Report of workshops and analysis of IDR/AHSS integration learning cases

The SHAPE-ID project was scheduled to organise six learning case workshops across Europe between December 2019 and May 2020 to enable stakeholders to explore best practices in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research (IDR/TDR) with an emphasis on research involving the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS).

The first three of these workshops – held in Dublin in December 2019, Edinburgh in January 2020 and Turin in February 2020 – took place as planned. The remaining three – intended to take place in Bilbao in March, in Warsaw in April and in Zurich in May 2020 – were postponed due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Due to the ongoing and uncertain situation with COVID-19, the SHAPE-ID consortium considered the organisation of in-person meetings no longer feasible and decided to reorganise the workshops in a remote setting. This choice, besides ensuring the protection of all participants’ health while reducing further delays to the project, has presented the opportunity to experiment with interdisciplinary/ transdisciplinary learning activities in a virtual environment.

Indeed, despite the adversity, there is an opportunity to be seized in organising online events. Exploring the potential of online techniques for working and developing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations is a necessary step considering that personal mobility and gatherings will not resume at previous levels of frequency and intensity soon. In particular, the role of the Arts and Humanities in this scenario is essential because the technology-driven process of moving meetings online will challenge most of the tacit and emotional aspects of human interaction, such as informal and private communication, the emotional effects of collaboration, and all those non-visible elements of social exchange that need to be considered and influence the outcome of collaborative research. We therefore had the opportunity to learn how to design, prepare and conduct online workshops – taking advantage of the necessary delay to research suitable methodologies and redesign already well-planned in-person workshops – and evaluate their efficacy compared to the traditional face-to-face workshops.

This document reports on the workshops, organising the findings into a coherent framework in order to feed into a second report,  D3.3 – Recommendations and measures to maximise IDR impact on society. The current report is structured as follows:

Section 1: Integration of challenge-oriented learning journeys

Section 2: Overview of the six workshops’ outcomes (Dublin, Edinburgh, Turin, Zurich, Warsaw, Bilbao)

Section 3: Detailed reports for each of the six workshops

Section 4: Conclusions on IDR learning cases tackling societal challenges and missions

In addition, Appendix 1 includes the full set of six workshops evaluation reports and Appendix 2 the full list of participants at all learning workshops.