What are General Affairs Unit and International Research Promotion Group?

General Affairs Unit

The General Affairs Unit, consisting of project leaders and three co-investigators for each research project, will put into practice the "integration of humanities and social sciences centered on interrelations" by integrating and linking the research results of each research project. The group plays a central role within this project of "Relational Studies on Global Crisis" by gathering and consolidating the knowledge of academics regarding the crisis in front of us.

In this research project, which is focused on relations, we organize research projects in which various research methods and research subject areas coexist with the level of interrelation between the research subjects being a common item. The General Affairs team is a point of contact between research projects combining various methodologies, and it achieves a new organic connection which does not lapse into the vertically structured research types of conventional science. It is the role of the General Affairs team to change the individual basic research that is pursued by the research projects into a problem-solving type of applied science for the "contemporary problems faced by the entirety of human beings," which can be regarded as a "new crisis".

Therefore, the General Affairs Unit will promote discussions that cross-cut research projects through an annual general meeting, international workshops both inside and outside Japan, and young researchers' workshops. For this purpose, we will establish (1) a Committee for the Cultivation of Junior Researchers, (2) an Online Journal Editorial Committee, and (3) a Public Relations Committee.

The Committee for the Cultivation of Junior Researchers actively bridges publicly offered research and planned research, actively incorporates young researchers into the project, and hosts young researchers' workshops. The Online Journal Editorial Committee publishes both an online journal with overseas front-line researchers as editorial members and high-quality papers in foreign languages in cooperation with the Public Relations Committee in charge of web presence, thus improving the quality of the project while striving for international recognition.

International Research Promotion Group

At the center of this new project of "Relational Studies on Global Crisis" is research focused directly on local societies including those in conflict areas such as in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. To this end, it is important to conduct research not only of the political and economic situations of regions and countries at various stages of a conflict, civil war, and their refugees, but also research what is familiar to the local communities concerned, such as their history and cultural background. For this reason, we have added three co-investigators to each project leader and organized an International Research Promotion Group.

The main role of the International Research Promotion Group is to work in cooperation with the General Affairs Unit to discover "contemporary problems faced by the entirety of humanity," which can be regarded as a "new crisis," and plan and organize international workshops every year concerning this subject. Here we have chosen the best overseas researchers from various research fields who will not only conduct collaborative research with prominent researchers in Europe and the United States, but will also build an international and inter-disciplinary network with local researchers, practitioners, media professionals, etc. They will then develop and disseminate internationally the "Relational Studies on Global Crisis" advocated by this project.

International conferences as a place of joint research with overseas nations will be held not only in Japan but emphasis will also be placed on holding such conferences in the countries and regions to be studied, such as Asia, the Middle East, Africa, South Eastern Europe, etc. This is because, by having Japanese researchers who specialize in the area discuss the urgent problems locally with local researchers, they can communicate the seriousness of their approach to the problems to the local society and, at the same time, they can directly call attention to the high level of research by Japanese researchers. We would like to realize a direct exchange of research with researchers in countries and regions that are most affected by the global crisis by having researchers go to the sites themselves.

In addition, the International Research Promotion Group plans to actively invite researchers from local societies to Japan as visiting researchers. Among researchers from non-Western countries such as Asia, Africa and the Middle East, there are many people who feel a distance from the Western-style framework of the humanities and the social sciences. Through these attempts, providing new viewpoints to locally-based researchers from Japan is also a groundbreaking point in this project of Scientific Research on Innovative Areas.