The project received funding from the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Program

• Principal Investigator: Professor Paulina Polak
• Team members:
  Professor Aleksandra Wagner
  Professor Maria Świątkiewicz-Mośny
  Tadeusz Rudek
• Project duration: 2021 - 2024

Partners in project:

• Tampere University
• Ghent University
• Jagiellonian University
• University of Turin
• The Instituto de Ciências Sociais
• Universidade de Lisboa
• Charles University in Prague
• University of Cassino and Southern Lazio
• NOVA University Lisbon
• University of Nottingham
• Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare
•  

About the project:

The ”VAX-TRUST – Addressing Vaccine Hesitancy in Europe” research project scrutinizes vaccine hesitancy as a broad societal phenomenon. The project is carried out in Finland, Belgium, Poland, the Czech Republic, Italy, Portugal, and the UK. Ever since vaccines have been developed, individuals have questioned the value and importance of vaccines for their health, and expressed distrust towards proponents of vaccines. These individuals doubt the benefits of vaccines, raise concerns about their safety and efficacy, and question the need for them. We will give vaccine hesitant parents the time and space to discuss this complex issue in our interviews.

Vaccine hesitancy is a most burning issue for healthcare professionals who meet more and more challenges in building trust relationships with their patients. Healthcare professionals need abilities to encounter vaccine hesitant individuals so that these individuals can make their decisions about health. Professionals need to be prepared to answer questions and concerns related to vaccines.

VAX-TRUST strives for both increasing understanding of vaccine hesitancy and improving the interaction between healthcare professionals and vaccine hesitant individuals. In this project, we will:

• equip healthcare professionals with tailored up-to-date knowledge on vaccine hesitancy in their specific local region and nation from a comparative perspective; this knowledge will be obtained through (A) a review of previous research on vaccine hesitancy, (B) an analysis of individual, socio-demographic determinants of vaccine hesitancy, (C) an analysis of macro-level determinants of vaccine hesitancy, and their interplay with socio-demographic ones and (D) qualitative observations and interviews with healthcare professionals and parents at local healthcare centres in specific Target Regions;
• give healthcare professionals tools, support and peer support to encounter a range of attitudes in relation to vaccination, taking into account that some professionals may themselves be vaccine hesitant. This will involve specific interventions tailored to healthcare professionals in the Target Regions. These interventions will be evaluated for usability and transferability;
• distribute the intervention tools to future healthcare professionals, medical and nursing students, in order to strengthen their knowledge about vaccine hesitancy and facilitate support to meet with vaccine hesitancy in their future career;
• identify and communicate recommendations to Target Regions, the seven countries and European area based on the project activities.

More about the project: https://vax-trust.eu

The project received funding from the National Science Center (OPUS)

• Principal Investigator: Professor Marek Kucia
• Team members:
  Dr Maciej Koniewski
  Sylwia Sadlik
  Dr Katarzyna Stec
  Katarzyna Bisaga
  Katarzyna Odrzywolek
• Project duration: 2018 - 2023

About the project:

1. The objective of the project
   The objective of this project is to sociologically analyze the memory of Auschwitz (the camp complex) in present-day Polish society. The project will deal with social memory understood in terms of the multi- -disciplinary research field of memory studies. The analysis will focus on the “collected memory” of three collectivities: (a) Polish general public, (b) Polish school students, and (c) Polish visitors to the AuschwitzBirkenau State Museum. It will also concern “collective memory”, i.e., patterns of memory manifest in people’s beliefs and opinions, commemorative rituals and speeches, exhibitions and memorials, educational material, and media content. The project will analyze: (a) the state of the Polish memory of Auschwitz in 2020, i.e., 75 years after the liquidation and liberation of the camp; and (b) the transformation of this memory since earlier research. The state and transformation of Auschwitz memory in Polish society will be analyzed in the context of changes of social memory and the politics of memory in Poland as well as Europe and the world. In the Polish dimension, these will be the changes of the social memory of the Holocaust and World War II resulting from the decreasing role of “communicative memory” and the increasing role of “cultural memory,” and the policies of the government of the Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość or PiS) and President Andrzej Duda, in particular their polityka historyczna or “historical policy” and changes in education. In the European and global dimensions, the project will take into account the processes regarding Holocaust memory—its universalization, cosmopolitanization, internationalization, and Europeanization—that have been analyzed in the social sciences, and the ongoing changes of the national memories of World War II, the Holocaust, and Auschwitz outside Poland. The aim of the project will be to develop a sociological theory capturing the social mechanisms of the constitution, persistence and transformation of social memory in a changing domestic and international political setting.
    
2. The research to be carried out
   The project will comprise: (a) manifold own empirical research; (b) the secondary analyses of the existing data; (c) the comparison of the results obtained in own research with those of the earlier projects; (d) an ongoing literature review; and (e) theoretical investigations. The own empirical research will consist of: (i) surveys of samples of the three collectivities—the general public, the students of primary schools, and visitors to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, adult and young; (ii) focus group interviews and/or in-depth interviews with members of these collectivities as well as with teachers, guides, experts, educators, and curators; (iii) studies of commemorations and their media coverage, museum exhibitions, school curricula and textbooks, and local practices and products of commemoration involving participatory observation, visual sociology, and content analysis.
    
3. Reasons for choosing the research topic
   Auschwitz and the memory of it are highly significant for people in Poland, wider Europe and the world. There is no comprehensive study of the (present-day) Polish memory of Auschwitz in the context of Holocaust memory and World War II memory, a study that would offer not only a description but also a theoretical explanation. There is (as yet) no scholarly study of the consequences of PiS government’s and President Duda’s “historical policy” for Polish social memory, a study that would contribute to the knowledge of how nationalism and right-wing populism impact social memory. Empirical research into the Polish memory of Auschwitz as well as Holocaust memory and World War II memory conducted so far lacks mutual connection and theoretical grounding, e.g. in the theories of Holocaust memory. The theories of Holocaust memory, esp. Alexander’s on universalization and Levy and Sznaider’s on cosmopolitanization, have not been developed in or applied to the Polish context or the context of Auschwitz. This project that will continue and develop the research conducted so far will aim to fill in these cognitive gaps. It will contribute to the development of sociology and the multi-disciplinary field of memory studies.

The project received funding from the European Commission under the Horizon Europe Programme

• Local coordinator: Dr Ewa Krzaklewska
• Research team:
  Ewelina Ciaputa
  Dr Paulina Sekuła
  Dr Marta Warat
• Project duration: 2022 - 2026

About the project:

INSPIRE is Europe's Centre of Excellence on inclusive gender equality in research and innovation. It brings together cutting-edge knowledge, ambitious policy approaches, and innovative practices to provide a gateway for scholars, equality experts, practitioners and trainers to connect and share resources, as well as co-create new ones.

INSPIRE's ambitious research programme develops new, relevant indicators for inclusive GEP development, conducts a GEP monitoring survey throughout Europe whilst identifies the conditions necessary for GEP impact. It fills key knowledge gaps on intersectionality, whilst building up the evidence base on promising practices in gendered regional innovation policy.

INSPIRE counts on 4 Knowledge & Support Hubs (KSHs) led by academics and practitioners throughout Europe to develop cutting edge knowledge on sustaining change, widening participation, intersectionality and fostering innovation and change in the private sector. These KSHs will provide support to 12 communities of practice to facilitate GEP implementation and foster mutual support for the co-development of innovative practices, customised training and pan-European data collection. Jagiellonian University is co-leading the Hub "Widening participation".

