Responsible Research and Innovation is an approach that anticipates and assesses potential implications and societal expectations with regard to research and innovation, with the aim to foster the design of inclusive and sustainable research and innovation

Horizon 2020

The European Commission (EC) supports research and innovation that upholds European values of inclusiveness and democratic politics. Science, research, and innovation are central to the European strategy for smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth. The European Commission (EC) has also formulated Responsible Research and Innovation in terms of six key areas:

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT * GENDER EQUALITY * SCIENCE LITERACY / SCIENCE EDUCATION * OPEN ACCESS * ETHICS * GOVERNANCE

As part of the NewHoRRIzon project, the Social Lab on ERC and EURO-EXPERT agreed on the creation of a website dedicated to foster RRI elements and initiate interaction from practitioners and the public.

RRI is implicitly cutting across all EURO-EXPERT’s action:

• it starts from the focus of the project: assessing the impact of Cultural Expertise, which we broadly define as the involvement of social scientists as expert witnesses in court and out-of-court litigation. Systematic record for the contribution of Social Sciences to dispute resolution causes is not only an unprecedented contribution to Social Sciences but also to taxpayers for contributing to a more effective use of taxpayer’s funded legal aid
• RRI plays a role also in the scrutiny of the very notion of Cultural Expertise for what concerns GENDER, power, access to justice, and their impact on GOVERNANCE. We will measure the risk that Cultural Expertise might perpetuate power imbalance by unconsciously condoning patriarchal practices, unequal access to justice and hindering democratic governance
• RRI has also guided the creation of the team of EURO-EXPERT: a full time post-doc position which is designed as a spring board for a talented post-doc who will have the opportunity to gain highly specialised skills in project coordination and will participate into an extremely knowledgeable and competitive research network
• the project has collected data in 16 European countries, soliciting contributions in a bottom up approach
• the deliverables of the project are also guided by RRI because we are creating a tool to assess the prospective impact of the use of Cultural Expertise. This tool will be available in OPEN ACCESS to professionals and beneficiaries in litigation involving the potential appointment of a cultural expert.