HERA Launches Fourth Joint Research Programme – Public Spaces

HERA Public Spaces (2019-2022)

The HERA Network is pleased to announce a new Joint Research Programme (JRP): Public Spaces: Culture and Integration in Europe. By launching the joint HERA JRP PS Call for Proposals, the funding organisations involved want to create opportunities for humanities-led, collaborative, transnational research that will result in new academic insights relevant to major social, cultural, and political challenges facing Europe and the world. The HERA JRP PS is co-funded by humanities funding agencies in 24 participating countries and the European Commission, with the total budget amounting up to €20 million.

Call Theme

Through time, public spaces have acted as open domains of human encounters and exchanges, often negotiated or contested. Public spaces are closely connected with the expression and exchange of values and beliefs and with the formation and appropriation of institutions, and thus public spaces lend themselves to cultural analysis of these processes and structures.

The aim of the HERA “Public spaces” programme will be to deepen the theoretical and empirical cultural understanding of public spaces in a European context. The programme has been designed to facilitate a broad range of cultural approaches to conceptualising public space, its structural and processual formations, and its possible outcomes in terms of integration, exclusion, disintegration, fragmentation, hybridization, amalgamation or transmission.