The COESO (Collaborative Engagement on Societal Issues) project facilitates and supports participatory research in SSH, through a service-first approach. COESO supports ten Citizen Science pilots presenting a variety of disciplines, societal challenges and types of engagement with citizens in different European countries. COESO project will specifically support collaborative practices in Citizen Science by developing a Virtual Ecosystem for Research Activation (VERA), a platform envisioned as a "collaboratory” providing a set of tools to discover potential partners, to define and co-design the activities, to co-create new knowledge and solutions, and to deliver them to society. COESO will furthermore collaborate with research funding organizations to enhance financial support to Citizen Science projects in the SSH and explore the frontiers of innovation in SSH public engagement by achieving a complete mutual learning with the teams involved in the Pilots. Finally, “Cooperation analytics” will be designed to measure the quality of collaboration between researchers and citizens in VERA. Those analytics will be useful to the project teams themselves but they will also be a major contribution to funders, policy makers, research organizations and other stakeholders supporting Citizen Science policies. COESO’s overall objective is to overcome the obstacles that hinder the development of Citizen Science in the SSH. COESO will enable a dramatic growth of Citizen Science projects in these disciplines and will intensify the collaborations between SSH researchers and citizens to tackle together the many societal challenges European societies face today. VERA will be one of the core services offered by OPERAS Research Infrastructure to the scientific community.

Work in contemporary societies has come to suffer several processes of change that in the context of the current economic and employment crisis (Veloso and Oliveira 2010), demands equating the structuring of identities that is built, destroyed and modified around work. Work continues to play an essential role both in the stability and in the appropriation of meaning in individual and social group trajectories (Veloso 2009) and in the social recognition mechanisms (Honneth 2005). Consequently, an examination of representations of work is a theme of great scientific and social importance. This research project seeks to analyse the social processes in the formation of work identities in Portugal and to recreate the resulting narratives that shape it. The project takes social representation as its theoretical-methodological basis (Moscovici 2000). Based on an analysis of a body of industrial films, which will allow us to highlight the main continuities and discontinuities of these narratives between the end of the 1920s and the 1980s, the project will follow a theoretically and methodologically innovative path. Taking work as its central focus, it will review the research already carried on social identities, work memories and identities and the relationship between technique and work(Veloso 2009; Marques 2011; Vidal 2006), to highlight the role of social memory in the construction of identities. The collective/social memory (Halbwachs 1994) is the central axis of the project, since it is this that will allow us to demonstrate, at both the individual and collective level, the social processes in the construction of work representation. While previous research has favoured the ethnographic method (Marques 2011), the intensive observation of work contexts (Veloso 2009) or archival analysis (Vidal 2006), this project proposes taking cinema as its starting point - and more particularly, industrial documentaries that were made in Portugal for both private and public bodies. ...