ERC Advanced Grant for marine environmental history

My new project on the Fish Revolution

Talking about Oceans Past

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzJ0HFScjwM

Sound bites on the Challenges of the Humanities in the 21st Century. ICS, Uni...

Humanities World Report 2015

The first of its kind, this 'Report' gives an overview of the humanities worldwide. Published as an Open Access title, and based on an extensive literature review and enlightening interviews conducted with 90 humanities scholars across 40 countries, the book offers a first step in attempting to assess the state of the humanities globally.  Download here!

Letter 7 March 2014 from SSH community to EU Commissioner for Research and Innovation

Brussels, March, 7th

Dear Commissioner,

The European Association of Sociology (EAS), the European Confederation of

Political Science Associations (ECPSA), the European Educational Research

Association (EERA), the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and

the European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres (ECHIC) have

welcomed your intention to improve the position of the Social Sciences and

Humanities (SSH), as you have stated on several occasions since the British

Academy meeting in November 2011.

Considering your clearly expressed political intent to support SSH, in line with the

European Parliament and the Member States, we wish to express our strong concern

about the implementation of H2020:

- The first available 2014-2015 work programs indicate that the share of SSH

research in SC6 has diminished dramatically. Extrapolated to the whole Horizon

2020 period, the core SSH program in SC6 will be funded up to the amount of

300 Million Euros. This is less than half of the FP7 budget for SSH (625 Million

Euros) and far removed from what has been claimed on many occasions prior to

this. It is now also evident that the main share of the SSH Challenge has been

allocated to other priorities: a third of the budget of SC6 has been given to DG

CNECT, which already gets more than 7 billion Euros under Priority 2 and from

other budgets elsewhere in various Societal Challenges, and a further third of

the budget is allocated to “innovation research”. Such budgetary decisions are in

complete contradiction to the proposals for the Specific Programme of H2020,

which allows for large research activity for SSH in SC6 in support of several key

policy areas developed in particular by DG EMPL, EAC, ECFIN, HOME, JUST,

DEVCO, BEPA, ENV and EEAS.

- According to the call for proposals, the « mainstreaming policy » of SSH in other

challenges, which was presented as an important complement to the specific

challenge, rarely pertains directly to research in SSH. Instead the calls have a

narrow utilitarian approach to SSH and fail to mobilise the breadth of relevant

SSH research for societal challenges. The selection of experts similarly fails to

draw the breath of relevant SSH expertise.

We hope that we are mistaken. We therefore ask for a meeting with you urgently in

order to get some clarification from you regarding the situation detailed above and

so that SSH core research in SC6 can be granted the key position that was agreed

upon by the European Parliament and the Council.

Yours sincerely,

Carmen Leccardi 

President of ESA 

Pablo Oñate

President of ECPSA

Lejf Moos 

President of EERA 

Noel B. Salazar 

President of EASA

Poul Holm

President of ECHIC

Answer to: carmen.leccardi@unimib.it , pablo.onate@uc3m.es , moos@dpu.dk ,

noel.salazar@soc.kuleuven.be ; holmp@tcd.ie

This letter was Cc’ed to:

- Members of Parliament

- Members of the Programme Committee for Challenge 6 (H2020)

- Media in member states: La Repubblica, El Pais, Libération, Der Spiegel, The

Times

Poul Holm: Oceans Past and Future. Talk at the Sydney Environment Institute, Australia, 1 Nov 2014

Full text of letter sent to the EU Commissioner for Research and Innovation

 6 November 2013 

“Towards Europe 2020: integrating the Social Sciences and Humanities” 

Letter from the 

European Alliance for the Social Sciences and Humanities 

Dear Commissioner Geoghegan-Quinn, 

We were delighted to participate in the recent EU Presidency conference «Horizons for Social Sciences and Humanities» in Vilnius and we enthusiastically support the Vilnius Declaration. We were much encouraged by your strong words of support for mainstreaming Social Science and Humanities (SSH) research in Horizon 2020, and we took note of your pledge to see words turned into action. 

We understand that things will take time and we want to offer our co-operation in mobilizing the interest and commitment of SSH researchers for the research agenda of Horizon 2020. 

