Marek Kwiek was awarded 110.000 EUR grant to participate in an ESF (European Science Foundation) EUROCORES- EUROHESC research project „The Academic Profession in Europe: Responses to Societal Challenges” (EUROAC, 2009-2012). Dominik Antonowicz is a team member (January 2010).

EUROAC
The Academic Profession in Europe: Responses to Societal Challenges (2010-2013) funded by European Science Foundation

The EUROCORES (European Collaborative Research) Scheme is a unique framework offered by the European Science Foundation (ESF) to promote collaborative research, networking and dissemination while targeting broad and complex topics of research across all scientific domains at the European level and in a global context. The European Collaborative Research Projects (ECRP) scheme, under the remit of the EUROCORES office, promotes investigator-driven, multinational collaborative research in the social sciences. Operating in the responsive-mode, its annual competition is open to applications in all fields of the social sciences. Researchers may collaborate across participating countries on any subject which demonstrates a need for international cooperation, while the funding remains at a national level.

EuroHESC  (Higher Education and Social Change)

The aim of the EUROCORES Programme EuroHESC is to develop and implement a programme of interdisciplinary comparative research into the relationships between higher education and society. This will involve the development of theories and hypotheses about this relationship and the factors which influence it, and will also address methodological issues of comparative research in the field (e.g. data comparability, combination of quantitative and qualitative research, and different levels of analysis).
Furthermore, EuroHESC will explore ways of utilising other social science datasets — for example, the European Social Survey and Eurostudent — in order to situate the study of higher education more firmly within the different social and cultural settings in which higher education occurs. EuroHESC is expected to make a significant contribution to the expansion of capacity in the field of higher education research and to a better integration with related scientific fields.
The programme aims to support high quality multidisciplinary research and is expected to run for 3-4 years; it includes national research funding as well as support for networking and dissemination activities managed by the ESF.

EUROAC  (The Academic Profession in Europe: Responses to Societal Challenges)

The aim of this CRP is to establish how the academic profession perceives, interprets and „digests” recent changes in its societal environment and the organisational fabric of higher education systems. As regards the former, attention will be paid notably to the growing relevance of knowledge, diversification and internationalisation. For the latter, groups of Individual Projects will explore the impact of changes in government, management and evaluation, changing academic career settings, and professionalization, both within academic roles and through modes of interaction and division of labour between new higher education professionals and the academic profession.