About us
What is the Science Shop?
- The Science Shop promotes and supports community-engaged research and learning. We connect community partners – civil society organizations, nonprofits, social entrepreneurs, active citizens’ groups – with faculty members and university students. Our aim is to advance science-society dialogue and encourage participation in addressing social and ecological problems.
We channel our community partners’ questions into university courses and research, where lecturers, researchers, and students collaborate with the community partners to answer them through mutual learning.
We connect civil society – representing community interests and values – and academic stakeholders, supporting their cooperation and the joint formulation of tasks and expectations. We do all this in the hope that, by working together, participants will grow from understanding each other’s perspectives and knowledge.
The support provided by the Science Shop includes
- identifying both academic and community needs embedding them into teaching and research opportunities,
- connecting relevant community partners with research or project needs depending on course projects, theses or research endeavors,
- facilitating and supporting the entire process, and
- providing a space for reflection and evaluation to assess the process and outcomes in pursuit of mutual growth and understanding.
OUR STORY
CSS’s immediate precedent was an exciting international project, EnRRICH (Enhancing Responsible Research and Innovation through Curricula in Higher Education), in which, in cooperation with renowned science shops, we looked at our courses, through the eyes of the society. Its other forerunner was the Social Enterpreneurship and Social Economy Master course, where, since 2006, we have been organizing course projects with social entrepreneurs building on the philosophy of service-learning. We spent the time between these two stages, preparing for the future. Among others, two of our founders studied at summer schools led by Henk Mulder, a founding father of the Living Knowledge Network from the University of Groningen’s Beta Science Shop. In spring 2017, our activities became institutionalized: the CBS Faculty Council and the University Senate approved the establishment of the Science Shop. Already in that semester, we worked on four pilot projects and started our workshops.
