Our Partners

European Journalism Centre

The European Journalism Centre (EJC) is an independent, international, non-profit foundation dedicated to maintaining the highest standards in journalism in particular and the media in general. Founded in 1992 in Maastricht, the Netherlands, the EJC closely follows emerging trends in journalism and watchdogs the interplay between media economy and media culture. It also hosts each year more than 1,000 journalists in seminars and briefings on European affairs.

European Cultural Parliament

European Cultural Parliament, an international NGO, was founded in the premises of the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, in 2001. The premise of the ECP was that ethical and aesthetic values should be the essence of the European society. The objective is - to strengthen the role of cultural and artistic ideas and initiatives in Europe. In addition, the founders of the ECP wished to strengthen the dialogue between citizens in Eastern and Western Europe and between the various arts sectors.

Outstanding artists and other cultural personalities from all parts of the continent were nominated members of the ECP in 2002. By the end of 2008 the ECP had about 170 Members from 42 European countries. The European Cultural Parliament is the only forum for European personalities in the fields of arts, culture and letters for dialogue, discussions and debate about crucial and burning issues of importance for European co-operation, European integration, European democracy and European culture. The European Cultural Parliament will stand for common values, cultural identity and diversity as well as understanding and tolerance and will promote bridge building with other cultures.

Hart Group

Hart Group, a sponsor of Oxford XXI, is a UK-based consulting organisation with a large network of local and international associates. Hart Group brings together professional expertise in social and economic development consultancy and financial and business services. In addition, the group provides a range of cross-cutting services, in the fields of:

Technical and Financial Audit;
Human resource development and training;
Institutional development;
Project management and monitoring;
Assurance reporting on public information.

Hart Group was founded in 1988 and has since established an extensive international network of professional organisations and individuals. The group has long-standing working relationships with institutes and consultancy organisations and has a wide network of partners and associate consultants across Western and Eastern Europe, Russia and the Commonwealth Of Independent States, Australia, South Africa, the USA and China.

University of Aberdeen (UK), New Europe Centre

The New Europe Centre Aberdeen is concerned with European social research. It consists of a variety of people and projects at the University of Aberdeen and outside who are working on the problem of understanding Europe in terms of people, values and behaviour. An important aspect of this work is also to look at policy measures and implications. The New Europe Centre, Aberdeen is part of a network of institutions across Europe that work together on different topics and includes partners from Vilnius to Vladivostock, from Lisbon to Lviv and from Bergen to Bucharest. The New Europe Centre is funded through a range of projects on topics such as household strategies, work-life balance, social capital, European social policy, gender, European identity, migration, youth and generations. It uses a variety of materials including policy documents, surveys carried out by the Centre as well as secondary data analysis and in-depth interviews.

The University of Aberdeen is Scotland's third oldest and the fifth oldest in the UK. Aberdeen is an international university built on serving one of the most dynamic regions of Europe. With over 13,000 students, and over 3000 staff, we are at the forefront of teaching and research in medicine, the humanities and sciences.

Music Mind Spirit Trust (UK)

Music Mind Spirit is a Charitable Trust dedicated to the betterment of humanity and the fostering of cultural and social citizenship within medicine, education and business through the better use and appreciation of music and the arts.

SongTrees (UK)

The SongTrees project was developed by Dr Chika Robertson as a Music Mind Spirit Trust project aimed to help children gain insight into their cultural identity through sharing musical memories with their parents, grandparents and friends. It created a valuable archive for musical / medical research. It set out to discover what kinds of music people from different generations remember and what associations it has.

Oxford Brookes University (UK), Department of Politics and International Relations

Oxford Brookes University is the only UK modern university to have achieved 24 subjects rated as excellent for teaching. We have a longstanding reputation for employability, and are host to two national centres of excellence in teaching and learning.

The University can trace its history back as far as 1865 with the foundation of the Oxford School of Art, which over the centuries merged and grew to become today's university. It was in 1992 that the then Oxford Polytechnic became Oxford Brookes University, naming itself after John Henry Brookes, first Principal of the Schools of Technology, Art and Commerce.

Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna (Austria)

The Institute of Advanced Studies (HIS), Austria's premier postgraduate research and training institute, combines theoretical and empirical research in economics and other social science disciplines since its founding in 1963. Through the interaction between scientific theory and practice, IHS provides innovative value-added services to policy makers and business practitioners. Key features are interdisciplinary exchange, a truly international faculty, a commitment to quality, and original scholarly output.

TARKI (Hungary)

TARKI Social Research Institute, founded in Budapest in 1985, is an employee-owned, nonpartisan research centre. The institute’s profile comprises research on a wide range of issues related to social stratification, labour markets, income distribution, intergenerational transfers, tax-benefit systems, consumption and lifestyle patterns and attitudes. Recent additions to TARKI include a public health unit and an institute for macroeconomic research. TARKI is engaged in the analysis of Hungarian social issues with a strong emphasis on comparative analyses, and provides expertise on European social structure, income distribution, social mobility and attitudes as well as on the operation of national social welfare regimes. TARKI regularly advises international and national decision-makers.

