Building the SwafS knowledge base

Specific Challenge

Understanding the evolution of science and society will help proactive and anticipatory policy making. This includes examining how societal actors, including young people, behave, understand, react to and interact with science and scientific developments, and their motives for engaging in science-related activities. It encompasses investigating science communication and science advocacy in the digital world, and how science and technology studies and different disciplines (e.g. behavioural sciences, communication studies, gender studies, linguistics, and social anthropology) – and multi/transdisciplinary approaches – can help explain interactions between science and society. This includes a focus on blind spots of research and innovation in relation to people's needs and concerns and in any of the areas or dimensions covered by RRI. Moreover, consideration could be given to rewarding achievement in RRI in its various dimensions to signal the organisations that are more RRI aware (answering questions such as how such a reward could work and based on which criteria). Another area is implications of deep changes in science and innovation and their interactions with society and the economy, such as the transition to open science and open innovation, and resultant changes in the relationships between science and society.

Scope

The present topic is completely bottom-up. Research and innovation actions are invited, using the above specific challenge to help stimulate ideas about where research is most needed.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of the order of € 1 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Expected Impact

Consortia should choose a basket of indicators to measure the impact of their work against. In particular, consortia are expected to contribute to one or more of the MoRRI indicators[1] and/or to the Sustainable Development Goals[2]. R&I outcomes should help build effective cooperation between science and society, foster the recruitment of new talent for science, and pair scientific excellence with social awareness and responsibility. Scientific and other types of publication should be foreseen.

Delegation Exception Footnote

It is expected that this topic will continue in 2020.

Cross-cutting Priorities

Socio-economic science and humanities
RRI
Gender
Open Science

[1]See http://www.technopolis-group.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/2171_D3.2.p… (Table 3.2).

[2]http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/.