ESSHRA
Project Summary

The overall objective of ESSHRA is to enhance research collaboration between the SSH research communities in the context of both an enlarging EU and an enlarged ERA. The specific objective of the project is to enlarge the SSH research agenda of the EU with research priorities of an enlarged and enlarging European research community, exploit experiences in transnational research for future research collaborations and design supportive research policies for future transnational research.

The partner countries involved in this project mirror the different possible status of involvements of its research communities: Turkey and Bulgaria with the status of Associate Candidate Countries, Switzerland with the status of an Associate Country and Malta with the status of a New Member State. The approach of this project to integrate new national research communities into transnational research and into the enlarging ERA could be considered as a model for integrating other research communities in the future.

In order to create sustainable future research collaborations ESSHRA will complement networking activities by raising substantial data on future research priorities in partner countries, on transnational research perspectives and on policy support actions towards the future of an enlarging ERA.

The project will invite experts to enhance future transnational research in a bottom up approach towards joint actions in this project. SSH scholars and researchers from project partner countries, previous FP project coordinators, transnational researchers, policy makers and research policy experts from the EU and from partner countries will be involved in the different types of activities of the project.

The objectives of this project will be implemented via multi-purpose conferences and other meetings involving researchers and research policy experts. ESSHRA will finally result in stimulating research policy experts from partner countries and the EU to develop policy recommendations scaffolding future transnational research in an enlarging ERA and to help to carry out the forthcoming FP7.

The objective of the project is to enhance research collaboration between the SSH research communities in the context of an enlarged EU and in the context of a widening ERA. To widen the SSH research agenda of the EU the project helps to take into account research priorities of an enlarged European research community for future agenda setting of the ERA and to benefit from the already made transnational research experiences. The project will identify future research topics and research priorities in Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) to contribute to the development of transnational research policies for enlarging the European research agenda in SSH. To achieve these aims the project will employ the dissemination of previous research results as a mode for initiating dialogues among transnational and national research communities on the research needs and priorities for identifying future research topics in SSH and for scaffolding transnational research policies. The project will include activities targeted at (1) dissemination of the results of previous Framework Programme (FP) projects on topics of high priority for the project partner countries, (2) identifying future research topics in SSH, and (3) development of policies for transnational research. The project outcomes generated via the project are produced to be used in designing the forthcoming FP7 and in enlarging the SSH research agenda. They provide contributions to design the wider ERA in a bottom up approach carrying out discourses among SSH scholars and researchers from project partner countries, previous FP project coordinators, transnational researchers, policy makers and research policy experts.

Dissemination of research results of previous Framework Programme projects and local research findings is targeted as a mode of stimulating a scientific debate on the policy implications of research findings, future possible research topics, and policies for transnational research. The project aims to create a supporting environment for the identification of policy relevant research topics of high priority at the local level in multi-national contexts. Based on these research topics, a series of dissemination events for transnational EU research projects and national research findings on the same research topics will be organised as a vehicle for identifying research deficiencies and preparing a road-map for future research needs and potential collaborations among national and EU researchers. The project will bring researchers from the EU and partner countries to discuss on future research topics that shall be included in the SSH research agenda, on the problems encountered in transnational research and policy recommendations to facilitate transnational research practices. Additionally, a parallel case-study will be conducted for further and in dept assessment of the transnational research practices in Turkey. The case-study will employ the methods and tools created by the FP5 EU-Dimension project, which aimed at the analysis of European transnational socio-economic research carried out via FPs. The case-study will include comparison of the perspectives for transnational research between the EU and Turkey in terms of transnational research topics and involved disciplines, research approaches, applied research types, and Lingua Franca communications. Data raised via the case-study will be used as a basis by transnational researchers and research policy experts for developing policy recommendations for future transnational research and research collaborations. As a result, the project aims to contribute to the identification of convergence and divergence between current SSH research conducted at EU level through the Framework Programs and the research findings and needs of the partner countries on the particular research topics of interest. The project will enable to portray binary-relations between research in EU and partner countries. Furthermore, the project will create comparative knowledge of SSH in different countries that can be used as a basis for specifying gaps of current research and support the European SSH community by identifying future research topics that can be included within the agenda of SSH research in FP7 and scaffolding future transnational research collaborations.