We are, however, deeply concerned by the low profile given to the SSH in the first draft of the work programme for the first 25% of H2020 (2014-2015). We urge the European Commission not to gamble away the willingness of the SSH community to contribute to research into all Societal Challenges. 

So far, we see that the Calls for research enssaged under the Social Challenge approach will have, despite all good intentions, an overriding focus on technology-based solutions, based on outdated linear innovation models and implemented in the traditional silo-like approach. 

In order to overcome this deplorable impasse, and building on recommendations made by delegates to the Vilnius conference, we submit the following suggestion: 

The Commission should consider support for synthesis centres, that will allow stakeholders and researchers from across all relevant areas to reflect on how Societal Challenge research can best integrate all necessary and innovative approaches, including a broader inclusion of SSH insights into the European agenda. 

We propose the environmental and educational fields as early candidate areas. 

As you know, European Social Science and Humanities research is very competitive in the global market place of knowledge and ideas. Europe as a whole would benefit from tapping more decisively into these rich resources. Conversely, if Horizon 2020 should fail to properly integrate the broad areas of competence of SSH research, substantial opportunity costs for the European Union are likely to occur.

We are particularly concerned that Social Challenge 6 (SC6), which is intended to have a particular focus on generating new insights and evidence through SSH research, risks being skewed heavily towards ICT-related applications research and on structural investments unrelated to any specific resaerch needs. 

It is important that future SC6 Calls are formulated in such a way that projects can draw on the best of relevant SSH research. This means being explicit about the allocation of funds for research, as opposed to funding currently foreseen for other activities. 

In this context, it would be beneficial if approvals of the Work Programmes were limited to just 1-year-periods each : the Commission and the communities can then monitor the implementation of the programme and the successful embedding of SSH. 

By the same token, we feel we need to reiterate the importance and urgent need for Advisory Groups to be appointed in an inclusive and transparent manner. 

The undersigned members of the EASSH Core Group, leaders from some of the premier research institutes in the fields of SSH, are looking forward to exchanges aimed at making Horizon 2020 a success. 

Best Regards, 

EASSH Core Group members and representatives 

Ms Angela Schindler-Daniels, Programme Coordinator NET4SOCIETY, Project Management Agency, German Aerospace Center, Bonn 

Lejf Moos, Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, and President, European Educational Research Association 

Milena Zic-Fuchs, Professor at University of Zagreb, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and Chair of the Science Review Group for the Humanities (ESF), ALLEA Working Group Social Sciences and Humanities 

Poul Holm, Professor at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and Chair “European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres” (ECHIC) 

Sean Ryder, Professor at NUI Galway, Ireland, and Chair, HERA Network Board (Humanities in the European Research Area) 

Thomas Risse, Professor of International Relations, Free University Berlin, and Chair Scientific Committee for the Social Sciences, Science Europe 

Wolfgang Mackiewicz, President, Conseil européen pour les langues / European Language Council (CEL/ELC) 

Contact: 

Dr Rüdiger Klein, Founding Chair, European Alliance for the Social Sciences & Humanities (EASSH), kleinrudiger@gmail.com. 

After Vilnius - Humanities in Horizon 2020

It's a long way yet for the humanities in the EU Horizon 2020 programme.  After the Lithuanian Presidency conference in September 2013 I was interviewed by Research Europe. The interview is here.

ECHIC and HUMED on Horizon 2020

European Consortium of Humanities Institutes and Centres (ECHIC)

And

Mediterranean Consortium of Humanities Institutes and Centres (HUMED)

Joint response to

Consultation on the state of the Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in Europe

Humanities institutes and centres play an important role as focus points and facilitators of research and innovative teaching, in particular with regard to emerging interdisciplinary fields. Numbers have grown rapidly in recent years, and ECHIC and HUMED were both founded in 2011. ECHIC has  40 members and 11 affiliate members in 20 countries. HUMED counts ten member institutions in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Together, we command an extensive global network of connections with centres across Asia and the Pacific region as well as in North and South America. 

We offer the following short joint response to the Consultation, noting that the consultation seems to be primarily directed at the individual level. We believe that research institutes and centres and indeed their associations are likely to play an increasing role in the European Research Area in the future and we look forward to future engagement.

