The Future of Social Confrontations

Forschungspolitik & Entwicklung

The Future of Social Confrontations

European R&I foresight and public engagement

The European Commission has launched a study "European R&I foresight and public engagement for Horizon Europe" that aims to help valorize foresight elements from R&I projects of Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe by increasing their visibility and the potential uptake of their results in EC R&I policy planning. Task 1 will provide foresight intelligence and forward-looking policy briefs to the European Commission for purposes of R&I policies. Deep Dive Foresight Studies provide the Commission with 8 foresight policy briefs on specific issues summarizing the state of the art of available foresight knowledge.

Klaus Schuch, scientific director of ZSI, is engaged as one of four external experts in the foresight exercise on 'The Future of Social Confrontations'. His fellow colleagues are Richard Wilkinson, Professor emeritus for social epidemiology, University of Nottingham; Honorary professor University College London; Sohail Inayatullah, first UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies, political scientist at Tamkang University, Taipei (Graduate Institute of Futures Studies); Associate at Melbourne Business School, Adjunct Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast (Faculty of Social Sciences and Business) and Sergiu Mișcoiu, Professeur des universités en science politique, Directeur de thèses aux Universités Babes-Bolyai (UBB) et Paris-Est (UPE), Directeur du Centre de Coopérations Internationales (UBB).

The foresight exercise is lead by Susanne Giesecke and supported by Masafumi Nishi (both AIT) .

Together they will bring in their knowledge and anticipation of future trends and upcoming topics to identify factors of change and basic scenarios.

Social confrontations signify the struggle about how we want to shape our future. Routed in different narratives represented by different social groups they are often competing for the sovereignty of interpretation of what this future is going to look like and how we are going to achieve it. These diverging perspectives are usually rooted in past collective experience and value systems (or certain interpretation of those) and constitute a point of reference for a personal identity that makes a person belonging to a certain group. Social confrontations are not a singular phenomenon but there are multiple social confrontations and they co-exist, overlap, and compete. The divides social confrontations create can go across all spheres of life: education, care, health, nutrition, energy, mobility, communication, race, gender, political power, migration, etc.

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