INSPIRE will reduce disparities across Member States and strengthen the ERA through its distributed approach, spreading knowledge, know-how and new opportunities for more open and inclusive research and innovation across Europe. INSPIRE strengthens the evidence base for informed policymaking by taking a practice-based approach and meaningfully engaging decision-makers in policy and R&I funding for shaping a more inclusive future.
 

More about the project: inspirequality.eu

• Principal Investigator at JU: Dr Agata Dziuban
• Team members at JU: 
  Dr Agata Chełstowska
  Dr Justyna Struzik
• Project duration: 2020 - 2023

About the project:

The CrimScapes project explores the expanding application of criminal law, crime control measures and imaginaries of (il)legality as both responses to, and producers of, the politics of threat and uncertainty that are currently expanding across the European region. Given the inherent tensions between democratic processes and ever-expanding legal regulations, the project investigates this growing reliance on criminal technologies and institutions as a challenge to the participatory nature of democratic societies, and as possible symptoms and causes of the general sense of turbulence that has come to dominate much of economic, social and political life. It works to analytically grasp the motivations behind, and challenges and implications of, criminalisation for the variety of actors and practices that (re-)shape entangled crimscapes - i.e. landscapes of criminalisation. With the support of secondary literature, archival research and interviews, project members will develop - for a variety of publics - CrimeLines (i.e. genealogical timelines) of seven European crimscapes (of drug use, migration, sex work, infectious diseases, the prison context, sexuality/gender, and hate speech). Additional ethnographic fieldwork will help to conceptualise - in publications and an EthnoGraphic Novel - the strategies, relations and citizenship dynamics of the implicated actors as they navigate democratic participation and freedoms with legal regulation and measures of crime control. Extracting from this empirical data, researchers will then highlight and open for discussion - with policy makers and other stakeholders - documented dilemmas of democratic governance so as to enhance the lived realities, rights-claims and desired futures of all implicated actors.

Collaborating partners:

• Université Paris Saclay, National Centre for Scientific Research, Centre for Sociological Research on Law and Criminal Justice Institutions
• University of Helsinki, Department of Social Sciences
• Jagiellonian University, Institute of Sociology

More about the project: https://www.euroethno.hu-berlin.de/de/forschung/projekte/crimscapes

• Principal Investigator: Professor Maria Światkiewicz-Mośny
• Project duration: 2021 - 2025

About the project:

Poles at the declarative level rate health highly as a value, but at the same time, they are not able to properly care for it. Research results clearly show that health remains one of the most important values, and a healthy lifestyle is the most preferred by Poles. However, such positive declarations do not prevent adult Poles from spending a significant portion of their budget on cigarettes and other unhealthy practices. Research commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) has shown that this problem is not limited to Poles only - as many as half of Europeans experience various health problems. What is the reason for this? First of all, it might be explained by low health capital. We will understand this concept as a collection of knowledge on health-related topics, the ability to communicate information related to it, and orientation to the future, i.e., activity and awareness that current health behaviours are essential for achieving a high quality of life. Its lack in conjunction with low health awareness results in poorer health and more frequent hospitalizations. This problem has been noticed by the WHO. It has been for many years calling for the development of health competences and creating space for discussion. In particular, childhood and adolescence should be an intensive time for the development of health capital and the acquisition of health competences. Combined with the sufficiently developed ability to think critically, they should facilitate the best decisions leading to a healthy lifestyle.

The planned research concerns the development of health capital and health competences of primary school students. Research tasks assume the analysis of school programs and textbooks. We will ask questions about what pupils in primary schools in Poland are taught about health-related topics, and in what context the knowledge is presented, whether the textbooks encourage to care for health, or rather threaten with diseases. The next stage will include quantitative measurement of individual competences of pupils in order to verify to what extent the policies and schools efforts really work. We aim here to assess the level of health literacy and critical thinking among pupils grades 6th to 8th in a national survey. In order to diagnose pupils' skills with high-quality tools, we will adapt and validate a renowned international instrument measuring skills of critical thinking about health. The collected material will be confronted with the opinions and experiences of teachers, educators, school nurses/hygienists, and pupils. In the course of the research, both content and teaching methods will be identified and described. The research team will also visit schools to observe eating habits, to analyze products sold in school shops and vending machines, ways of spending free time during breaks.

The acronym of the "LIGHT" project is supposed to emphasize the essence of education in the process of building health capital and health literacy and critical thinking. It should also indicate the direction on the path to better health of society as a whole. The diagnosis, which will be the result of the research project, can become the basis for building educational programs developing health competences.

More about the project: light.project.uj.edu.pl

Call name: Working Life Related Challenges 2019, Type of grant: Programme Grants, Focus: Working Life​

Project financed by FORTE – Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (Forskningsrådet för hälsa, arbetsliv och välfärd – Forte)

Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Andreas Motel-Klingebiel, Linköping University, Sweden

• 
  Principal Investigator at JU: Professor Jolanta Perek-Bialas
• Project members at JU:
  Dr Anna Urbaniak
  Maria Varlamova ​
  Natalia Krygowska-Nowak
• Project duration: 2019 - 2025

About the project:

Ageing societies need to extend working lives and EIWO pushes the boundaries of knowledge about late working life and the potential of its inclusive and equal prolongation via a theoretically driven, gender-sensitive combination of multi-level perspectives. EIWO takes a life-course approach on exclusion and inequality by security of tenure, quality of work, workplaces and their consequences. EIWO identifies life-course policies, promoting life-long-learning processes and flexible adaption to prolong working lives and to avoid increased exclusion and inequality. It provides evidence for policies to ensure both individual, company and societal benefits from longer lives, and it has five objectives:

1. To produce new knowledge on chances and limits of longer working lives through investing nature, sources and effects of exclusion and inequalities in Sweden and Europe with a focus on workplaces as the decisive level to realise late exits in practice
2. To assess policy, institutional and corporate-level influences on unequal employment chances and life-long learning opportunities, security levels and their impact on late work trajectories
3. To gain an in-depth understanding of how earlier life courses influence and structure perceptions and accumulations of inequality and disadvantage
4. To inform Swedish social and employer´s policies for inclusive and fostering labour markets by an enhanced understanding of alternative practices within Europe
5. To propose policies to minimise risks that cumulate over the life course and to mitigate exclusion and inequalities in late working life

The research programme EIWO builds on current and previous research, among them MoPAct and EXTEND, as well as on an international network of senior and junior scholars. Added value comprises theoretical advances, methodological innovation and impact on EU- and national labour market and branch- and company policy.

Partners in project:

• Linköping University Department of Culture and Society Division Ageing and Social Change ​Norrköping, Sweden
• University of Vechta Institute of Gerontology Department of Ageing and Work Vechta, Germany
• Institute for Gerontology at Technical University Dortmund Dortmund, Germany
• TU Dortmund University Department of Social Sciences Dortmund, Germany
• University of Sheffield Department of Sociological Studies Sheffield, UK
• Jagiellonian University Institute of Sociology Cracow, Poland

More about the project: http://www.eiwoproject.org/

The project received funding from the European Commission under the Horizon Europe Programme

• Principal Investigator​: Dr. Marta Warat
• Team members at the Jagiellonian University:
  Dr. Inga Hajdarowicz
  Dr. Barbara Ostafińska-Molik
  Dr. Paulina Sekuła
• Project duration: 2023-2026

Project description:

Democrat aims to strengthen liberal democracy in the European Union (EU) by supporting its embedding and sustainability through participatory redesign and implementation of innovative and context-sensitive Education for Responsible Democratic Citizenship (EfD) curricula and learning methods in compulsory school, including formal and informal learning, as well as learning for teachers and social educators.

