The Coordinated Humanitarian Response, Health and Displacement action-research project aims to implement an international master's degree, including European and African universities - HumanResponse Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree. The programme aims to provide a unique multidisciplinary programme in teaching and research about life-saving assistance and displacement in volatile contexts. The Erasmus Mundus project provides 60 scholarships for students, teacher mobility and lectures by Visiting Scholars from various countries.  In addition, it contributes to research with articles on innovative topics. The programme is jointly developed by Iscte-University Institute of Lisbon, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Makerere University (MU), University of Cape Verde (UniCV), University of Santiago (US), University of Athens (UAthens) and University of Rovuma (URovuma). The first semester is spent in Lisbon, Portugal, the second semester in Trondheim, Norway, and the third semester in Kampala, Uganda, before the students move to one of the seven partner institutions to work on their master’s thesis. In the fourth-semester students may collect dissertation data in humanitarian contexts with 23 institutions (associated partners) in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South America or Asia. The curriculum is taught by both academics and practitioners, emphasizing problem-based learning and knowledge application opportunities in summer schools and internships.   HumanResponse tackles both research and teaching to address the pressing need for professionalisation of humanitarian workers through: fostering South-North collaboration and multi-stakeholder cooperation, strengthening localized leadership, and articulating theory and practice to navigate organizational complexity in humanitarian action.

Climate change and biodiversity loss have for long hinged on apocalyptic images of future catastrophes that must be acted upon before it is too late. Recently, new scientific, artistic, and activist narratives have gained ground  that suggest socio-ecological catastrophe is already here and inescapable.  The  LIving with WildFIre  (LiFi) project engages with these post-apocalyptic narratives through the lens of Extreme Wildfire Events (EWEs). We ask how lived experiences of EWEs influence the way communities imagine, narrate and act upon their environmental relations and futures. B2F investigates both the traumatic dimensions of EWEs (eco-anxiety, grief, loss) and the potential of EWEs to transform community imaginaries, agency and political organization.  LiFi interweaves political discourse theory and interpretive methods within a transdisciplinary framework. Working with fire-affected communities, we investigate: their changing priorities; how recovery and sustainability are re-imagined; and what shared visions for the future gain ground. LiFi will unearth archetypal political ’fantasies’ that  emerge after profound socio-ecological disruption, and the possibilities these bring to creatively renegotiate collective values, environmental rights, obligations and political participation and engagement. Through its  transdisciplinary approach, LiFi will help communities develop soft skills and policy tools necessary to build  resilience in a rapidly warming world. 

The burden of accumulated scientific evidence unequivocally shows that climate change has profound and multifarious implications for human societies, as well as for biophysical systems, which will be aggravated in the coming decades. Its impacts, and the mitigation and adaptation measures to contain them, will especially affect people that are presently young. In Portugal and around the world, the future of young people and of other age groups will also be shaped by other sustainability-related challenges, as the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2018) and numerous analysts have highlighted the need for ‘transformative systemic change’ in order to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement and Agenda 2030’s Sustainable Development Goals. Several perspectives and proposals have emerged to address the need to foster social, economic and environmental sustainability transformations, as well as support their agents and drivers (Linner & Wibeck, 2019). Research has shown that techno-managerial discourses are dominant in the media and other public spaces, complemented by discourses focusing on individual change (Carvalho et al., 2018). However, transformations towards sustainability are eminently political, with power, justice and redistributive issues at their core. Pluralism and contestation are critical to overcome a post-political ambiance and to re-politicize the Anthropocene, namely by exposing and debating divergent visions of socio-ecological futures (Lövbrand et al., 2015). Recent mobilisations around climate change have clearly indicated that young people are or want to be involved in climate change debates and futures. The JUSTFUTURES project will contribute to understanding young people's agency and political imaginaries. It will do so by mapping existing collective action groups, analysing narratives and media(ted) discourses of climate futures and examining, through extensive field work, young people...

The EUMEPLAT project aims at analyzing the role of media platforms in fostering or dismantling European identity. The assumption we will draw on is that European dimension has rarely been dominant in media history. In most cases – i.e., movie – market shares are mainly divided among national productions and importations from the most influential country. In broadcasting both regional and national patterns emerge, with properly European exchanges being the exception more than the rule. Web platforms are usually owned by US companies, with a new threat appearing in our media landscape. We will focus on the “platformization” process, as the rise of new closed Web architectures, so as to inquire its positive and negative externalities, functional and dis-functional consequences. Positive externalities are beneficial to society at large, in a way that explains the overall ambition of the project. Detecting the insurgence of negative effects is a fundamental duty for scholars and policy-makers, as externalities of both kinds tend to reinforce themselves, giving rise to positive loop feedbacks and critical vicious circles. Negative externalities include misinformation, toxic debate, exclusion of independent voices; positive externalities encompass European co-productions, or practices able to bring people out of the information bubble. For this purpose, we will run a multidisciplinary analysis of platformization in three fields: news, video sharing, media representations, with the final goal to offer a theoretical synthesis. The research question is whether or not new platforms – YouTube, Netflix, NewsFeed - are making European culture more European, based on indicators related to production, consumption and representation. Patterns will be detected by comparing national, regional and European and level. Advanced methods will be applied for data analysis, so as to provide guidelines for decision-makers (i.e., fake news prevention; best practices in co-productions).