European humanities is undergoing a radical transformation which provides huge potential benefits to society. The transformation is evident in methodologies (digital humanities) , resurgence of multi- and interdisciplinary approaches in environmental, medical, health, cognition and many other fields, application (use of historical data for public planning, narrative models for business, arts technology for media, bioethics, etc.). In addition, classical fields of humanities are ever more important as interpretative frameworks for cross-cultural understanding in a globalizing world. These changes affect the teaching curricula and the teaching methodologies in and beyond the humanities. The impact of this transformation is sub-optimal because supporting structures and scaling are problems: there is a lack of translational infrastructure (as we know it in translational medicine), and lack of appropriate incentives at the individual and collaborative levels.

European humanities commands global respect and attracts tens of thousands of overseas students and scholars to Europe. They return to their home countries trained in European thought and knowledgeable of European values, which include the practice of democratic criticism and free public debate. This soft power is of immense value to the European Union and to the practice of European citizenship and it must be cherished, researched and taught to our own best standards. It is particularly important to overcome methodological nationalism and increase understanding and bridging of regional cultural divides both within Europe and with neighbouring regions. In particular, humanities institutes and centres play a crucial role in reducing the divides between North and South, East and West, by bringing together scholars in dialogue and collaboration. Given the critical state of the Euro-Mediterranean partnership, HUMED is offering a unique network for reflections on diversity and coherence of cultural, intellectual and social traditions and perspectives in the region.

Despite notable progress, it must be recognized that large and important numbers of humanities researchers have not called on by FP7 work programmes. The failure to include humanities research incurs huge opportunity costs for the European Union.  The overarching challenge to Grand Challenge research is to build radically inter- and transdisciplinary research environments to deal with the complexity   of contemporary problems. It is urgent therefore to  mobilize all relevant knowledge bases, as knowledge growth is  much larger by adding another discipline than by adding more resources to a discipline which is already engaged. It is therefore of the utmost importance to call on the huge knowledge base of the humanities and to offer dynamic research perspectives to this community of scholars.

In order to make up for these lost opportunities, we recommend

·      A substantial increase of entry points for Humanities scholarship - in terms of funding, work programme design and language - under the Horizon 2020 6th challenge "Inclusive, innovative and reflective societies"

·      That the humanities as well as and in equal measure to the social sciences be mainstreamed across all research challenges 

·      That active humanities researchers be members of all panels that provide scientific advice on the design of work programmes

·      That work programmes for all grand challenges encourage the inclusion of humanistic research wherever relevant

·      That a criterion of funding be that proposals, when relevant, include an adequate and realistic budget for humanistic research

·      That review panels include active humanistic researchers

·      That a conference to review Horizon 2020 progress on SSH perspectives on the grand challenges be called every second year

·      That a specific call be made for infrastructural support of humanities consortia to overcome national and disciplinary fragmentation and to improve the translation of humanities research into education and policy.

Prof. Poul Holm, Trinity College Dublin (ECHIC)

Prof. Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University (ECHIC)

Prof. Javier Moscoso, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (HUMED)

Prof. Eduardo Manzano Moreno,  Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (HUMED)

The Slave's Tale

Watch video
PDF of slides available here

What happened to the men and women who were sold on the Dublin slave market in the early middle ages? Some were taken off to places as far away as Iceland, Scandinavia, Normandy and the Spanish Caliphate. A few of their voices have survived to be told.
Speaker: Poul Holm
Date: Tuesday, August 21st as part of a series of monthly lunchtime lectures during 2012 at the Wood Quay Venue by the Friends of Medieval Dublin and Dublin City Council.

The RITE model

Human motivation is key to global environmental change. Therefore, the social, human, natural and technical sciences must work together to overcome the Two Cultures syndrome. The complex problems which cut across disciplines require new epistemological frameworks and methodological practices that exceed any one discipline. 

Read the full paper in Environmental Science & Policy 2012: behind pay-wall at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2012.11.010 or access the free pre-publication paper: Collaboration between the Natural, Social and Human Sciences in Global Change Research. 