Education in general, and in particular Education for Responsible Democratic Citizenship (EfD) should contribute to defend, strengthen and deepen liberal democracy in the EU. EfD does not only refer to knowledge of the formal rules of the democratic political systems. It rather adopts a holistic and humanistic approach, based on the core values of democracy and the centrality of citizens’ agency. Both elaborate design and authenticity is needed to support the development of citizens as democratic agents who could act in a meaningful and constructive way and with integrity, despite turbulence. This is why EfD focuses on competences (which encompass knowledge, skills and attitudes) to build Responsible Democratic Citizenship (RDC). Activating such holistic EfD is a key strategy to boost sustainable democracy in the EU. Democrat will develop an EU multidisciplinary RDC competence framework, as a basis for establishing curricula for life-long learning (and related learning approaches), to develop and assess knowledge, skills and attitudes for active and responsible democratic citizenship, whilst maintaining openness and flexibility for context-sensitive implementation in different national formal education systems and informal learning environments.

The project will test curricula and learning approaches through a series of real, open, local innovative learning projects and propose a toolbox to enhance EfD in the EU member states and beyond. This ambitious research and innovation (R&I) programme is based on a participatory and co-creation approach. Cooperating with a wide range of actors is at the core of the project – public authorities responsible for education, municipalities, schools, students, parents, teachers, social educators, their associations, and other relevant NGOs among others. It will set up a national living lab in each country (Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Spain and Poland) as well as one transnational living lab, to foster exchange of experiences, mutual learning and codevelopment of practice within and across the national education networks.

Labs will involve: public authorities responsible for education, municipalities, schools, students, parents, teachers, social educators, their associations, and other relevant ONGs among others. LPPs will not be circumscribed to formal education systems, but take the local environment and democratic initiatives towards sustainability as reference. This implies to include local citizens as pupils, parents, teachers, social educators, representatives of NGOs and public institutions in the process of design, implementation and assessment of LPPs, strengthening democratic processes in education.

The project is implemented by a consortium of 10 partner institutions:

• Universitat De Barcelona | Spain (UB), Coordinator
• NOTUS | Spain
• Tallinn University | Estonia (TLU)
• Helsingin Yliopisto | Finland (HY)
• Hochschule Dusseldorf | Germany (HSD)
• Uniwersytet Jagiellonski | Poland (UJ)
• Dublin City University | Ireland (DCU)
• Foundation for Global Governance and Sustainability | Belgium (FOGGS)
• Stichting International Parents Alliance | Netherlands (IPA)
• European Universities Continuing Education Network | Belgium (EUCEN)

More about the project: https://democrat-horizon.eu/

• Program: ERA-NET SUSFOOD2 and CORE Organic Cofunds Joint Call 2019: "Towards sustainable and organic food systems"
• Project team at the JU:
  Professor Ewa Kopczyńska - Principal Investigator and researcher
  Dr Konrad Stępnik - researcher
• Project duration: 2021 - 2023

Partners in project:

• University of Giessen, Consumer Studies, Germany
• University of Trento, Sociology and Social Research, Italy
• Coventry University, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, UJ
• OsloMet - Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway
• Instytut Socjologii, Uniwersytet Jagielloński, Poland

About the project: 

Our project examines how increasing the diversity of species on fields and on farms, diversity of products in markets, diversity of policies concerning food and diversity of meals on our plate can help us to create more sustainable food systems and gain higher level of food security.

• Food governance: We explore the different governmental policy interventions as well as citizens' and movements' local demand for organic food to foster sustainable food systems.
• Food chains: We examine the drivers and barriers to increase the use of biologically diverse products in different food supply chains.
• Food culture: We explore synergies and trade-offs between diversity and sustainability, including diets which are healthy, fair and accessible to all.

The FOOdIVERSE project is looking for solutions that can make the food system more diverse and sustainable. Such innovations can arise at the local level, where more and more people are interested in creating short food supply chains. One of the goals of our project was to invite them to cooperate. We use the Living Lab approach, which is an increasingly important approach to creating innovations involving many different actors. The creation of Living Labs was preceded by case studies that helped us assess the innovative potential of Food Networks. These studies confirmed that they have the ability to generate new solutions for the food system. We have gained confidence that they are good bases for creating Living Labs.

Case studies were conducted in five countries: Poland, Norway, Germany, UK and Italy. We analyzed three Food Networks in each country. The research sample included various types of initiatives: Food Councils, Food Cooperatives, associations of various actors in food chains, Community Supported Agriculture initiatives.

There were formal and informal organizations among the examined Food Networks. Regardless of their legal status, Food Networks have a rather loose structure. Their characteristic feature is the participatory way of making decisions. This does not prevent effective project management. This means that Food Networks have the ability to carry out an innovative process in line with the Living Lab approach.

Food Networks bring together different actors of the food system. Therefore, they automatically meet the basic assumption of the Living Lab methodology. Diverse members hold different points of view on the problems of the food system. They also have diverse competences and qualifications, which is conducive to creating new solutions. Food Networks also have the potential to involve new actors in the innovative process.

Generating innovation is usually not an explicit goal of Food Networks. However, they are innovators, and their novelty is manifested in the fact that they empower various actors in the food chain. Citizens gain the ability to make decisions about its operation, which is not possible in mainstream ways of obtaining food.

Food Networks operate on a local scale, which limits the range of innovations they implement. However, they have the ability to create copies of themselves, i.e. similar organizations in other places. They disseminate the solutions they create by inspiring other organizations to do the same. This mechanism can be used to disseminate new solutions developed by FOOdIVERSE Living Labs.

More about the project: https://foodiverse.eu

• Principal Investigator​: Professor Krystyna Slany
• Team members:
  Professor Magdalena Ślusarczyk
  Dr Ewa Krzaklewska
  Dr Anastasiya Stelmakh
• Project duration: 2022 - 2024

About the project:

GEN-MIGRA is a ground-breaking research collaboration that seeks to transform our knowledge about migrant women’s vulnerabilities and strategies to navigate new social risks during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic represents a major health challenge which has worsened existing inequalities globally, including gender inequalities. Women have been at the forefront of key sectors which have been hardest hit by the pandemic, while also experiencing increased care responsibilities and heighted risks of domestic abuse and violence.

Drawing on the experience and expertise of partners across six countries, GEN-MIGRA aims to generate new evidence co-produced with migrant women and their families to inform concrete policies and practices which will improve the lives of migrant women, their families and the communities in which they live.

Project Aim

Although it has been reported that women and migrants have shouldered the greatest burden during the pandemic, there has been limited research on the impact of the pandemic on women migrants. Women may migrate for better work opportunities, to seek social protection or as part of care networks.

GEN-MIGRA will address this gap by exploring the challenges the Covid-19 pandemic and related mobility restrictions have posed for women’s mobilities, work, transnational care obligations, safety and wellbeing. We will work with migrant women themselves and their families to address this important gap.

