Meet the 2023 Unusual Collaborations Teams!
The Centre for Unusual Collaborations is proud to announce the start of seven fantastic Unusual Collaborations! The teams that were selected are at various stages of the research process: three teams recently finished their Spark grant, two teams enter their second year of the Unusual Collaborations grant and two other teams embark on their third and thus final year with support of CUCo. Please meet the teams!
Three teams make the transition from Spark to Unusual Collaboration:
Dirty Work, Clean Future
With growing attention for labor shortages and employment conditions, it is remarkable that an unsustainable form of employment is understudied: dirty work. In our project, we aim to reduce occupational, social, and health inequalities by combining expertises. Visit their UCo page here.
Imagining More-than-Human Communities
Our project sets out to imagine what a more equitable community of humans and nonhumans might look like and how we can make it a reality in our everyday lives. Visit their UCo page here.
Plasticity
Do the separate usages and applications of the concept of plasticity have some common ground? If they do, how does this relate to the safe future evolution of our society? Visit their UCo page here.
Two teams that enter their second year as Unusual Collaboration:
Playing with the Trouble
A critical challenge for addressing urgent broad societal issues is to navigate multiple worldviews and perspectives, both within academic research contexts and at the interface of science and society. Spaces that cultivate playfulness can open up participants to express, share, question, and transform how they experience and act in the world. Visit their UCo page here.
All in the Same Boat
The All in the Same Boat team was inspired by our previous CUCo-funded work to take on an ambitious new goal in 2023. Specifically, we identified a gap in water-security-related research questions and approaches that involve society and the general public. Visit their UCo page here.
Finally, two teams are now entering their third year as an Unusual Collaboration:
Power of One
Individuals with intersecting identities or complex situations are often unseen and unheard in society. The Power of One focuses on these individuals who are often not reached by professionals, and whose needs are often not assessed. Visit their UCo page here.
Chronic Pain (Connecting the Dots)
Chronic pain is complex and cannot be solved by the medical profession alone. We are an interdisciplinary team, consisting of a linguist, psychologist, neurobiologist, immunologist, anaesthesiologist, engineer, veterinarian, behavioural and molecular scientist and combine knowledge and skills to understand chronic pain. Visit their UCo page here.
You are invited to follow the progress of these exciting teams throughout the project duration on their project webpages. The teams receive an Unusual Collaborations grant for a year, during which time CUCo will support them beyond the funding, also to stimulate cross-project fertilization around the process of collaboration. In doing so we enable the teams to reach their ambitious goals for these wonderfully unusual collaborations.
The selection was done through a lottery held on the 15th of December, read more about CUCo’s motivation to use lottery here.