiential knowledge and hybridizations;
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Expanding networks and cooperation

through inclusive, cross-sectoral, cross-disciplinary, and contextual exchange. It will leverage various social planes from offline and online environments, to contribute and draw from existing collaborative platforms, as well as tuning in and widening climate action networks to explore critical exchange dialogues and partnerships;
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Improve transfer capabilities

by leveraging best practices in online and offline communication, engagement, and co-creation with and through art and society to enhance knowledge sharing, and embodied experience in teaching and learning. Promote further transfer value through the identification of collaborative working tools and creative processes.

OBJECTIVES

Research coordination objectives

  • Explore the hybridization of concepts and practices, allowing space for evolving, contrasting forms with an outlook toward development of new research routes;
  • Work towards triangulation of concepts and models to strengthen transdisciplinary exchange and enable innovation among European and Pan-European partners;
  • Establish good practice guidelines to promote inclusive, responsible and innovative pathways of co- creation;
  • Expand dissemination and outreach potential through mobilization of existing SSH transdisciplinary networks and policy arenas on an ongoing basis;
  • Develop a digital dynamic (expressed through the digital platform that constitutes the website) to facilitate interactions, open source sharing and enhance outreach to targeted audiences (i.e. early career SSH transdisciplinary researchers, citizens researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and others), with a continuity plan beyond the lifetime of the Action;
  • Organise blended multi-stakeholder gatherings to promote transdisciplinary exchange;
  • Create an inclusive teaching and learning peer-to peer platform exploring critical practice perspectives through development of actions that are cognizant of discrepancies in resource availability, knowledge needs and power dynamics;
  • Develop participatory evaluation processes to appraise the salience, actionability and transferability of different transdisciplinary strategies and tools;
  • Produce learning briefs based on themed-case studies to support the incorporation of new insights into policy and industry;
  • Seek out alternative ways to enhance impact at micro and macro-level through engagement with multiple stakeholders at various scales, from local, regional to global.
Capacity-building objectives
  • Facilitate SSH engagement in climate research by acting as a Hub in connecting multiple disciplines, actors and spaces into a supportive network with diverse exchange capabilities based on communication practices including digital archives, arts and exhibitions;
  • Explore transferability of transdisciplinary critical practice knowledge and skills within and beyond academia;
  • Develop network continuity capacities with a focus on establishing key milestones beyond the lifetime of the project based on early career researcher outputs, ITC led actions and dissemination of transdisciplinary skills and perspectives;
  • Support the continued development of collaborative and participatory skills by setting up a blended roadshow of tools and approaches that promote transdisciplinary learning in real time;
  • Enhance knowledge brokerage approaches to help connect and make actionable knowledge where it is needed by linking concepts to methodologies and actions and building institutional capacities beyond academia;
  • Target natural science and critical science scholars through joint teaching and writing activities to move research frontier and practical applications of climate services and RRI;
  • Organise events to explore and promote synergies between science, policy and practice;
  • Enhance existing impact and evaluation metrics relating to the role of the arts in climate action.