University of Bergen

The University of Bergen (UiB) is a young, modern university with about 16,500 students and 3,600 faculty and staff, making it a medium sized European University. UiB is an internationally recognised research university and the most cited university in Norway. Seven faculties cover most of the traditional university disciplines. Within the faculties are included 54 different specialised departments, multi-disciplinary research centres and institutes. The University is engaged in the European Union's Framework programmes for research and technological development and has been designated as a European Research Infrastructure and a Research Training Site in several scientific fields. UiB is involved in 109 FP7 projects – 38 coordinated by UiB. To date, UiB has been awarded 95 projects under H2020 of which 33 are coordinated by UiB. UiB researchers and administrators receive professional support from a dedicated research support team consisting of advisers from different divisions like finance, research administration or communication during applications and for project management.

The project will be hosted at the Sociological Institute at the Faculty of Social Sciences at UiB. The faculty covers with its seven departments a broad range of social science disciplines and provides education at all levels. The Faculty has approx. 3000 students taking Bachelor and Master's degrees, covering 45 different study programs. In 2017, the Faculty had approximately 137 person-years in permanent academic positions. The Faculty’s research activities cover a broad spectrum of themes and geographical scales, from the local to European and global. Research related to development, migration, work life, and welfare are among the research priorities of the Faculty. Researchers at the Faculty of Social Sciences have extensive international collaboration. In addition to the Faculty’s own internationally renowned scholars, a considerable number of internationally leading researchers have close relations with our departments. The Faculty’s involvement in EU programs of research and innovation dates back to late 1990s. Since the EU’s 4th Framework Programme, the Faculty’s different departments have initiated, hosted, and coordinated a number of European Union funded projects. In recent years researchers at Faculty of Social Sciences have won ERC Starting Grant, Consolidator Grant and Advanced Grant. The Faculty of Social Sciences currently hosts the Horizon 2020 Societal challenge 6 project “Transforming into Open, Innovative and Collaborative Governments“ (TROPICO). The Faculty also hosted the European Consortium for Pacific Studies (ECOPAS), funded under FP7. Several of the departments are involved as partners in projects awarded under the Societal challenges calls in Horizon 2020.

Main Tasks in the Project

While the University of Bergen contributes throughout the project, its main tasks and expertise relates to refining the innovative methodological framework with the application of the MILC approach to identifying, researching and comparing innovative practices at its corse (WP2) and to exploring stakeholders’ knowledge and experiences of current practices that aim to tackle educational inequality in each country (WP5). While it will have a major contribution throughout WP5 centering on practice research, it acts as consultant for the secondary data analysis and policy analysis according to its expertise regarding these fields.