Social ties and relationships are an integral component of democratic governance (Lawson 1980; Putnam, 2000). High trust interactions between citizens and political actors such as politicians, government officials, and journalists, enable collective action, inspire participation and ensure adherence to political rules and norms. Yet these bonds are subject to challenge and increasingly frayed. Digital technology has been heralded as one way of rebuilding social ties, but evidence of polarized debate, untrustworthy information, uncivil behaviour and transient engagement challenges this idea. Building on previous work revealing citizens’ preferences for frequency, form and channel of communication from those political actors (Soo et al.2020; Weinberg 2023a), we consider whether and under what conditions digital communication can strengthen or erode trust – specifically looking at communication via email, social media, chatbots, social media influencers, and AI-generated synthetic media. We expect minority communities will have different expectations for communication with political actors and will examine how women, ethnic minorities and diaspora communities respond to alternative forms of contact. Using surveys and experimental methods in Canada, France, Poland, and the UK, we examine whether and how each point of contact could be optimized to promote trust. Such analysis is vital to ensuring that trust is promoted across diverse communities and that inequalities and discrimination are not exacerbated in our political systems. Moreover, it allows us to determine whether singular modes of trustworthy communication exist, or whether potentially competing conceptions of trustworthy interaction need to be theorised. Importantly, we then ask elites and citizens about their responses to these strategies to assess viability.

SUPER will train 15 doctoral Fellows as transdisciplinary leaders to develop and promote sustainable, equitable physical activity and sports that prioritise both human and planetary health in the face of world finite resources and a changing climate. The network will bring together sports and physical activity industries, organisations and practitioners with leading researchers and experts across fields such as sports & behaviour sciences, human health, education, social science, planetary health, circular economy, environmental sciences and sustainable development to conduct empirical research and cascading skill-building with the following objectives: Objective 1: Establish the theoretical and evidence base as well as a research roadmap on the impact of sports and physical activity on planetary health, resources and climate and, conversely, the impact of climate change on sports and physical activity. This, to support policy, practice and novel solutions. Objective 2: Develop novel solutions for sports and physical activity policy, infrastructures, equipment, practices and promotion that bring co-benefits by simultaneously increasing population resilience to climate change equitably and lowering the impact on the planet and planetary limits. Objective 3: Test and demonstrate these novel solutions in key sectors through living labs: Health Care, Professional and Amateur Sports, School/Education, Urban Design, Workplace/Occupational Health. Objective 4: Provide evidence-based guidance and scientific support to future generations and all stakeholders who promote, manage, or use sports and physical activity: industry, practitioners, organisations, policymakers, funders, and the public, on making sports and physical activity sustainable and equitable. Objective 5: Build capacity for future generations and among the sports and physical activity industry, organisations and practitioners for developing innovative, sustainable and circular solutions and practiceTBD

As metaverses operate in real-time their wide adoption is expected to create digital public spaces for interaction in which the already possible online interactions are intensified and blended with the physical world as never before. To lead in this field and maximize positive implications, Europe needs to ensure that new multi-dimensional challenges arising, are addressed in accordance with European values. AGORA responds to the lack of doctoral programs which go beyond the technical understanding of Metaverses and consider its business and social value while unpacking and addressing potential unintended consequences. Through a rigorous and robust research and training programme, AGORA aims to develop a critical research and talent base capable of leading by example. AGORA’s approach is to train the researchers not only to understand Metaverse's infrastructure but also to understand and oscillate between the different levels of Metaverse’s business and societal value, paving in this way a more integrated understanding of this disruptive ecosystem. Combining theoretical and hands-on industrial research and transferable skills training will enable researchers to target high-quality publication outlets and to become creative and autonomous so that they can exploit and commercialize research results and become competitive in the global arena. One of AGORA’s unique selling points is its ability to prepare the ESRs to work in any of the three pathways (academia, industry, policy making) as well as their intersections. AGORA's inter-sectoral network brings together leading academic and non-academic co-supervision arrangements of high quality, stimulates the development of new industrial doctoral training procedures between top business schools and industries in the region.

SOTERIA aims to drive a paradigm shift on data protection and enable active participation of citizens to their own security, privacy and personal data protection. SOTERIA will develop and test in 3 large-scale real-world use cases, a citizen-driven and citizen-centric, cost-effective, marketable service to enable citizens to control their private personal data easily and securely. Led by an SME, this project will develop, using a user-driven and user-centric design, a revolutionary tool, uniquely combining, in a user-friendly manner, a high-level identification tool with a decentralised secured data storage platform, to enable all citizens, whatever their gender, age or ICT skills, to fully protect and control their personal data while also gaining enhanced awareness on potential privacy risks. SOTERIA solution will be tested and validated through 3 real-world large-scale use-cases, involving 6,500 European citizens, targeting 3 applications which usefulness has been highlighted during COVID-19 pandemic: e-learning, e-voting and e-health. This 3-year transdisciplinary project from both SSH and technology angles, will develop an innovative solution based on: a secured access interface relying on high-level identification, a smart platform processing data to transmit only the minimum personal data required, a secured data storage platform (decentralized architecture) under the full control of the citizen, an educational tool to raise awareness of citizens developed using a citizen-driven and citizen-centric approach. The technologies developed will i) empower citizens to monitor and audit their personal data; ii) restore trust on privacy, security and personal data protection of citizens in digital services; iii) be fully compliant to GDPR regulation and apply strictly the data minimization principle; iv) ensure cybersecurity.

Understanding the challenges to liberal democracy across Europe and supporting its resilience and sustainability, now more than ever requires us to better systematize and to make transparent the activities and behaviours that take place at all stages of the political process. Social scientists are nowadays in a unique position to systematically observe political and societal developments empirically and more closely than ever before if they were to fully exploit the possibilities of the vast amounts of semi-structured textual data and the computational techniques that are available. Political texts produced by the media, individual-, collective and institutional political actors like politicians, political parties, governments, or by citizens and non-governmental organizations, offer a remarkable opportunity to observe and understand social and political processes better than hitherto possible. Obstacles to such exploitation lie in the fragmentation of the research field, the domain, language and context sensitivity of tools, the only evolving standardizations and routines of data sharing and validation, and in unclear legal and ethical frameworks. The new opportunities with regard to text analysis in digitalized democracies can be seized to the full extend by bringing together social scientists that control expertise with regard to the political processes and substantive issues An institutionalization of the field of political text analysis by means of a common European infrastructure will yield more impactful, sustainable, resource saving, innovative, democratic, non-discriminatory and substantially meaningful research landscape. The OPTED infrastructure, for which this project lays the foundation in terms of conceptual design work, pushes the boundaries of political text analysis by addressing both the development and the application of tools and techniques, the standardization of measurement quality and legal and ethical frameworks.