I just got back from five intense, productive days in Durrës, where I carried out a Short-Term Scientific Mission at Aleksandër Moisiu University under COST Action CA22165 DepolarisingEU. My host was Professor Roland Lami. Together, we wanted to figure out how digital media can bring publics together instead of tearing them apart during civic crises.…
Year: 2026
PAAR-Net members and colleagues may be interested in a new Special Issue of the Journal of Aging Studies focusing on participatory approaches and the co-production of knowledge with older adults. […]
The recording of the third webinar in the PAAR-Net Working Group 2 webinar series, Meaningful Participation and Voice: When Does Older Adults’ Participation Become a Democratic Action?, is now available. […]
by Dr. Tarlan Ahmadov – Society for Inclusive and Collaborative Entrepreneurship (S4ICE), Stuttgart, Germany I was looking for patterns in how researchers have thought about technology and rural development over the past fifty years. I expected to find growth — more papers, more journals, more buzzwords. What I didn’t expect was to find a field…
Scientific collaboration is one of the most valuable ways to address today’s complex environmental and societal challenges. Thanks to the support of the SMART-RURAL COST Action, I had the opportunity to undertake a one-week Short-Term Scientific Mission (STSM) at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, hosted by Professor Renata Sõukand, one of Europe’s leading ethnobiologists. Returning…
This SMART-RURAL STSM in Moldova and Romania explored rural resilience from a Near Neighbour Country perspective, examining technology adoption and existing resilience assessment frameworks. The work highlighted key gaps around institutional integration, traditional knowledge, multi-level assessment and the realities of post-socialist rural contexts, helping shape the development of more context-sensitive resilience indicators for SMART-RURAL.
This SMART-RURAL STSM at UiT The Arctic University of Norway explored how digital coordination in rural logistics can reshape not only efficiency and access, but also power and dependence between actors. Through a systematic evidence review and conceptual analysis of 80 publications, the mission examined who controls critical access points such as platforms, payment systems,…
Prepared by: Mr Ilija Mugosa, Center for Finance Between 10 and 18 June 2026, I had the opportunity to undertake a Short-Term Scientific Mission (STSM) at the Universidad de Málaga, hosted by the Department of Applied Economics, within the framework of the SMART-RURAL COST Action (CA24170). The mission, entitled Innovation and Digital Solutions in Smart…
A crisis in numbers: the scale of scientific misconduct today At CYPHER’s third general meeting, data scientist Lonni Besançon presented an overview of the current state of research integrity – and with it, a concerning picture of what can be at stake in 2026. Scientific publishing has seen a sharp rise in documented misconduct. In…
The workshop is intended to bring together leading scientists in the field of non-linear X-ray techniques using free-electron lasers. The discussions are supposed to center around how such novel techniques can be brought to impactful scientific applications and are sorted into four methodological sessions
