The promotion of humanities and social sciences extends far beyond Europe. The Transatlantic Platform for Humanities and Social Sciences (T-AP) has set itself the goal of advancing academic cooperation between South America, North America and Europe and, at the same time, jointly researching the social challenges of the 21st century.
Transatlantic Platform
The Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Sciences and Humanities (T-AP) is a collaboration between research funders from North America, South America and Europe. It aims to facilitate trans-Atlantic joint research projects in areas of strong potential for international collaboration. T-AP also strives to align policies and practices to facilitate international collaboration in the social sciences and humanities. Since 2016, the T-AP has launched several calls for research proposals.
The BMBF participated in a T-AP call on “Social Innovation” from 2018. In times of change, “Social Innovation” is an extremely important field of research because social innovations are directly related to the search for solutions to social problems and challenges. Cooperation between different actors and disciplines plays an important role in this. This is because the solutions often start at the interfaces between different sectors of society, such as civil society, business and science, and integrate expertise from different areas. Against this background, social innovations are also a subject for social science and humanities analyses.
The Social Innovation projects contribute to raising awareness of the fundamental and also cross-border role of the social sciences and humanities in coping with the global social challenges.
The BMBF also hosted a T-AP Conference on "Social Innovation – Learning from Multinational Collaboration“ in November 2022.
In 2021, the T-AP has launched an international call for proposals on the topic “Recovery, Renewal and Resilience in a Post-Pandemic World“. Since 2022, 19 Trans-Atlantic projects – among these 5 co-funded by the BMBF - investigate the medium-and long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic from a humanities and social science perspective. The international collaborative projects advance knowledge of how to mitigate the negative societal effects of the pandemic and support recovery and renewal in a post-pandemic world.
