Building interdisciplinary communities of interest and launching community engaged research projects into and across courses and/or faculties
Coordinator:
ULB
Main objectives: In this work package we will launch and sustain Community Engaged Researches (CER), ranging from student-led projects to larger-scale initiatives funded to address challenges identified by civil society. TOGETHERNESS plans to address the local topics starting from mono-disciplinary explorations, which will progressively constitute a body of knowledge nurturing subsequent studies from other disciplinary perspectives. The goal here is to develop the academics abilities regarding interdisciplinarity, hence allowing transdisciplinarity collaborations to address complex societal challenges. ULB will coordinate the methodology; TUD, UNISS and ULB will deploy CER on their own territories.
What has been done and next steps: We have organised a two-parts webinar: the first transnational part gathered CSO and academics to present them TOGETHERNESS intentions and opportunities, while the second part redirected participants into local sessions to identify challenges from their territory and the possibility to engage in CER. Based on this first event, each academic partner (TUD, UNISS, ULB) will develop the CER agenda and dynamics based on their local research and teaching practices, preexisting collaborations with CSO, and territorial challenges and opportunities. The next step is to launch first exploratory collaborative research in each of the 3 territories by the beginning of 2026-2027 academic year.
The methodologies and practices we will experiment during TOGETHERNESS to sustain CER dynamics will be in a handbook for dissemination.