Resilience without accountability holds back transformative change

The concept of resilience is often positioned as a solution to social challenges, notably the unfolding climate crisis. However, as Benedikt Fecher, Ali Aslan Gümüsay, Stephan Bohn and Anna Jobin discuss, resilience on its own is insufficient without accountability. Linking resilience to the vastly increased powers of digital technology, for better or worse, to track, … Continued

Building Institutional Memory for Research Projects – Why education is key to long-term change

Research Impact, especially as conceptualised in the Research Excellence Framework, is often seen as bounded within a clearly defined project timeframe. In this post, Ryan Nolan, discusses how the National Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Research (NICER) Programme, has developed an interdisciplinary and long-term approach to research impact by focusing on education and community building. The importance … Continued

Transformation by design or by disaster – Why we need more transformative research now

Global society is beset with many ‘wicked problems’ that are unlikely to be resolved by traditional disciplinary research methods. In this post, Kristina Bogner, Michael P. Schlaile and Sophie Urmetzer discuss the concept of transformative research and how it can be applied to create the conditions for a sustainable and just transition in mobility. The … Continued

Facts Don’t Change Minds – Social Networks, Group Dialogue, and Stories Do

There is often a presumption amongst scientists that communicating the evidence on a given issue is on its own persuasive enough to change minds. Anne H. Toomey argues thinking in this way itself ignores evidence from other fields of research and presents four ways by which researchers can engage with findings from the social sciences … Continued