The project also examines the state responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in six countries: Germany, Brazil, Poland, Spain, Portugal and the UK. In doing so, we aim to create new knowledge on global challenges and gendered consequences of Covid-19. In many countries, these consequences also intersect with other concurrent transformative events, such as Brexit in the UK or the refugee crisis after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

GEN-MIGRA seeks to translate this knowledge into gender-responsive policies which will help tackle the vulnerabilities experienced by migrant women and their families. We will build this evidence by working closely with women migrants, their children and other family members and NGOs supporting migrant groups.

GEN-MIGRA is receiving funding through the Trans-Atlantic Platform (TAP) for Humanities and Social Sciences, an unprecedented collaboration between humanities and social science research funders from South America, North America and Europe.

The project is funded by four major funders: DFG (Germany), FAPESP (Brazil), NCN (Poland) and UKRI-ESRC (UK).

More about the project: genmigra.org

The project received funding from the National Science Center (PRELUDIUM)

• Principal Investigator: Katarzyna Słaby
• Project duration: 2019 - 2023

About the project:

Cancer have managed to create a kind of mythology around itself, supported and narrated in various ways within various social practices - medicine, grassroots self-help groups, literature or media. Cancer, the emperor of all maladies as defined by the popular book, is not only a serious challenge for the specific biography and for close ones to the ill, and his/her doctor, but also for the whole society. In this sense, cancer is both an intimate an physical experience and a social challenge, which should be met not only by medicine, along with its progress in the field of oncology, but also by us, as whole society. Same as doctors learn how to treat cancer, we must to master the knowledge how to treat persons who suffers from it.

Cancer, remaining in complicated relations with time, is being measured by within various moments and points in time. In fact, despite the standards set out in oncology concerning the moment when one is theoretically recovered, one can never speak of being cured and cancer-free. Such an ambivalent group is the remission society, whose experience is being an primal interest within this study. Currently in Poland almost 990 thousand people are living with cancer diagnosis stated within the past 15 years, with 495 thousand diagnosed only within past 5 years. In this large group there are people who are undergoing treatment, as well as those that are in the remission from cancer. Considering the epidemiological trends, this group will be constantly growing, which means an increasing population of people which need to re-organize their life after the treatment and cancer itself, and in consequences, differentiation of their situation, their choices and eventually, the narratives emerged around this experience.

In order to enable the preliminary recognition of these narratives, the author of the research refers to the distinction introduced by Arthur Frank - the restitution narrative and the quest narrative. The first one is convergent with the biomedical paradigm according to which talking about illness is like talking about a repaired body, which after the successful treatment is being restored, without providing any reflection on the complexity of this experience. The quest narrative, in turn, takes a form of the journey, with all ups and downs and becomes the possibility of expressing one’s own illness and remission experience placed within particular biography going beyond the scope of the biomedicine. This project aims at recognizing ways of narrating the experience of the cancer illness and remission on the example of two patient associations - "Amazons" (women in the remission from breast cancer which underwent mastectomy) and "Gladiators" (men in the remission from prostate cancer). These studies will have the character of ethnographic fieldwork, consisting of in-depth interviews and participant observation. These self-help groups present different experience in terms of gender, but one of the objectives of this research is to investigate whether gender has an impact on the way in which illness is being narrated and in what social context.

Previous research has showed that the social context in which the experience of illness and life in remission are formulated is significant for the choice of a particular type of narrative - the history or herstory of illness in an individual interview tend to be reported differently than within the group or while meeting with new patients, where some difficult facts and part of experience were deliberatively eluded. This means that the remission society is not only ambivalent in terms of its position within the healthy/ill opposition, but also in terms of expected attitudes and narratives, which supposed to bring hope for recovery rather than reflect the complexity of this specific liminal condition.

The opportunity to examine those narrations given gendered experience of breast and prostate cancer, while providing individual and self-help group perspective may provide a valuable material about life after cancer and testify for the complexity of this experience.

Funded by: European Union, under Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), Horizon Europe

• Principal Investigator at JU: Professor Beata Kowalska
• Project duration: 2022 - 2025
• Project coordinator: Scholars at Risk Europe at Maynooth University, Ireland

Partners in project:
6 project partners
4 associated partners
9 advisory board members

About the project:

Inspireurope+ coordinates and strengthens support in Europe for researchers at risk.

Building on the work undertaken by Inspireurope (2019-2022), Inspireurope+ proceeds from the view that excellence in research depends upon free and open scientific debate and requires a diversity of perspectives and methodologies to flourish. Challenges to academic freedom and related pressures on individual researchers remain significant globally. In many countries and regions researchers face risks to their life, liberty, and research careers. When researchers are at risk, and excluded from participating in the global research circuit, whether due to discrimination, persecution, disaster, or violence, not only are individual lives and careers at risk; the very future of research is also at stake.

The skills and attributes of researchers at risk carry significant research potential for hosting countries in Europe. The coordination of efforts between researchers at risk and actors experienced in the work of support and solidarity is required for this research potential to be more fully realized on a Europe-wide scale. In recognition of a shared commitment to excellence in research and to the principles of freedom of inquiry and academic freedom that are essential for world-class research, the Inspireurope+ partners coordinate activities across Europe to support researchers at risk.

More about the project: https://sareurope.eu/inspireurope/

The project is funded under the EU Research and Innovation Framework Program Horizon 2020 "Science with and for society".

The project is coordinated by the Center for Women and Gender Research (CISRDe) at the University of Turin, Italy. The international project is led by prof. Cristina Solera (sociologist from the Department of Culture, Politics and Society, member of CIRSDe).

At the Jagiellonian University, the project is carried out jointly by the Institute of Sociology and the Department for Safety and Equal Treatment - Safe UJ. 

• JU team members:
  Dr Paulina Sekuła - Principal Investigator on behalf of the Institute of Sociology of the Jagiellonian University
• Dr Ewa Stoecker - Principal Investigator on behalf of the Department for Safety and Equal Treatment - Safe UJ
  Professor Małgorzata Grodzińska-Jurczak
  Professor Stanisław Kistryn
  Professor Anna Zachorowska-Mazurkiewicz
• Małgorzata Grodzińska-Jurczak
• Katarzyna Jurzak
• Aleksandra Migalska
• Project duration: 2021 - 2025

Partner institutions in the project:

• CTAG – Automotive Technology Center of Galicia, Spain
• Jagiellonian University, Poland
• Munster Technological University, Tralee, Ireland
• National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Italy
• University of Belgrade - School of Electrical Engineering, Serbia
• University of Gdańsk, Poland
• University of Turin's Research Center for Women's and Gender Studies (CIRSDe), Italy - project coordinator

About the project:

From 2021-2025, we will work to increase women's participation in research and innovation with the aim to improve women’s career prospects, to improve gender balance in decision-making bodies in research organisations, and to include gender dimensions in relevant research content. Increasing the quality and societal relevance of knowledge, technologies, and innovations produced.

We are tackling gender imbalances through implementing gender equality plans that include both cultural and structural aspects. To remove barriers to hiring and the career development for women in research, and to distinguish gender inequalities within governing bodies and evaluation committees. This ensures actions align with the European Commission’s objectives for gender equality in European research.

Gender data and strong governance are central to MINDtheGEPs and the gender equality plans we are creating. In each implementing organisation, we will map existing gender data, integrate existing data with new ad-hoc data and set up a gender data portal to make data accessible, to visualise where action might be required to reduce gender gaps.

