Organizing spaces of creativtiy and reflection (OSCAR): The university and sustainable regional development
Project Description
The research project OSCAR asks how institutions of higher education organize their spatial development in an increasingly urban, creative and entrepreneurial society. Apart from pointing out and quantifying universities as places of education and consumption, the project team zooms in on how universities serve society as places of encounter, critical reflection and creativity. From this later perspective, universities have been described as third spaces, laboratories and heterotopias. It is this emerging and interdisciplinary stream of research that the proposed project seeks to contribute to, by developing a decidedly processual and spatio-aesthetic perspective. Drawing on the concepts of heterotopic space and affective atmospheres the research team seeks to understand how creativity and reflexivity emerge from encounters on and off campus.
Tracing practices of university development through approximately five ethnographic case studies, the project aims to understand, systematize and reflect established and emerging interspaces between university and society. The project follows the everyday practices of university life and traces how it intermingles the in- and outsides of university space. In particular, the research will focus on exploring new and experimental ways of creating encounters between the university and its economic, cultural and societal context. The project will publish its findings in both the context of the academic discourse on what has been addressed as the university's "third mission" and within the local practical context of the University of Liechtenstein. It thus seeks to inform the future practices of universities in general and the University of Liechtenstein, the Principality of Liechtenstein and its citizens in particular.
Project results:
Tracing practices of university development through approximately five ethnographic case studies, the project aims to understand, systematize and reflect established and emerging interspaces between university and society. The project follows the everyday practices of university life and traces how it intermingles the in- and outsides of university space. In particular, the research will focus on exploring new and experimental ways of creating encounters between the university and its economic, cultural and societal context. The project will publish its findings in both the context of the academic discourse on what has been addressed as the university's "third mission" and within the local practical context of the University of Liechtenstein. It thus seeks to inform the future practices of universities in general and the University of Liechtenstein, the Principality of Liechtenstein and its citizens in particular.
Project results:
