SHAPE-ID’s first webinar on 14th May 2020 addressed the importance of ensuring perspectives from the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences are part of the response to the COVID-19 crisis, with an international panel of speakers from the University of Aalborg (Denmark), the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities (EASSH) and NUI Galway (Ireland). While immediate responses have understandably tended to focus on funding research that can fight the virus, our world and ways of living have changed suddenly and radically, and there is a widespread sense that we cannot return to the old “normal”. Why do the Arts, Humanities…

SHAPE-ID Research Fellow Dr Bianca Vienni Baptista (ETH Zurich) was invited to share insights from the systematic literature review conducted in Work Package 2 on the new Bristol University Press blog "Transforming Society". The piece, "What factors help or hinder interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research?", explores the extent to which collaborative research practices present new contexts and challenges for research and how we can learn from the factors, identified in SHAPE-ID's work, that can help or hinder the development of such research. Importantly, our research finds that these factors for the most part can either help or hinder, depending on context,…

Sadly our next three workshops have had to be postponed due to the ongoing coronavirus crisis. We were very much looking forward to our workshops on Trustworthy Artificial intelligence with the University of Deusto in Bilbao in March, on Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage in Warsaw in April and on the broader challenges of AHSS integration in Zurich in May. We send our best wishes to all our participants and colleagues around Europe and hope to see you all when we are able to reschedule. Over the next few months we will be sharing more insights from the first three…

SHAPE-ID partners, Bianca Vienni, Jack Spaapen and Catherine Lyall, together with Expert Panel member Julie Klein, recently represented the project at the international Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (AIS) conference in Amsterdam.  Hosted by the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies (24-26 October), the sold-out event attracted 30 different nationalities from five continents to exchange knowledge about interdisciplinarity in global contexts.  This 41st annual meeting of the Association provided an invaluable vehicle for networking with world-leading scholars of interdisciplinary research and teaching and for disseminating information about emerging findings and future plans for the SHAPE-ID project.  Dr Vienni convened a…

SHAPE-ID Coordinator Professor Jane Ohlmeyer presented at the EU Research & Innovation Days Session 'Me and My Society - Integrating the Social Sciences and Humanities' on 24th September. The session focused on the future of the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in science and research policy and was organised as a co-design exercise with audience members following short presentations by the three panel members. Jane spoke about the importance and under-representation of the Arts and Humanities in interdisciplinary research, drawing on some early findings from SHAPE-ID and proposing that 'AHSS' replace 'SSH' to put the Arts and Humanities at the…