The ISSC is a partner in a transnational project – SSH-Futures – which is supported by the European Union’s Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP6).

The SSH-FUTURES project studies the opportunities for complementary development of the social sciences and humanities in Europe and their mutual interactions with societal demands. It will critically examine the potential value of including such an approach within research policies in Europe. In order to get a better understanding of the potential of these fields of enquiry, the project looks at the ways in which the social sciences and the humanities can and do have impact on economies, societies and their political institutions, ways which we expect to differ clearly from those of the natural and technical sciences. The project also examines the institutions of knowledge production, what methods are applied to produce knowledge and to disseminate this knowledge and what expectations there are from both the side of its ‘producers’ and from that of its (potential) ‘users’ at the national, European and international levels.

SSH-FUTURES is implemented by an international consortium which includes research institutes and universities in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ EU member states and associated countries. The project is coordinated by Dr Ronald Pohoryles, Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences (ICCR), Vienna, Austria. Other project partners include:

• Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche Comparative en Sciences Sociales (Interdisciplinary Centre for Comparative Research in the Social Sciences), France
• Economic and Social Institute, Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Fundacja Europejskiej Wspolpracy Naukowej (The Foundation for European Scientific Cooperation), Poland
• Interdisciplinary Center for Technological Analysis and Forecasting, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
• International Social Science Council, France
• James Martin Institute, University of Oxford, UK
• United Nations University - Comparative Regional Integration Studies, Belgium
• University of Gothenburg, Sweden
• Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung an der Universität zu Köln (Central Archive for Empirical Social Research), Cologne, Germany
• Zeppelin University GmbH, Germany

Work on the SSH-Futures project commenced in May 2006 and will be completed in April 2009.

On April 22, ISSC hosted a gathering of international social science experts to consider and discuss initial research findings from the SSH-Futures project. Find more information on this event here.

For further information about the SSH-Futures project, please contact the Project Assistant, Evgenia Shilnikova. You can also visit the project website at : http://www.iccr-international.org/ssh-futures/index.html

In August 2007 the ISSC responded to the European Commission’s Green Paper on the European Research Area (ERA). The purpose of the Green Paper was to stimulate debate and launch a process of consultation on the future development of the ERA.

The Green Paper can be downloaded from
http://ec.europa.eu/research/era/consultation-era_en.html

The ISSC’s response to the Green Paper can be downloaded here:

[pdf file, 220 Kb]