Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH)

Coordinator of CitSci4SSH — Citizen Social Science for the Social Sciences and Humanities

Citizens in Power is working with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) within CitSci4SSH, an Erasmus+ KA220-HED cooperation partnership in higher education coordinated by AUTH and running from December 2026 to December 2028.

AUTH is Greece’s largest university, with 10 faculties, 44 departments and five independent departments, serving around 42,000 active students and employing approximately 2,300 teaching and research staff. Our counterpart within the university is the Peace & Innovation Journalism Lab (PJL) of the School of Journalism and Mass Media Communication, established in 2012, holder of two Jean Monnet Chairs and the only AUTH laboratory accredited within the UN Academic Impact Network.

What the collaboration does

CitSci4SSH embeds Citizen Social Science in accredited Social and Political Science curricula at four European universities. Students and expert citizens work together in CSS Living Labs on migration, asylum and identity narratives, producing assessed academic work from research carried out with the communities concerned rather than about them. The partnership delivers a shared pedagogical framework, credit-bearing modules, staff capacity-building and a multilingual open educational resources platform.

Roles

AUTH coordinates the partnership and leads project management and the work package on institutional uptake and staff capacity-building, contributing its expertise in conflict-sensitive reporting and the framing of migration in public discourse.

CIP leads dissemination, exploitation and sustainability, and is responsible for the pedagogical framework, staff train-the-trainer programme, the open educational resources platform, and the citizen partnerships, onboarding and Living Lab protocol that connect universities with civil society organisations and expert citizens.

Why it matters for CIP

The collaboration extends CIP’s work on civic participation and inclusive education into accredited higher education, and gives our methods for community engagement and non-formal learning a route into university curricula that continues after the project ends.