TARKI is a member of various international research networks and consortia, including CESSDA, ICPSR, ISSP, ESS, LIS, ECPR and ENEPRI. In addition, every second year TARKI publishes the highly regarded Hungarian Social Report that is widely referred to in scientific publications, reviewed in the press and often incorporated into university course syllabi. TARKI has its own fieldwork department with a nation-wide interviewer network and hosts Hungary’s national social science data archive, a member of the Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA).

University of Jyvaskyla (Finland), Research Centre for Contemporary Culture and Department of Art and Culture Studies

The Research Centre was started in 1983 as a project to promote interdisciplinary research on contemporary cultural phenomena. The founder and long-time director of the project was Dr. Katarina Eskola, a sociologist. From the beginning, the humanities and the social sciences became the main collaborative orientations. In 2000, it was given the status of a research centre, and at the same time it was made part of the Department of Art and Culture Studies in the Faculty of the Humanities. The Centre also got a professorship, and “contemporary cultural studies” was as established as a discipline with postgraduate education as a new task. The first professor was Katarina Eskola. Erkki Vainikkala was chosen as her successor in 2008. At present, the Centre also has the position of a senior lecturer, held by Dr. Urpo Kovala. Additional research staff is recruited for research projects. – Within the theoretical and historical perspective of socio-cultural modernization, the empirical work at the Research Centre has been focused on the production, distribution and – especially – reception of cultural products, including literature, audio-visual culture, and the uses of media especially by children and young people. Work on (auto)biographies has been important. Increasingly there has been work on the cultural uses of the Internet. Methodologically, narrative approaches, sociology of culture, and discourse analysis have been in the foreground.

University of Lleida (Spain)

The University of Lleida, the oldest university in Catalonia, is a medium sized university with approximately 8,000 students and 2,000 teachers and researchers. The department of Geography and Sociology was created in 1996 and includes several disciplines: human geography, sociology, anthropology and social work. It has organized a Masters in Youth Studies and Policies, in collaboration with the Research Committee 34 (International Sociological Association). The researchers of the department have been involved in several investigations on youth cultures, intercultural education, Latin gangs and violence. UDL was a partner in the FP6 funded TRESEGY research consortium.

Centre for Independent Social Research, St. Petersburg (Russia)

Founded in 1991 as an NGO, CISR has three basic objectives: (i) academic sociological research, (ii) building professional networks (in Russia as well as internationally) in the sphere of social sciences, (iii) preparing and training the young generation of social scientists and researchers. CISR's researchers are primarily guided by qualitative sociological methodology. The majority of studies conducted by the CISR deal with civil society and social structure. Up to 40-50 projects are conducted annually, most of them in cooperation with specialists from all over Russia and abroad. The Centre's researchers publish as many as 100 articles a year in Russian and foreign scientific journals. CISR regularly conducts seminars in profiling directions and subjects attended by experts and interested people. CISR seminars have been attended by such outstanding social scientists as Thomas Luckman, Ulrich Beck, Saskia Sassen, Theodor Shanin, James Scott, Fritz Schuetze, John Urry, Benedict Anderson and others.

The University of Surrey

The University of Surrey undertakes pioneering research with a focus on relevant and practical applications. Surrey's ground-breaking research is bringing direct benefits to many spheres of life - helping industry to maintain its competitive edge and creating improvements in the areas of health, medicine, space science, the environment, communications, defence and social policy. The results of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008, confirmed that the University of Surrey continues to consolidate its strength as a world-class, research-intensive institution.

The University of Trento (Italy)

The University of Trento is placed in a location which has always been the connecting point between the Mediterranean world and Central Europe. It has always paid attention to joining forces and creating complementarities with Italian and foreign institutions and organizations.

In little more than 40 years of history, the University has been characterized by the intense mobility of students and lecturers, aimed at a constant improvement of research and didactics. The international dimension can be considered one of the features through which the University of Trento can reach prominent positions in Italian university ranking. 15,000 students, 500 people between lecturers and researchers and 500 people in the non-academic staff: these numbers reflect the situation of a University able to offer an ideal study and research environment aiming at meeting the wishes of each person.

The School of Sociology and Social Research at Trento conducts research which addresses the problem of the relation between social change, new and old inequalities and the individual and collective strategies used to face them. The sharing of a paradigm of sociology as a social science – to quote Boudon's famous definition, from the debate on European social science - that takes shape within a path that highlights the integration between sociological theory and empirical research, represents a basic element and an epistemological distinction of all those who work, teach and research in this area.

Roskilde University, Department for Society and Globalisation

Roskilde University is a state university founded in 1972 with the objective of providing research and education at the highest level in the fields of natural science, social science and the humanities. These activities at Roskilde University are organised in six departments; degrees are offered in a wide range of subjects at Bachelor, Master and Ph.D. levels. Many study programmes are now being offered in English at both undergraduate and graduate levels, thus creating an exciting and inspiring study environment for both Danish students and students coming from abroad.

The Department of Society and Globalisation carries out research and teaching in EU-studies, Global Studies, International Development Studies, Public Administration, Social Science and Master in Public Policy.