This project engages with the topic of digital transition in the development of careers in science, focusing on the experiences of people employed in research centres at Portuguese universities. It has the main aim of exploring how these processes have transformed the research profession, with positive and negative consequences for researchers’ personal and professional development, including work/life balance and internationalization. Through evidence-based analysis, the objective of the project is to help inform policymakers and stakeholders in the Research and Development (R&D) sector of the economy about these issues as they pertain to Portugal, and create a better understanding of the impact of digital transitions on the lives of professionals for wider research communities. Theoretically, the project situates digital transitions within a mobilities context. Significantly, this body of work has acknowledged the importance of greater global interconnectedness and a reliance upon information technology in highly qualified professions. This extends to the research teams’ own contributions to the mobilities research field, including the idea that many societies are currently experiencing an immobility turn arising from a problematization of corporeal travel within urban environments and an expansion of digital work platforms, at national and international levels. These developments create new possibilities and a wider range of connections, but also place impositions on researchers, including an erosion of personal time and space by work imperatives. In regard to empirical approach, research questions aim to explore not only the extent of digitalization in research units, including key tasks relating to experimental work, field studies and international collaboration, as well as the normalization of remote working, but also the impact on the domestic sphere, taking a cross-sectional approach covering researchers at different career stages, enabling the research ...

The outbreak of Covid-19 has had a profound impact on all the social, economic and political life of practically all societies. To help contain the virus and limit pressures on national health care systems, spatial mobility has also been severely affected. Motivated by the rapid spread of Covid-19, countries around the world closed their borders, airlines cancelled their flights and people have been told to stay at home by their governments, limiting human circulation in a manner unprecedented in the post-war period. As a border-crossing and now a border-closing related phenomenon, the global flow of international students has been severely disrupted by social isolation measures put in place without consideration of the consequences for mobility-dependent individuals, a predicament that invites research and analysis. Looking at the Portuguese case, this situation not only reflects the challenges raised by the pandemic in regard to how institutions dependent upon mobility function, but also existing inequalities between the Global North and the Global South, and the socio-economic differentials that have shaped individual experiences of the lockdown: what has become for a many forced displacement from sending countries or an involuntary return home. Some people are evidently better equipped or better situated to cope with the sudden immobility than others. Special attention in our work is given to the impact of lockdown on the quotidian routines of international students, taking into account the new, and existing, challenges they now face, as well as the effectiveness of the response made by host institutions. Empirical evidence is drawn from 30 interviews conducted with international students who were attending Portuguese universities during the lockdown, providing us with illustrations of their capacity to cope with what we have termed ‘pandemic immobility’.

Circulation of Science is a research project that aims to help resolve the contradiction in Research and Development between recognition of the importance of science in its many forms to Portuguese society and the reality of working in this sector of the economy. Focusing upon a number of key stages in a career in science, the challenges facing employers and employees are explored, taking into account issues arising from a competitive yet hierarchical organisation of science and the need to manage requirements for geographical mobility and cope with precariousness.

While the value of Science to national economies is rarely questioned, the status of many research scientists in the labour market is less certain. Despite enjoying stimulating and challenging work, many in research and development (R&D) face employment conditions characterised by precarity, vulnerability to exploitation and a demand for involuntary or inconvenient mobility. This work plan acknowledges this inconsistency and seeks to generate knowledge and understanding of how to improve the ‘health’ of Science in Portugal, with findings aimed at policymakers and stakeholders, including employers. In addition scientific workers will be provided with an opportunity to voice their own concerns and contribute to improving prospects for socio-demographic inclusivity in R&D and eliminating exploitation.

International Student Mobility (ISM) is frequently studied in regard to issues such as employability and European identity. Less prominent in prior studies has been consideration of the socio-demographic aspect of ISM. Of specific concern are issues in regard to access to platforms such as the European Commission’s Erasmus programme, including differentials according to gender, socio-economic background and academic discipline. Added to this is the geodemographic dimension of institutional mobility: while new opportunities are being opened-up outside of the European Union as part of the outreach function of the Erasmus+ initiative, access to publically-supported mobility chances are becoming restricted within certain regions within the EU, a situation related to the austerity policies associated with the economic crisis in the Mediterranean countries and elsewhere. This project studies ISM along these two vectors, with a scientific aim of identify ideas for improving access to student mobility and addressing current deficits in provision.

MYPLACE explores how young people’s social participation is shaped by the shadows (past, present and future) of totalitarianism and populism in Europe. Conceptually, it goes beyond the comparison of discrete national ‘political cultures’ or reified classifications of political heritage (‘postcommunist’/’liberal democratic’); it is premised rather on the pan-European  nature of a range of radical and populist political and philosophical traditions and the cyclical rather than novel nature of the popularity they currently enjoy. Empirically, MYPLACE employs a combination of survey, interview and ethnographic research instruments to provide new, pan-European data that not only measure levels of participation but capture the meanings young people attach to it. Analytically, through its specific focus on ‘youth’ and the historical and cultural contextualization of young people’s social participation, MYPLACE replaces the routine, and often abstract, iteration of the reasons for young people’s ‘disengagement’ from politics with an empirically rich mapping of young people’s understandings of the civic and political space that they inhabit. In policy terms, MYPLACE identifies the obstacles to, and facilitators of, young people’s reclamation of the European political arena as a place for them.