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Collective Social Futures is organised in to three broad thematic areas.
Explore CSF themes
Social Difference, Migration and Diversity
How can we best take account of and understand rapidly changing societal complexities? Addressing today’s societal challenges requires social scientific theories that can adequately grasp social complexity, from the rapid increase in complexity of global migrations and mobilities, the bordering/re-bordering of nation states, and the uneven impacts of environmental crises, to the complex power relations driving intersectional inequalities involving gender, class, race, age, dis/abilities and sexualities.
Democracy, Activism and Social Transformation
How can democracy and collective engagement be re-envisioned to achieve socially inclusive and ecologically sustainable transformation? Addressing societal and environmental challenges requires modes of governance that have the capacity to mobilise collectivities and solidarities, and to enhance democracy.
Working towards collective social futures requires knowledge generation from engagement through participatory governance, action research, activism, social movements, co-operative studies, creative and arts-based research praxis and policy-engaged research. Transdisciplinary research offers opportunities to explore innovative, creative, mobile and participatory approaches to re-envisioning democracy, activism and movements for co-created social change and just transitions.
Caring and Inclusive Relations
How can social relations be re-imagined in ways that are more caring and inclusive? Transdisciplinary engagement can enable the application of theories of care and interdependence to address a wide range of challenges, including health and care inequalities, environmental sustainability challenges, energy poverty, the digital divide, just transitions and the housing crisis.
Drawing on current thinking in global ethics of care, and grounded in recognition of society’s mutual interdependence, the CSF platform will explore how ideas of interdependence and care can be applied to addressing global crises that are characterised by neoliberal individualism and lack of care (for one another, for the public good, for the earth and for the environment).
Featured Projects
The following case study projects illustrate the key themes listed above. A more extensive list of projects is available at Projects & Outputs.
Deep Societal Innovation for Sustainability and Human Flourishing
Funded by the SFI/IRC Pathway Programme, the CODA project explores how hearing children of deaf adults (Codas) experience the courtesy stigma (or stigma-by-association) of their parents and the cultural resources they use to become agents of their own empowerment.
TOGETHER: Collaborating across prison walls and borders
This project explores prison-university partnerships to co-create an all-island curriculum that builds empathy and mutual understanding between diverse communities.
Deep Societal Innovation for Sustainability and Human Flourishing
The accelerating impacts of climate change, allied to the challenges of meeting 2030 goals (and beyond), has stirred a sense of urgency for policy responses and societal and behavioural changes needed to embark upon the structural transformations required to tackle pressing global challenges. DSIS seeks to develop a methodological basis for conceptualising the deep whole of society transformation required to engage on a trajectory towards authentic sustainability and human flourishing, which can create narratives for deep, rapid, whole of society transformation, and employ those narratives to inform policy making and public discourse on climate change and sustainability. DSIS is an inter- and transdisciplinary, inter-institutional, and international initiative, anchored at, and emanating from a well-developed research base in this area at UCC, and includes researchers and academics from MaREI and ISS21.
PI: Professor Edmond Byrne (School of Engineering and Architecture and the Environmental Research Institute/MaREI)
Project Co-Leads: Professor Maggie O’Neill (Department of Sociology and Criminology and ISS21), Dr Ian Hughes (Environmental Research Institute/MaREI)
Funder: EPA
Project dates: 2024-2028
DICES
The DICES project seeks to unlock the potential of the social economy to foster social inclusion and provide access to high quality care and care work. A key objective will be to assess and make policy recommendations to strengthen working conditions in the social economy and best practice care organisations will be identified and strategies to scale these will be developed. The project will have practical outcomes, such as the piloting of innovative care organisations and initiatives co-designed with key stakeholders.
Funded through Horizon Europe, the DICES project will focus on optimising the potential of Europe’s social economy organisations to enhance social inclusion at both the local level, particularly in 'left behind places,' and within organisations, with a specific emphasis on care provision.
TOGETHER: Collaborating across prison walls and borders
The aim of this project is to develop a user-led framework for university-prison education partnerships distinct to the island of Ireland context. TOGETHER will move beyond imported UK and US models of prison-university education, contributing to improved quality of education and learning on the island of Ireland and producing an all-island toolkit for convivial learning co-produced with prison based students and university based students.
We are a team of researchers from Queen's University Belfast and University College Cork, working with those with lived experience of the criminal justice system.
This project is funded by the HEA North-South Research Funding Programme running from September 2022 to September 2024.