In addition, we will create and reinforce roles and bodies that support gender equality in research careers (both men's and women's) and conduct a series of trainings to empower women in junior positions and raise awareness of gender gaps among their senior colleagues.

We will introduce work-family measures addressed to both men and women, and set equality targets for decision-making boards and gender-sensitive research. Creating conditions for the endurance of the GEPs we develop beyond the project’s lifespan. In the end, we will develop good practice advice for the design of future gender equality plans and actions for systemic institutional change.

Contact:

• Paulina Sekuła (Institute of Sociology of the Jagiellonian University, E-mail: paulina.sekula@uj.edu.pl)
• Ewa Stoecker (Department for Safety and Equal Treatment - Safe UJ, E-mail: ewa.stoecker@uj.edu.pl )

More about the project: www.mindthegeps.eu

COmmunity Models for the Energy Transition through Social Innovation - COMETS

• Principal Investigator at JU: Dr Wit Hubert
• Team members at JU:
  Dr Wit Hubert
  Professor Aleksandra Wagner,
• Project duration: 2019 - 2023

About the project:

COMETS (Collective Action Models for the Energy Transition and Social Innovation) is filling the knowledge gaps around citizen engagement in the energy transition to renewable sources by investigating and quantifying the aggregate contribution of Collective Action Initiatives (CAIs) in the energy sector at both national and European levels.

COMETS overall objective is to investigate Collective Action Initiatives (CAIs) as the main driver of Social Innovation in the energy sector.

The role of citizen-driven CAIs (e.g. energy communities, cooperatives, purchasing groups) and their contribution to the energy transition has neither been quantified at an aggregate level, nor has their contribution potential been estimated or understood in sufficient depth. COMETS aims to fill these knowledge gaps by quantifying the European-wide aggregate contribution of CAIs to the energy transition at national and European levels by investigating their evolution and scaling up at an in-depth level in six selected countries.

Two specific objectives derive from the overall objective:

1. To build robust knowledge on social innovative processes in the energy transition as implemented by CAIs. COMETS will generate and test new knowledge about technical, institutional, economic, social and cultural factors that may facilitate or hinder sustained activities of CAIs. The project will provide new tools for the assessment of CAIs performance and will provide aggregate estimates of their current and potential contribution to the energy transition.
2. To provide tools and recommendations for improving the start-up, steering, and up-scaling of CAI activities. COMETS will co-design the tools with practitioners, enabling changes in the current situation and generating blueprints for future initiatives.

Partners in project:

UNITO - Università di Torino, Italy (coordinator)
DTU - Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, Denmark
ECOLISE HVL - Western Norway
University of Applied Sciences - Høgskulen på Vestlandet, Norway
JRC - Joint Research Centre - European Commission
RUG Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands
ECN The European Crowdfunding Network, Belgium
TECNALIA - Fundación Tecnalia Research & Innovation, Spain
TREA -Tartu Regiooni Energiaagentuur, Estonia
VITO - Vlaamse Instelling voor Technologisch Onderzoek, Belgium
UB - Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Italy
UJ - Uniwersytet Jagiellonski, Poland

More about the project: http://www.comets-project.eu/

The project received funding from the National Science Center (PRELUDIUM)

• Principal Investigator: mgr Natalia Ożegalska-Łukasik
• Project duration: 2019 - 2023

About the project:

Contemporary Chinese society has been an arena of massive socio-economic transformations for over four decades. One-child policy introduced in 1979 (officially concluded in 2015) caused a reduction in the size of the Chinese family, an increase in wealth and thus greater opportunities to invest in its only child, for example by allowing it to study outside the People’s Republic of China (PRC). At the same time Chinese society is aging at a dramatic rate, and the state is refusing to provide care for elderly which is a legal obligation for children in the PRC since 1996. The process of individualization in a society, so strongly oriented to the group and subjected to intense transformation, with simultaneous strong cultural pressure to realize the Confucian principle of filial piety (xiào) which for the centuries was considered as foundation of family, is an inspiration to undertake research on this subject.

The aim of the project is to examine the role that is currently played by the filial piety in the daily lives of Chinese migrants residing in Poland and Australia. In addition, an important goal is to determine its significance in constructing their personal and collective identity and how they define their role in relation to an aging parent remaining in China. The main research questions will also concern whether there are differences between the two groups of migrants in the way of defining their position in relation to parents and, if so, to what extent these differences are resulting from the migration experience of the country in which they reside. The publications examining filial piety in the transnational context typically deal with perception from the perspective of single country, with the clear dominance of outlooks on the situation and filial expectations of elders.

Proposed project will fill the gap in state-of-art research by introducing comparative international analysis of filial piety, from the perspective of caregivers, between two countries of different structure of migrants: Australia – with the highest share of migrants in the general population, well-rooted population of ChineseAustralians and Poland – where the flow of immigrants from China is relatively new phenomenon. Also, from the local Polish perspective there is a very limited scope of social research in area of Chinese studies. The ambition of this research project is likewise to fill this gap by providing an outlook to this grave problem social problem of all modern societies. As part of the project, I accept that filial piety will be understood as a socially constructed identity. The previously mentioned institutionalization of filial piety distorts the meaning of the traditionally understood filial obligation, in which the failure to provide materially safe old age was the most important but a deep sense of bond. In an attempt to analyze motivation for xiao practice, the theoretical reference may also refer to the so-called "Filial duty theory", or more specifically, three of its variants of the theory of debt, gratitude and friendship.

The in-depth interview with elements of the narrative interview, conducted as part of my research, will consist of three parts. In the first one, I will ask to present the history of migration of the respondent, paying attention to changes in customs that have occurred after living in a new country. In the second, I ask about the situations in which they feel Chinese and what cultural practices in general they consider to be maintaining the Chinese culture and distinguishing the Chinese from other nationalities and cultures. In this part of the interview I will also ask the respondents to present their own understanding of the obligations that children have towards their parents. The third part of the interview will be devoted to asking supplementary questions and possibly indirectly obtaining information on the implementation of their filial duties. I intend to concentrate research on a group of people aged 20-40 living abroad at least one year, because they are a particularly interesting group of Chinese, who are already a generation of Chinese only children and although their parents are not yet elderly, it is before them to face the problem of aging Chinese society.

The project received funding from the National Science Center (OPUS)

• Principal Investigator: Professor Marta Smagacz-Poziemska
• Project duration: 2021 - 2026

About the project:

“I just want things to be back to normal again” – these are the words spoken by people at the beginning of 2021. “Build back better” is the message from the experts and global leaders, who emphasise that the pandemic Covid-19 is a chance to boost recovery processes toward sustainable transition in the face of climate crisis. But, according to the World Economic Forum-Ipsos survey from the beginning of 2021, on average 54% of people across the globe expect something like pre-COVID 'normal' will return within the next 12 months, 6% that this is just something what has already happened and 8% don't think it'll happen at all. In Poland, 10% of people think ‘normal’ pre-COVID life has already returned, 46% of respondents expect it will happen within 12 months, whilst for 10% pre-Covid ‘normal’ life will be never back.