We propose a framework for funding excellence in interdisciplinary studies, named the Radically Inter- and Trans-disciplinary Environments (RITE) framework. RITE includes the need for a realignment of funding strategies to ensure that national and international research bodies and programmes road-map their respective strengths and identified areas for radical interdisciplinary research; then ensure that these areas can and are appropriately funded and staffed by talented individuals who want to apply their creative scientific talents to broader issues than their own field in the long term, rather than on limited scope (5 year and less) research projects. While our references are mostly to Europe, recommendations may be applicable elsewhere.

Listen to radio interview on Australian ABC Classic FM

Humanities findings

I gave this talk 27 April 2012 at the conference Restating the Value of the Humanities in Contemporary Contexts at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. 

In the next 15 minutes I shall argue that humanities research is vital to address the challenges of environmental and climate change; and that we need to develop a model for translational humanities.

I believe that the humanities produce findings like all other sciences. Findings come in many forms. It is a humanities finding that children's reading abilities are positively influenced by parents reading aloud to them. The finding is a result of researchers comparing parents' practices and school children’s linguistic abilities in several countries and combining statistical figures with theories of learning.

There is always an interpretation involved in a discovery, whether of a cultural marker or a cell membrane. The archaeologist identifies changes in soil layer as a Viking stronghold only when combining knowledge of building construction, dating and typologies with theories about past societies.

It is important to recognise that the humanities may produce findings because this enables us not only to criticise the world but to help create a better one.

Some colleagues argue that the role of the humanities is not to contribute to the construction of the world, but rather that our role is to be a critical voice against the established. They will leave it to natural and engineering sciences to describe and construct the world, and will instead take the position as critics: while the natural science's role is to lay brick upon brick of the scientific building, it is the humanistic role to demolish the building. The postmodern historian Ankersmit says squarely that the historian is not committed to the truth, but solely to narrative power.

It's a radical position, which I reject. We cannot renounce the reference to reality and truth without giving up our academic position. But I do recognize that post-modern thinkers have played a positive role by demolishing positivist innocence and naivety. Not only that, postmodernist thinking is paradoxically perhaps one of the most important discoveries of the humanities of the late twentieth century. It's a thinking that creates a whole new dialogue between classic humanistic study objects on one side and constructing sciences such as computer science and engineering on the other side. For computer and film industries postmodernist thinking has proven extremely useful. Just think of the games industry and architecture. The movie The Matrix in 1999 with its combination of Baudrillard's philosophy and animation technology marks a breakthrough, and the last ten years of rapid development of narrative style and experience universes would be unthinkable without post-modern thought and its influence on everyday thinking.

In the 21^st century our thinking is characterized by design rather than tradition, we are no longer so much preoccupied with how the world is, but with how we can create something entirely new and unbound. The linguistic turn was therefore one of the humanistic world's most important discoveries in the last generation. The problem is that the humanities in the postmodernist interpretation may turn entirely self-reflecting. When a researcher looks at surroundings, the researcher looks really only at his own reflection. Research may be a question only of how I choose to look at the world, how the world is reflected in me, or how can I look deeper into myself.

Instead of just being critical of this development of the humanities and harking back to the positivist epistemology, we must recognize that there is no turning back. We all acknowledged that we humans have no other tool than language to comprehend the reality that is around us. The only thing we have as researchers are sensations and perceptions, empirical data and models, whether we are researching nanoparticle or dance. In this way both science and the humanities have taken the linguistic turn.

So what about the humanities and environmental change? The future of the planet is determined by our actions, our behaviour as consumers and as citizens. All the individual choices we make sum up to a behavioural aggregate, which is bad for the planet and bad for ourselves. Global changes are known - we can measure and discuss differences of degrees of warming, weather patterns and water rise, but the big challenges are known. What we do not know is how we may change direction. How can research help us survive as a species? Enlightenment is not enough. It is extremely difficult for humans to change behaviour, even though we know the negative consequences of unchanged behaviour, just think of tobacco smoking, HIV, or CO2 load. 

The challenge is without a doubt the most complicated the human species has ever encountered in terms of human cognition. We have successfully adapted as a species to environmental change in the past when forces of nature were beyond our control. We have also successfully survived the threat of nuclear warfare when we invented the means of our own destruction. But will we be able to address the challenges of repetitive behaviour when all our incentive structures go against such change? Here is a vast agenda for the humanities as we are concerned with human motivation, ideas, thought processes and human action.

