RESILIENCE (Religious Studies Infrastructure: tooLs, Innovation, Experts, conNections and Centres in Europe) is a distributed Research Infrastructure that entered the ESFRI Roadmap in 2021. Its mission is to address the challenge of creating a larger, structured involvement of excellent scholars who innovatively produce competencies, knowledge, approaches, and impact within the scientific domain of Religious Studies.
The main objective of the RESILIENCE Preparatory Phase Project (PPP) proposal is to bring the RI to the completion of its Preparatory Phase, which started in 2021 and will end in 2025. The work includes legal, governance, financial, technical, strategic, and administrative aspects carried out in 6 work packages.
The primary outcomes of the PPP are the setting-up of the legal and financial frameworks of the functioning of the RI; the preparation of signature-ready documents towards the implementation phase; the completion of the RESILIENCE service catalogue, and the establishment of legal agreements and technical frameworks for their operation.
RESILIENCE already conducted a socio-economic ex-ante impact study, which assumes that every impact of the RI has a scientific dimension due to the origin of every activity within the framework of RESILIENCE.
Therefore, the scientific impact of RESILIENCE is both quantitative and qualitative: the RI offers not only access to a wide and ever-enlarging data sets for the study of religions, but most importantly works towards the strengthening of the scientific excellence, improvement of the research conditions and leverage of the quality of research conducted in the European Research Area and beyond, functioning as a pole of attraction for users all over the world.
This is made possible by the services offered through the platform, which helps primarily scholars but also other users to access data and conduct research both physically and virtually, with the help of peers and experts. The RI offers a fertile environment which stimulates the production of interdisciplinary, international and intercultural knowledge about religion that is able to challenge the assumptions of frontier science such as Quantum Science and AI science.
Religious Studies are a cross-disciplinary domain and through the RI it is possible to challenge a conception of siloed research boundaries and of limited fields of application, also in society.
Moreover, the RI accelerates collaboration beyond the EU, serving as an entrance point to the broad variety of European research on religions to global partners and grounding the position of the EU as a leader in the scientific domain of the RI.
Access is key to this purpose, especially access to the sources and to the community of scholars, which is the outcome RESILIENCE aims at with the work of the PP: RESILIENCE impact on the community by:
- reducing the obstacles in the transnational access to the resources for Religious Studies, with the establishment of a central hub as entrance point to distributed resources such as manuscripts, experts, devices;
- enhancing the onsite and online access to digitised resources, thanks to a large TNA programme;
- increasing the mobility of scholars who need to conduct their research on the resources consulted onsite and contributing to the digitisation of resources. As mobility has a long-enduring and visible impact on the research quality of the community if and only when it is supported by local peers and experts, funds, and co-projected dissemination activities, RESILIENCE will invest in the provision of such services.
Previous INFRAIA (ReIReS) and INFRADEV (RESILIENCE) projects already allow the RI to evaluate its impact on the community of scholars through access and mobility (ReIReS TNA programme and intra-consortium mobility activities), and plan on how to scale-up such activities. To better assess and identify its path towards impact, RESILIENCE shares the views expressed by RI-PATHS impact categorisation, so to grasp the diversity of impacts created by the RI ecosystem besides the scientific one, RESILIENCE adopts the following operational categories: 1. society, 2. policy, 3. economy and innovation, 4. human resources.
