Societal impact

To achieve impact on our society, our department aims at meaningful exchange with and involvement of public and private stakeholders in the research, including communities, neighbourhood representatives and marginalised population groups.

In our view, societal impact can be reached on many different levels and includes, but also goes beyond, outreach such as public lectures and public communication. We focus on four types of key activities that foster interaction between education, research and society at large:
 

  1. Societal learning. We educate students to be socially-engaged professionals through career and employment prospects, by connecting teaching and learning to topical issues and by providing links between teaching and societal issues, practice and Lifelong Learning.
  2. Societal advice. We support organisations in tackling pressing societal issues, including governance, legal and economic issues, through both short-term and more lengthy, commissioned research.
  3. Societal debate. We actively direct relevant knowledge towards society, through expert roles, lectures, social media, media communications and public events, as well as through public engagement and outreach activities.
  4. Societal co-production and co-creation. We emphasise transdisciplinary research in co-production with social partners including governments, NGOs and businesses, and business development by way of stakeholder networks and multi-year agreements. We also focus on co-creation activities with the communities and organisations we include in our academic research projects.

Collaboration

For information and collaboration, please contact our knowledge broker, Simone Pekelsma.