UNIBILITY - University's Social Responsibility Conference

Please find featured below and attached the call for abstracts for the UNIBILITY - University's Social Responsibility conference, which is to take place in Barcelona on Friday, 20 September, 2017.

The conference aims to bring together ideas regarding strategic planning and good practice in University Social Responsibility (USR), considered under different headings such as civic engagement, third mission, etc. See attached call for further details.

With best wishes,

Lucy

For regularly updated information about UALL, including events, go to: www.uall.ac.uk [1]

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

1st European USR-Conference »University Meets Social Responsibility«

Friday, 22^nd September, 2017, University of Barcelona, Spain

Conference topic

Universities in Europe seem to become more and more sensitive to and aware of the importance of the social dimension of their teaching and their research. Universities are more and more pressured to react to societal change, social crises and social problems. Many are currently developing strategies and actions to make this a priority, not only in policy terms, but also in daily practice of staff and students.

This concept of “University’s Social Responsibility” (USR) is discussed under different headings such as social responsibility, the social dimension, the third mission, university-business cooperation, civic engagement, knowledge transfer, and many more. As USR is considered a broad topic, each university is challenged to define their areas and focus of USR. Many activities already contribute to reaching the overarching objective of socially responsible action towards the outside of universities and relevant stakeholders.

Nevertheless, universities must avoid falling into the trap of turning social responsibility into another standardized policy they have to follow for legitimization, ranking or auditing purposes. This 1^st USR-Conference aims at the exchange of good practice examples for USR and the discussion of the state-of-the-art of strategic planning of USR in European universities.

We are inviting presenters with presentations in the following two topic areas:

1. Topic: Strategic Planning of Social Responsibility

• How do universities raise awareness within their higher education institution for USR (faculty level, student level, teachers’ level, within leadership etc.)?
• How can universities build capacities for USR within the university? (internal trainings, material, resource planning, departments, etc.)
• Which strategies and action plans are in place for USR? Which strategies are implemented to actively reduce barriers for USR within the university?
• How do universities identify relevant focus points for USR-purposes within the university (relevant activities, transferable research, governance processes, transfer action plans, documentation processes, etc.)?
• How can societal requirements from the multi-stakeholder environment from outside the university be determined and analysed for USR? (needs analysis, the role of transfer offices, formats of cooperation etc.) How do universities conduct stakeholder consultations? In which forms are stakeholders involved in university research?
• How do universities identify success factors and indicators for USR?

2. Topic: Good Practices

• Public and social engagement as examples for social responsibility
• Knowledge transfer: Communicating research to the wider general public
• Cooperating with industry partners
• Transfer offices and examples for responsible science

Submissions

Please submit your abstract to [email protected] [2] until March 10^th at the latest following the following rules:

• Only abstracts submitted in English will be reviewed.
• Only 1 abstract can be submitted per presenting author.
• Abstracts must not exceed 250 words (excluding references) and authors should use the template provided.
• All abbreviations must be spelled out on first use.

Important dates and deadlines:

• Call for abstracts closes March 10^th
• Authors notified about acceptance of abstracts until March 31^st
• Registration will open April 1^st and end August 31^st
• Conference day on Sept 22^nd

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