Celebrating three years of CoAct: Ending Cycles

Celebrating three years of CoAct: Ending Cycles

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
During the last 36 months, the Global Innovation Gathering helped CoAct project deliver Citizen Social Science concepts and practices to more than 1,6 million people, using a wide range of communication strategies and tools, combined with intense resilience and creativity during the COVID-19 pandemic.  CoAct (Co-designing Citizen Social Science for Collective Action) proposes a radically new approach to facing global social issues by engaging vulnerable citizens as co-researchers. The strategy represents a new account of Citizen Social Science, understood here as participatory research co-designed and directly driven by citizen groups sharing a social concern. CoAct's research approach, where citizen groups and their problems are at the core of the research questions, requires translating those attributes for its communicative and dissemination activities. Furthermore, CoAct's shared values - Inclusiveness, Horizontality, Equity, Trust and Respect, Open Science, Co-ownership, Empowerment, and Reflexivity - underlined the direction and structure of CoAct's communication, dissemination and exploitation Work Package, led by the Global Innovation Gathering inside a consortium partnership. The first year...
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ECSA 2022 Conference: Citizen Science for Planetary Health

ECSA 2022 Conference: Citizen Science for Planetary Health

Photo by Florian Wehde on Unsplash Why “Citizen Science for Planetary Health”? Because the health of our planet is at risk. To preserve and support the well-being of all life on Earth, we need the commitment and efforts of everyone – policy makers, the public, business, science and research. Citizen science offers effective and innovative ways to do transdisciplinary research and influence decision-making in multiple areas and ways. Citizen science is particularly suited to connect diverse fields and diverse actors in the common endeavour of collaborating in research.The concept of planetary health is based on the understanding that human health and human civilization depend on thriving natural systems and the sustainable stewardship of those natural systems. This demands not only knowledge, commitment and engagement of health and environmental sciences, but inter- and transdisciplinary efforts from all research fields and societal and political actors. The ECSA 2022 Conference invites researchers from all disciplines, civil society actors, citizen scientists, policy decision-makers and all interested in the topic in...
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What is CoAct?

What is CoAct?

By Mugethi GitauNo Comments
https://youtu.be/kPuSDkEjEo8 Co-designing Citizen Social Science for Collective ActionCoAct is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. CoAct is proposing a new understanding of Citizen Social Science as participatory research co-designed and directly driven by citizen groups sharing a social concern, in which they become co-researchers in processes commonly dominated by academic researchers. CoAct aims to bring together and further develop methods to give citizen groups an equal ‘seat at the table’ through active participation in research, from the design to the interpretation of the results and their transformation into concrete actions. We call this Citizen Social Science!Citizen Social Science combines equal collaboration between citizen groups (co-researchers) that are sharing a social concern and academic researchers. Such an approach enables to address pressing social issues from the bottom up, embedded in their social contexts, with robust research methods. We aim to co-create socially robust knowledge. How will we do Citizen Social Science?The research groups will develop locally embedded...
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