But have the humanities ever changed anything? Yes, I would maintain that the humanities have been central to articulating and determining long-term human behaviour certainly since Socrates. Consider this one example of the role of the humanities during the Cold War. The world of the 1950s and 1960s was dominated by a belief in social engineering both in democratic and communist systems. Look at this n-gram of the frequency of the concepts of ‘social planning’ versus ‘human development’. The Cold War period was convinced of the possibilities of social planning as a result of the cognitive breakthrough for the quantitative social sciences such as sociology and economics. Still, it was beyond comparison a humanities thought product that helped to define and defend the western world during this time, the philosopher Karl Popper's 1945 study of the Open Society and his uncompromising defence of democracy at a time when totalitarian thinking was in sharp focus. Popper's philosophy had a take-up the extent of which we can hardly fathom today because it so radically came to define Western thought and behaviour during the Cold War. In a sense it is still with us today, perhaps most clearly evidenced by the United Nations COP-17 on Climate Change in Durban, South Africa, last year. The clash between the liberal thinking of western countries and the perspective of the newly affluent BRIC countries was evidence that we need a new kind of thinking, which I would call Anthropocene Humanities, to overcome the differences and create a new consensus for living with environmental change.

Anthropocene Humanities must help us understand how and why we choose to act like we do. Research in environmental history is obviously relevant in this regard, but many other humanities disciplines can make important contributions. There is a need for research on narratives and language, a need to rethink philosophical and ethical questions about the commitment of living generations to future generations, there is a need for studies of climate representations, etc. My suggestion is not to make all humanities a servant of one particular agenda but rather to encourage humanities researchers to grasp the real need for a better understanding of the human in the age of the Anthropocene.

An agenda for Anthropocene Humanities must be to enhance and intensify work on how social and cultural directionality could be articulated, democratically anchored, and implemented in the search for new technologies, medical knowledge, economic paradigms, and forms of social organization. The agenda must also embrace the fact that traditions of Western thought are repeatedly confronted with their internal limits and intellectual tipping points while non-Western traditions remain embedded and constrained within national or cultural confines that do not offer universalistic responses to environmental action. It is a big agenda, the humanities are central to it, and we need to draw on all the diversity of the human experience to meet the challenge.

Humanities Centres and Institutes such as An Foras Feasa and the Trinity Long Room Hub may contribute uniquely and decisively. At the upcoming meeting of the world-wide Consortium of Humanities Institutes and Centres in Canberra, a group of us will propose an agenda to sponsor humanities think tanks to work on these questions. We shall also propose to develop a website to communicate case studies, images, artwork, and produce a text book for undergraduate teaching of environmental humanities, sponsor events to highten awareness of Anthropocene questions amongst our colleagues, etc.

The challenge for us on the one hand is to defend disciplinary diversity, so we avoid being one-dimensional in our concept of the human - biologists have been good at defending biodiversity, we must be better to speak on behalf of the diversity of human existence. On the other hand, we must become better at articulating our findings, and we must bring our findings into play. We must come up with answers on how we can bring heritage with us into the future, how our research may benefit social cohesion, how can we share knowledge with companies and institutions, and how it helps us live with the challenges of climate and globalization.

I would argue that it is time to develop an idea of ​​a translational humanities. Translational medicine is the term for the important transformation of health research that occurred around 2000 by an emphasis on shortening the turnover time and reduce transaction costs in the research value chain. There are delays and obstacles at every level from laboratory to hospital bed, from biomedicine and psychology to the patient. This is why translational medicine is about ensuring that basic research and knowledge at each specialized level is translated to the next, and about developing relationships from research labs to hospitals, GPs and ultimately to the patients.

Such a translation dimension is not typical in the humanities. We do not have the financial overheads that can pay the transaction costs. As a humanities scholar you must be both basic scientist and entrepreneur, translator and communicator, activist and lobbyist. If you are not able to play all parts, it is unlikely that your research will have impact.

Research councils therefore need to think in ways of enhancing both the ability of the humanities to research the Anthropocene and to translate our findings. We need funding for basic research in human behaviour, management, motivation, intention and desire. And we need funding to be able to put this knowledge at stake in society.