The objective of ISEED is to identify, through an analysis of a variety of types of, and experiments in, public engagement on science-related questions and activities, generalizable characteristics and conditions that cultivate active and productive citizen participation in public deliberation. The aim is to construct a novel concept of ‘deliberative participation’ designed to enhance both the quality and the legitimacy of political decision-making, by focusing on the importance of knowledge-based deliberation. ISEED will build on and extend existing experience in the field of citizen science to explore the conditions under which participative and deliberative practices can be successfully implemented for the purpose of building forms of knowledge-based democratic governance complementary to political representation in democratic societies. ISEED combines theoretical analysis, empirical research, and small-scale experiments. It will reassess the role of the public sphere to include a novel notion of deliberative participation in a plurality of publics and counter publics. It will empirically explore how current practices of citizen participation in science can offer innovative methods to confront and overcome a number of current obstacles faced by democratic participation and decision making. It will develop a new tool to describe styles of argumentation in traditional and digital media and analyze the role of emotion and reason in polarised debates on contemporary scientific issues. The ISEED consortium, committed to multi and inter-disciplinary research, aims to deliver scalable results to foster deliberative democratic processes in Europe and other knowledge societies.

The aim of RecoLATIN project is to favour and to increase the quality of vertical and horizontal student mobility within Latin America and European higher education systems. Partners intend to improve competencies and skills of credential evaluators by defining common practices and realising common tools among European and Latin America national bodies and HE institutions, starting from the experience of European HE institutions in relation with the Bologna Process and practices adopted by NARIC centres. Recognition procedures and practices are not only related to technical issues, but are influenced by the structure of each HE system and their cultural approach. The theme of recognition takes into account all the aspects of a HE system (i.e. QA; accreditation/recognition of institutions and programmes; access to courses; etc.): in order to evaluate a foreign qualification we need to know different elements and to consider the purpose of this evaluation procedure (i.e. academic or professional recognition). The activities of the project are placed both at national (official bodies) and institutional level (HEIs). The Latin America countries signed the UNESCO Recognition Convention in 1974 and their recognition practices are based on previous concepts not influenced by the Lisbon Recognition Convention criteria. For that reason we intend to create operational national recognition centres and to provide training activities on recognition practices for their staff. We will draft National Reports of each partner country involved in the project in order to present their HE systems in the view of recognition purposes. We will focus our attention on controversial recognition cases and sectors as TNE and international institutions, distant learning qualifications and non-traditional degrees. Each result of the project will be disseminated through two final seminars organised in the two respective areas as an impulse for both other countries and their HE institutions.