CHANSE: Four successful researchers from Switzerland in collaborative projects
With its “Transformations: Social and Cultural Dynamics in the Digital Age” call, the CHANSE programme is supporting 26 projects in the humanities and social sciences. These include three projects with Swiss participation.
The Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe (CHANSE) programme is an initiative by 27 research funding organisations from 24 countries. With its “Transformations: Social and Cultural Dynamics in the Digital Age” call for proposals, CHANSE is supporting a total of 26 international research projects with a budget of EUR 36.6 million. Three projects with Swiss participation feature among the high-calibre research projects.
- In the “Redistributive Imaginaries: Digitization, culture, and prosocial contribution” project, Moritz Ege (University of Zurich), together with researchers from the UK, Finland, Germany and Spain, investigate the influence of digitisation on people’s conception of social solidarity. Digitisation does not only create new ways of contributing to charitable causes via platforms but also alters the ways in which contributions are distributed and may have disruptive effects.
- Chantal Martin-Sölch (University of Fribourg) and Omar Abou Khaled (Fribourg technical university – HEIA-FR) are investigating the influence of digitisation on our conception of time and timeliness in an age when people are constantly networked and reachable. Together with researchers from the UK, Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland and Spain, they are working on the “Time experience in Europe’s digital age” project, which seeks to examine how this experience impacts on wellbeing, health and the economy.
- Miriam Meckel (University of St. Gallen) is heading “The Q-Shift: decision-making in the age of Quantum AI” consortium. She is working with researchers from the UK, Germany and Denmark to investigate the ways in which quantum computers and artificial intelligence can help to resolve complex problems. One of the project's goals is to analyse the cultural and social forces that are bound up with technology and influence its further development. In this context, the question of whether quantum computers and artificial intelligence are altering the established decision-making processes is also of relevance.
Successful Switzerland
In the first phase of the call, Switzerland – along with Slovakia – was among the most successful partner organisations. 42 per cent of the researchers involved in project outlines from Switzerland were invited to submit a full research proposal. Of those, one third of the submitted projects with Swiss involvement were put forward for funding.
In total, researchers submitted 366 project outlines. From among those, the international evaluation panel has invited 90 collaborative projects to submit a full research plan. On completion of the evaluation process, CHANSE will be able to support 26 projects – thanks also to co-financing to the tune of EUR 10 million by the European Commission. The success rate of about 7 per cent is comparable to the figures from other calls at European level in the humanities and social sciences.
A list showing all projects that have received funding can be found on the CHANSE website.