Widening and diversifying citizen engagement in science

The general goal of this project is twofold: to create new knowledge about how to transform potential citizen participation in science into actual engagement in scientific research and to unveil new ways to engage societal actors, including young citizens and groups that have traditionally been excluded from science.

This will be done in the framework of two Sustainable Development Goals – Quality Education and Gender Equality – and with a mixed method approach, by using digital technology (social media analytics), a survey and an intervention study, including communicative focus groups. By exploring the transformation of potential engagement into actual engagement through fostering awareness of the social impact of research, this project will contribute to the understanding of how societal actors react to and interact with scientific developments.

The aim is to improve the cooperation between science and society, with diverse citizens and societal actors involved in it. The potential pairing between scientific excellence and social awareness of the social impact of research will also be addressed.

This Horizon2020 project has a duration of 30 months from October 2020 and involves seven partners from seven different countries.

Part of EPA´s contribution to this project involves coordinating:

• the publication of the Policy Brief, which will include the project’s main findings relevant for policy-making. It will focus on providing an understandable message and recommendations to different stakeholders and will include Knowledge on how citizens benefit from science and on successful awareness-raising initiatives, successful action increasing citizen participation and successful action fostering the recruitment of new talent for sciences, and Findings on the replicability of the identified successful actions and policy-informing,
• a series of “Video Capsules”, to be shared on social media, in which participants will explain how they interact with and participate in science,
• Open Science events in order to communicate the project’s outcomes and themes: gender, education and RRI. 

More information can be found on the project website.