University of Malta (UM)

CIP and the University of Malta have worked together since 2021, across three EU-funded projects.

The University of Malta is the country’s sole public higher education institution, with a 400-year history, some 11,500 students including around 1,000 international students from 92 countries, and 14 faculties across four campuses. Over the past fifteen years it has taken part in 365 EU-funded projects, 114 of them under Erasmus+.

HEIDI — Digital action at higher education institutions as a catalyst for social change (2021–2023)

Our first collaboration. Coordinated by the Extreme Citizen Science group at University College London, with CRI (University of Paris), the University of Malta, Web2Learn (Greece) and CIP, HEIDI worked to strengthen the capacity of universities to support community-driven knowledge and action during the COVID-19 crisis. The project delivered 90 events reaching 3,000 people in five countries, examining the barriers to university involvement in public digital engagement and creating conditions for citizens and higher education institutions to co-create digital action.

ArcH App — Digitalising youth awareness of the European built heritage

An Erasmus+ youth cooperation partnership bringing together the University of Malta’s Faculty for the Built Environment, Eurocircle (France), DRAMBLYS (Spain), Innovation Hive (Greece) and CIP. The project equipped youth workers to help young people aged 18–30, including those from marginalised groups, to discover the European dimension of local built heritage, producing modular training, digital guided visits to 60 heritage buildings across the partner cities, and the “Buildings alert!” mobile application.

CitSci4SSH — Citizen Social Science for the Social Sciences and Humanities (2026–2028)

Our current collaboration, an Erasmus+ KA220-HED cooperation partnership coordinated by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, with partners in Greece, Cyprus, Croatia, Malta and Ireland. The project embeds citizen social science in accredited Social and Political Science curricula, with students and expert citizens working together in CSS Living Labs.

UM participates through its Faculty of Education, whose team works in science communication, co-creation, STEAM pedagogy and participatory evaluation. The Maltese strand of the project concerns how quantified claims about population and migration are constructed and understood — the most quantitative of the four national cases. CIP leads dissemination, exploitation and sustainability, and is responsible for the pedagogical framework, the staff training programme and the citizen partnerships that bring expert citizens into the pilots.

The thread across the three projects is consistent: how universities work with communities rather than about them, and what it takes institutionally to make that work last.