The promotion of the humanities and social sciences extends far beyond Europe. The Transatlantic Platform for the Humanities and Social Sciences (T-AP) has set itself the goal of advancing academic cooperation between South America, North America and Europe and, at the same time, jointly researching the social challenges of the 21st century.
Transatlantic Platform
International networking is high on the agenda not only for researchers, but also for research sponsors. Funded by the European Commission (2013 to 2016), the T-AP has worked to network American and various EU funding organizations, as well as researchers in the social sciences and humanities. In the first step, ongoing research projects in the partner countries were identified. In the second step, common priorities for cooperation and concrete research topics were identified, and, in the third step, corresponding funding guidelines were formulated.
Since 2016, the T-AP has published several tenders in the field of "Digging into Data". The aim was to promote research projects with "big data" approaches, i.e., techniques for digital data analysis, in order to gain new insights into social science and humanities issues. Even after the EU funding of the T-AP expired, the organisations involved in it decided not only to continue the platform, but also to expand it in the future.
Read more about “Digging into data”
The T-AP is currently comprised of 17 research sponsors from Europe and America, including Germany. Together, they identify the social challenges of the 21st century and align them with the corresponding funding guidelines.
The last funding guideline focuses on transatlantic research projects in the field of "Social Innovation" . In times of change, this is an extremely important field of research because social innovations are directly related to the search for solutions to social problems and challenges. Cooperation between different actors and disciplines plays an important role in this. This is because the solutions often start at the interfaces between different sectors of society, such as civil society, business and science, and integrate expertise from different areas. Against this background, social innovations are also a subject for social science and humanities analyses.
The projects selected by an international panel of experts will soon begin their work. They also contribute to raising awareness of the fundamental and also cross-border role of the social sciences and humanities in coping with the challenges of the globalisation of the economy.
Currently, the T-AP partner organizations are planning a joint open call for proposals for transatlantic collaborative projects on the medium and long-term consequences of the corona pandemic from a humanities and social science perspective. The international call for proposals is to be published in spring 2021.