The sites of the most acute disruptions by the pandemic and, in the era of planetary urbanization, particularly important for sustainable transition, are big cities. The lockdown prevented or limited routine activities, and questioned the default rules, rhythms, and geographies of urban life. We could just see the cities without urban life, with limited mobility, urban spaces emptied of social activities, closed or online social institutions and organizations. After modifying practices and adapting to urban life the next stage opens with the claim of “returning to normality”. But what does ‘normality’ mean for cities? Is it a claim to go back to previous ways of living? If not, how urban future will be done? How are the horizons of local change (what urban normalcy could/should/has to be) being produced and implemented in everyday practice? Based on ontologies of social (potential) agency we assume that any social change towards any social future is resulting through interacting everyday routines and their cultural and political frameworks. There is tacitly assumed obviousness of our everyday actions (how we move around the city, what we do in our neighbourhood, where we let to go our kids unaccompanied, how we spend time when we do not work etc.). However, this obviousness is being arranged on a basis of material and symbolic resources we can use and supplemented by ready-to-use scripts of past, present, and future realities, (re)produced through cultural representations (literature, arts and public art, mass media products, films etc.) and sciences. All of them co-shape people’s desires, motivations, understandings of possibilities or limitations. Political programs specify the goals and values using the representations of the past, present and future, and they define legal and infrastructural frames to reach the goals. However, people up to do what they really want to do, governed by habituation or desires and motivations. If they cannot, they try to rearrange the way to reach the goals – the lockdowns evidenced both the importance of everyday routines (when practices of ‘normal’ life had been collapsed) and human’s creativity to perform some practice anyway.

In our project we aim to answer:

1. how urban communities, experienced by the pandemic and facing with possible next disrupters, are imagining, and enacting ‘normal’ urban life towards the future?
2. how are political and cultural representations of the past, present and future shaping possible scenarios of urban life,
3. and, conversely, how are scenarios for the future being implemented through everyday urban practices.

To reach the aims, we will bridge disciplinary divides and combine theories and concepts from social sciences (sociology, economics, human geography) and from cultural studies (anthropology, performativity studies, languages and literatures), applying them into comparative case study research in three cities, representing three different pre-Covid types (demographic and economic paths and their current situation, the images of the city reproduced by the media etc.). We will explore selected urban practices and how (if) they change, such as practice of leisure in a city, neighbourhood care, civic engagement or mobility. We will carry systematic analysis of scientific papers and books on urban everyday life after the Covid-19 pandemic, ethnographic field research, analysis of usable past and visions of the future in local political programmes, local art, cultural institutions and media (including social media locally oriented). Speculative design interventions in each city will be employed to explore not-predefined scenarios emerging in the process of questioning ‘normal’ urban practices.

The results of our project will be:

1. documentary analysis and interpretation of post-pandemic changes in Polish cities carried out through the lens of everyday urban practices and their political and cultural frameworks,
2. conclusions on the ethical aspects of “back to normal” urban life identified during the study
3. transversal theoretical and methodological toolbox for practice-centred research on urban transformations.

We will share the findings both through scientific papers and series of webinars and podcasts to the general audience

Projekt uzyskał finansowanie Narodowego Centrum Nauki (SONATA)

• Principal Investigator: Dr Anna Szwed
• Team member: Professor Katarzyna Leszczyńska
• project duration: 2018 - 2023

About the project:

The religiosity of Polish society has remained relatively stable over the last 25 years (90% of Poles declares themselves as Roman Catholics). The newest researches show that Poles “believe in their own way” more and more often and not necessarily obey Catholic rules. Researchers predict that in the forthcoming years the biggest changes in religiosity of Poles will affect young people and women, especially the educated ones living in large cities. Although the trajectory of the changes is not evident, it is claimed that the process may possibly result in women leaving the Roman Catholic Church.

This project is focused on religiosity of young (up to 40 years old), educated women living in the largest Polish cities. The aim of the project is to research how women refer to different kinds of Catholic rules, how they interpret and negotiate them, if they obey the rules or resist them. I am interested in rules which refer to “feminine” and “masculine” (e.g. rules that define women’s roles in the Church). I will also research the relationship between women’s religiosity and their professional activity and family life (does religion affect professional activity and family life or is the other way, or are the three spheres independent?).

Two kinds of research methods/techniques will be used in the project. Firstly, individual in-depth interviews with lay women who: declare themselves as Roman Catholics, have higher education, live in Polish cities over 500 thousands inhabitants, are not older than 40 years. The group will include women that declare diversified intensiveness of religiosity (from “rather not religious” to “very religious”) and church attendance (not practicing, practicing irregularly, practicing regularly), hence persons attached to the Church as well as these who may soon leave the Church. Interviews will be conducted with married women, women living in informal unions and single women, mothers and women without kids, working and unemployed. I plan to interview around 40 women.

Secondly, the ethnographic research of three women’s religious groups will be conducted. These groups differ regarding the level of openness to new members and modes of activity. But all of them focus on women’s roles (e.g. in the Church, family etc.). At this stage of research I will use such techniques as: interviews with groups members, participant observation, content analysis of the materials generated by the groups. The project will provide in-depth knowledge about the religiosity of women in Poland and the place of religion in an individual’s life (also in the fields of professional activity and family life). It will increase knowledge about the transformations of religiosity of Poles, especially people with higher education and living in large cities. The project corresponds with a current trend in social sciences of researching women’s agency and will contribute to developing sociology of religion in the field of gender and religion which is still not a popular research direction in Poland.

The project will develop the methodology of research on religiosity and will offer the original theoretical approach.

• Principal Investigator at JU: Professor Ewa Kopczyńska
  Team members at JU:
  Professor Barbara Ostafińska-Molik
  Jakub Szmid
• Project duration: 2022 - 2026

About the project:

PLAN’EAT is a Horizon Europe research project, funded by the European Commission, which aims at transforming food systems and food environments towards healthy and sustainable dietary behaviour. The project aims to develop recommendations and tools for changing towards more sustainable and healthy eating habits. Its part is multi-sectoral, multi-faceted and multi-disciplinary research across Europe, which will be the basis for identifying the key factors of dietary patterns and developing effective solutions that translate into improved food consumption in Europe.

The research is carried out by a consortium of 24 partners, including universities, research and education units, think-tanks and other entities.

The Polish team participates in research work and is responsible for building and running the Living Lab, i.e. a space for diagnosing, creating and testing solutions for the food system. The Polish Living Lab will focus on the dietary patterns of children and adolescents.

THE MAIN OBJECTIVES OF PLAN’EAT ARE:

• to understand the underlying factors and drivers influencing dietary behaviour,
• to measure, compare and ‘monetize’ the environmental, social and health impacts of 3 dominant European dietary patterns through True Cost Accounting (TCA),
• to co-design effective recommendations, tools and interventions that allow food system actors to steer a transition towards healthier and more sustainable dietary behaviour.

PROJECT APPROACH

CO-CREATION

• PLAN’EAT will implement a systemic and co-creation approach at macro (food system), meso (food environment) and micro (individual) levels. Various socio-cultural and geographic contexts will be considered by implementing 9 Living Labs (LLs), 5 pan-European food value chain Consultation and Working Groups (CWGs) and 1 Policy Lab.

METHODOLOGY

• The dietary patterns of 11 European countries will be mapped and assessed in terms of environmental, socio-economic and health impacts. Impacts will then be translated into true costs for 3 dominant dietary patterns.
• The micro-meso-macro factors influencing dietary behaviours with the highest potential for change will be analysed.
• The knowledge and scientific evidence obtained will feed into the co-design and test of more than 10 effective solutions adjusted to different contexts and end-users.

