GenderSAFE advances efforts to implement a zero-tolerance approach to gender-based violence in higher education and research in the European Research Area. Its overall objective is to contribute to building safe, inclusive, and respectful research and higher education. This will be realised through building capacities, mutual learning and exchange, setting up instruments to monitor the uptake and content of Research Performing Organisation (RPO) policies and promoting uptake of policies at the level of the national authorities and Research Funding Organisations (RFOs). This overall objective will be achieved through a five-fold strategy comprising: • Increasing robustness of zero-tolerance policies by building a common policy discourse in the EU reflecting state-of-the-art theoretical debates, including attention to power and intersectionality, mobility and precarity, • Facilitating the uptake and ownership of a zero-tolerance approach to gender-based violence policies through mutual learning, exchange, and co-design in a Community of Practice, involving multiple circles of various types of stakeholders, • Building institutional capacities to set up and implement gender-based violence policies through training of responsible staff and officers, • Creating a knowledge base on the uptake and contents of zero-tolerance policies at RPOs in the EU through a data collection and monitoring system, • Raising awareness and creating uptake through carefully designed communication, dissemination, and advocacy activities.

"The relationship between technology and society changes; it is becoming a widely recognized view that future technology policies including energy policies have to be not only technically, but also socially acceptable. While it is uncertain what this shift means for the transformation of political decision-making about energy, the implications for the scientific ethos are obvious. It seems to be no longer tenable to view the research as accomplished in the seclusion of laboratories and detached from the impact of energy technologies on social systems. If science is to assist political reason convincingly, then competences have to be built, which allow conceiving the technical and the social as two interlinked phenomena.The main goal of TEACHENER project was to foster transdisciplinary education and build a bridge between Social Sciences and Humanities on the one hand and teaching about energy at technical higher education institutions on the other. To accomplish this goal, project partners 1) mapped the demand for SSH approaches at technical higher education institutions (HEIs) in project countries, 2) designed the TEACHENER EDUKIT as a complex and flexible set of Teaching Modules covering various topics associated with social aspects of energy, 3) tested Teaching Modules at partner technical HEIs and during two Student Winter Schools.The TEACHENER EDUKIT, being a main result of the project, is a complex set of ready-to-use, innovative Teaching Modules covering various topics associated with social aspects of energy for educating Master and PhD students at technical higher education institutions. Innovative educational practices, constituting the EDUKIT, provide the graduates of technical energy studies with interdisciplinary skills, knowledge and competencies in social sciences and humanities, enabling them to better respond to the needs of the labour market related to the shift to knowledge society and a fair energy transition with new or adapted job profiles. The EDUKIT and accompanying e-book ""Integrating Social Sciences and Humanities into Teaching about Energy: the TEACHENER EDUKIT"" encompass the project results. The EDUKIT has been incorporated into teaching curricula at technical institutions participating in the project, either as standalone courses for MSc/PhD students or as parts of existing courses offered at the technical university.The partnership behind the project consisted of 'socio-technical teams'. Each such a team consisted of researchers from one SSH institution and one technical HEI partner:- In Poland it was Nicolaus Copernicus University (NCU) and Gdańsk University of Technology (GUT), - in Spain MERIENCE and Catalan University of Technology (UPC), - in Czech Republic the Institute of Sociology of Czech Academy of Sciences (ISAS) and Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU), - in Germany the team consisted of researchers from the department of Urban and Enviromental sociology and Monitoring and Exploration Technologies from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research.The TEACHENER consortium encourages technical university teachers to use TEACHENER EDUKIT, an integrated toolbox consisting of the following eight Teaching Modules, each devoted to a different topic:1.ENERGY AWARENESS2.PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS OF ENERGY DEVELOPMENT3.ENERGY AND THE PUBLIC4.SOCIAL IMPACT OF ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES5.TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT6.SMART METERING. SOCIAL RISK PERCEPTION AND RISK GOVERNANCE7.CONFLICT MANAGEMENT8.DECENTRALIZED ENERGY SYSTEMSOn the dedicated web-platform available under www.teachener.umk.pl, one can download the ready-made Teaching Modules and adapt them to the own requirement of teaching at a technical university"

The CASPER project, in response to the SwafS-11-2019 call, aims at examining the feasibility of establishing a European award or certification system for gender equality in research organisations. On the basis of an in-depth assessment of existing relevant systems, the project proposes to devise and validate four scenarios, including a no-action scenario, in co-creation with national and international stakeholders. Each scenario will be examined via a walk-through methodology to understand their respective strengths/weaknesses, costs/benefits, other positive/negative impacts or their contextual relevance, and subsequently validated with stakeholders. The project will focus predominantly on gender-related inequalities in research and innovation, and will incorporate an intersectional perspective where possible. It will take place over a 2-year period, and consider not only the EU and its Member States but also relevant countries for gender equality certification/award systems such as NO, IS, CH, US or AU.

Is there a crisis in the legitimacy of the European Union? That research question is timely and important. Investigating it is also an ideal way of training research leaders of tomorrow to rethink our assumptions about the study of legitimate political order. Whilst, however, the financial crisis has raised new questions about the legitimacy of the EU, existing theories of legitimacy crises are largely based on single-state political systems. New theory is, therefore, needed to understand what would count as legitimacy crises in the case of a non-state political system such as the EU. PLATO’s (The Post-Crisis Legitimacy of the EU) ESRs will work together as a team to build new theory from 15 investigations into different standards and actors with whom the EU may need to be legitimate. ESRs will go well beyond the state-of-the-art by building a theory of legitimacy crisis in the EU from a uniquely interdisciplinary understanding of how democracy, power, law, economies and societies all fit together with institutions within and beyond the state to affect the legitimacy of contemporary political order. By developing the analytical tools needed to understand a core predicament in which the EU may both need to develop legitimate forms of political power beyond the state and find those forms of power hard to achieve, PLATO will train ESRs with the conceptual clarity needed to define new research questions at the very frontiers of their disciplines and the methodological skills needed to research those questions. They will also be prepared for careers in the non-academic sector (policy-advice, consulting, civil society, European institutions and expert bodies). PLATO’s ambitious cross-university, cross-country and cross-sectoral programme of research training, supervision and secondments will pool resources from a unique network of 9 research-intensive universities and 11 non-academic partners who are themselves key users of state-of-the-art social science research.