The project received funding from the National Science Center (PRELUDIUM)

• Principal Investigator: Radosław Nawojski
• Project duration: 2021 - 2024

About the project:

The Polish Women's Strike and the Black Protests, which have been going on for half a decade, have brought a fresh breath of air into the art of street protest and the ways of experiencing citizenship. Events such as blocking the city with a musical and dance manifestation, staging a performance from the windows, or creating a forest of banners are forms of mass resistance never seen before in Poland. They carry the potential to intensify and pluralize the landscape of contemporary resistance. Half a decade of unprecedented and massive protests around reproductive rights make it clear that citizenship is not a neutral status or an abstract concept. During the Women's Strikes and Black Protests, clear political demands are made concerning civil and human rights. Stagnant rights provide a space for negotiation and even denunciation of obedience, as was the case during the 2020 events when demonstrations took place during pandemic restrictions.

The Black Protests and Women's Strikes events become a lens that focuses on the everyday problems and challenges of living in a particular political community. At the same time, they give impetus to the creation of new individual and collective subjectivities. The spaces of resistance they create and the acts of political influence they undertake redefine the classical meanings ascribed to citizenship and provide a new vocabulary and categories for the definition of the "I-citizen." The meanings attributed to it go far beyond the relationship between the individual and the state; references to international or supranational institutions appear. Citizenship is constituted in these struggles, and with it, the civic imagination is expanded; something that not so long ago seemed impossible suddenly becomes real in a protest of thousands.

The aim of this empirically-grounded study is to explore and describe the processes of experiencing and (re)defining citizenship in the context of mass mobilizations within the Women's Strikes and Black Protests that have been ongoing in Poland since 2016. This social movement against the restriction of abortion rights, which has been active for half a decade, is a key phenomenon of civic mobilizations in Poland and the used repertoire of actions in broader global feminist movements.

The planned research process leading to the realization of the project's goal is innovative, both in terms of how empirical materials about collective action are collected and the inclusion of the interviewed individuals in the co-creation of a space presenting different 'witness' narratives about recent events. This will be done through the collection and analysis of publicly available material from demonstration events taking place in many towns and regions of Poland, narrative interviews with individuals participating in protests with a strong representation of those coming from smaller towns or those remaining outside the media center, and sociological analysis of the collected material. As a result, the recent history of social mobilization for women's rights will be described, bringing together the numerous demonstrations, the speeches made at them, the slogans chanted, and the photos and video footage. In turn, the analysis of the collected materials will contribute to a deeper understanding and description of the contemporary experience of citizenship and the identification of the main barriers affecting the sense of belonging to a political community and civic engagement, as well as the characteristics of the acts undertaken to influence the surrounding reality

The project received funding from the European Commission under the Horizon Europe Programme

• Principal Investigator: dr Paulina Sekuła
• Team members: dr hab. Aleksandra Wagner, dr Marta Warat Project
• Project duration: 2023-2026

Project partners:

• CONSIGLIO NAZIONALE DELLE RICERCHE (CNR-IRPPS)
• AGENZIA NAZIONALE PER LE NUOVE TECNOLOGIE, L'ENERGIA E LO SVILUPPO ECONOMICO SOSTENIBILE (ENEA)
• FRAUNHOFER GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER ANGEWANDTEN FORSCHUNG EV (Fraunhofer)
• AFRICAN INSTITUTE FOR MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES-NEXT EINSTEIN INITIATIVE (AIMS Rwanda)
• PORTIA GGMBH (Portia gGmbH)

About the project:

gEneSys conceptualises energy transition as a dynamic, gendered, mission-oriented socio-technical innovation ecosystem with several ‘subsystems’: technological, policy, social, environmental, governance, and economic, each with its own sustainability visions, values, and priorities, as well as change actors and stakeholders, who may also influence what happens in other subsystems.

gEnesys will:

• Cooperate with partners in Africa to demonstrate the gender concerns in the EU’s and UN’s mission to supply/ensure access to affordable and secure energy and show how to integrate gender perspectives into SDG7 for gender equality benefits.
• Improve understanding of “inclusion” by addressing the intersectional aspects of gender inequality through the analysis of existing data and by collecting, analysing, and theorising original data collected in the project through extensive surveys.
• Review EU and national energy-related policy frameworks to identify the extent to which gender mainstreaming is being implemented.
• Examine available statistics on the participation and roles that women hold in energy-related sectors as researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs, and employees. It will also collect new data to understand the behaviours and attitudes to energy transition of women and men as citizens and consumers.
• Assemble the gender evidence base for transformative climate and environmental policies with an intersectional approach to reduce climate and environmental impacts to help challenge patriarchal and other discriminatory structures.
• Apply gender lens to the 400 priority SSH research questions recommended by the EU Energy SHIFTS project (only 20 of which refer directly to gender) to support study design with appropriately considered intersectional aspects of gender dimension.
• Improve understanding how countries can use the shift towards sustainable energy to tackle systemic gender discrimination within societies.
• Assemble the evidence base on energy-related emerging career directions and opportunities for women as researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs, and employees, together with examples of mechanisms enabling their greater participation.
• Use the broader socio-cultural-political aspects to promote international collaborations and engagement of the wider range of change actors and stakeholders in Europe and Africa to show the benefits of using gender equality as a lever in achieving sustainable socio-economic development.
• Demonstrate how to integrate gender-intersectional perspectives into the production, application, and communication of knowledge on energy transition.

• More about the project: https://www.genesys-project.eu/
• Twitter: @gEneSys_horizon
• LinkedIn Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12786780/

The project has been funded by the European Commission under the Horizon Europe Programme in cooperation with the Ministry of Science and Technology, People's Republic of China (PRC)

Project carried out as part of Capturing Invisible LAB

• Project Manager: Tadeusz Rudek (tadeusz.rudek@uj.edu.pl)
• Team Members:
  Aleksandra Wagner, Ph.D., Prof. UJ (aleksandra.wagner@uj.edu.pl)
• Project duration: 2024 - 2027

Project partners:

• Jagiellonian University
• Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (Consortium Leader)
• University of Zaragoza
• University of Valladolid
• University College London (UCL)
• Max Planck Institute of Chemistry
• Peking University
• Tsinghua University
• Southern University of Science and Technology
• Beijing Institute of Technology

Description:

The PANTHEON Pathways to(wards) carbon neutrality for climate, environment, health and socio-economic co-benefits research project aims to build a model of scenarios and development pathways leading to net carbon neutrality in China and the European Union.The results will be used to inform public policy in areas such as the environment, health, society or the economy.

The PANTHEON project places particular emphasis on

1. Modelling pathways to carbon neutrality: PANTHEON will develop a sophisticated model that takes into account current technologies, policies and societal challenges. Together with key stakeholders, the project will explore concrete options for a transition to climate neutrality.
2. Mutual learning and collaboration between EU and PRC SSH and STEM scientists. The PANTHEON project will enable consortium partners and identified stakeholders to learn together and explore the best solutions to decarbonise the economy. In this way, PANTHEON integrates natural sciences, social and human sciences and stakeholders to develop joint recommendations for decarbonisation policies at different levels and within global supply chains.

The PANTHEON project aims to contribute to the bi-regional climate goals through an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to modelling pathways towards climate neutrality.

The Jagiellonian University team is responsible for stimulating and monitoring the reflexivity of the modelling process, including the involvement of stakeholders (social and scientific researchers, trade unions, industry, NGOs and activists). The JU team also coordinates the work of the project's Advisory Board and is responsible for critiquing the process and assumptions of the model.

More information on the project: website (coming soon)

Projekt finansowany ze środków Ministerstwa Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego w ramach programu Premia na Horyzoncie 2

• Kierowniczka projektu: dr hab. Paulina Polak, prof. UJ
• Czas trwania projektu: 2021 - 2025

Projekt finansowany ze środków programu Erasmus+

• Kierowniczka projektu: dr Justyna Struzik
• Czas trwania projektu: 2022 - 2025

Opis:

The PrEcIOUS project aims to promote an unbiased Higher Education (HE) community, characterized by a culture capable of counteracting invisible homophobia or transphobia and promoting a culture of differences; to produce a cultural change, not working only with the specific group, but acting on the structural reasons that caused this discomfort, overcoming the concept of «their inclusion» with «plurality»; to empower students and, more in general, the entire university community in order to become unbiased citizens.

The general objective of the project is to promote an unbiased HE community characterized by a culture capable of counteracting prejudices and phenomena such as homophobia or transphobia and promoting a culture of differences. The project addresses HEIs as a system that is not particularly well equipped in providing students with solid responsible and active citizenship competences and those tools that help them become unbiased citizens. The project’s aim is to produce a strong cultural change, not working only with the specific group or office, but acting on structural reason and perspectives of meaning, empowering students not to be influenced bygender and sexual stereotypes and prejudices.

Specific Objectives:

• To create awareness at HEIs community level about the concept of invisible homophobia, which is internalized and concerns oneself.
• To define an unbiased community of citizens for sustainable societies, who are self-aware of stereotypes and prejudices concerning LGBTQIA+ people.
• To address the reinforcement of competences of HEIs’ students as necessary transformative means towards the building of a more inclusive HE environment.
• To provide HEIs staff, including academics and managerial and administrative ones, with practical guidelines oriented at intervention proposals on how to make their HEIs more accessible and inclusive considering issues related to sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression and promoting the culture of differences.

The Project’s Results:

• A Report on the invisible homophobia and its impact on HEIs communities’ life. It contains desk research, lexicon glossary, empirical qualitative research.
• A Framework on transversal skills for the unbiased community of sustainable citizens, organized in 5 competencies areas (Literacy, Stereotypes and Prejudice, Intersectionality, Societies, and Communication).
• An Implicit bias test that measures prejudices and personal bias, according to three different levels (green/no homophobia, orange/low homophobia, red/high homophobia).
• A digital platform, as an international and virtual community of practice among HEIs, for the reinforcement of competencies of HEIs’ students as necessary transformative means towards the building of a more inclusive HE environment.
• A Training Package for an unbiased HE community, composed of online pills, COIL, in-presence training, and short-term (5 days) mobility for active training.
• HEIs’ Guidelines – Vademecum on how to build HEI communities based on the concept of “plurality”.
• HEIs’ Action Plans for proyect’s sustainability.
• Memorandum of Understanding signed by rectors: for the proyect’s sustainability: European unbiased HEI communities.

Więcej informacji o projekcie: https://preciousproject.eu/

Projekt uzyskał finansowanie Narodowego Centrum Nauki (PRELUDIUM)

• Kierownik projektu: mgr Radosław Nawojski
• Czas trwania projektu: 2021 - 2025

Opis:

Trwające już pół dekady Ogólnopolskie Strajki Kobiet i Czarne Protesty wniosły świeży powiew do sztuki uprawiania ulicznego protestu i sposobów przeżywania obywatelstwa. Odbywające się w ich ramach wydarzenia jak zablokowanie miasta muzyczno-taneczną manifestacją, wystawianie spektaklu z okien czy stworzenie lasu transparentów, to niespotykane wcześniej w Polsce formy masowego oporu. Niosą one za sobą możliwość intensyfikacji oraz pluralizacji krajobrazu współczesnego sprzeciwu. Połowa dekady bezprecedensowych i masowych protestów wokół praw reprodukcyjnych wyraźnie pokazują, że obywatelstwo nie jest neutralnym statusem, ani abstrakcyjnym pojęciem. W trakcie Strajków Kobiet i Czarnych Protestów stawiane są wyraźne żądania polityczne odnoszące się do praw obywatelskich i człowieka. Zastane prawa stanowią przestrzeń negocjacji a nawet wypowiadania posłuszeństwa, jak miało to miejsce w trakcie wydarzeń w 2020 roku, gdy demonstracje odbywały się w czasie pandemicznych obostrzeń.

Wydarzenia w ramach Czarnych Protestów i Strajków Kobiet stają się soczewką, która skupia w sobie codzienne problemy i wyzwania życia w określonej wspólnocie politycznej. Jednocześnie dają one impuls do tworzenia nowych podmiotowości indywidualnych i zbiorowych. Powstające w ich ramach przestrzenie oporu i podejmowane akty politycznego wpływu redefiniują klasyczne znaczenia przypisywane obywatelstwu, dostarczają nowego słownictwa oraz kategorii dla definicji „ja-obywatelka”. Nadawane mu znaczenia daleko wykraczają poza relację między jednostką a państwem, pojawiają się odwołania do międzynarodowych czy ponad narodowych instytucji. Obywatelstwo jest konstytuowane w tych walkach, a wraz z nim poszerzana jest obywatelska wyobraźnia, coś co jeszcze nie tak niedawno zdawało się niemożliwe, staje się nagle realne w wielotysięcznym proteście.

Celem tego empirycznie ugruntowanego badania jest eksploracja oraz opis procesów doświadczania i (re)definiowania obywatelstwa w kontekście masowych mobilizacji w ramach trwających od 2016 roku w Polsce Strajków Kobiet i Czarnych Protestów. Ten aktywny od pół dekady ruch społeczny wobec ograniczania prawa do aborcji jest kluczowym zjawiskiem mobilizacji obywatelskich w Polsce, jak również przez wykorzystywany repertuar działań w szerszej skali globalnych ruchów feministycznych.

Zaplanowany proces badawczy prowadzący do realizacji celu projekt, ma charakter nowatorski, zarówno biorąc pod uwagę sposoby gromadzenia materiałów empirycznych o działaniach zbiorowych, jak i włączenie badanych osób do współtworzenia przestrzeni prezentującej różne narracje „świadka” o niedawnych wydarzeniach. Odbędzie się to poprzez gromadzenie i analizowanie publicznie dostępnych materiałów z wydarzeń demonstracyjnych odbywających się w wielu miejscowościach oraz regionach Polski, wywiady narracyjne z osobami uczestniczącymi w protestach z silną reprezentacją osób pochodzących z mniejszych miejscowości lub tych pozostających poza medialnym centrum oraz socjologiczną analizą zebranych materiałów. W rezultacie zostanie opisana najnowsza historia mobilizacji społecznej na rzecz praw kobiet, które w jednym miejscu zgromadzi liczne wystąpienia demonstracyjne, wygłaszane na nich przemówienia, skandowane hasła oraz zdjęcia i materiały wideo. Z kolei analiza zebranych materiałów przyczyni się do głębszego poznania i opisu współczesnych doświadczeń obywatelstwa oraz zidentyfikowania głównych barier wpływających na poczucie przynależności do wspólnoty politycznej i zaangażowania obywatelskiego, jak i charakterystyki aktów podejmowanych celem wywarcia wpływu na otaczającą rzeczywistość.