Nataša Pantić, Professor in Educational Change and Diversity at the University of Edinburgh and a Core Fellow at HCAS, has secured €2 million from
“Schools rely heavily on tacit relational knowledge – informal ways staff understand and support students, each other, and their wider communities. Schools are places of belonging and togetherness as well as learning – fundamental functions of education as public good, that we need to better understand, capture, and invest in,” Pantić explains.
The investigation will be carried out in eight schools across Scotland, Sweden, Belgium, and Serbia. RelatED is designed to uncover the norms and interactions that underlie and shape relationships in schools. Relational agency is central not only to teaching and learning but also to fostering social connectedness. As Pantić notes, “Learning is deeply interactive, and informal knowledge shapes both academic aspirations and belonging in schools.” This aspect is particularly relevant given the growing diversity in student populations.
By generating new knowledge about relational agency, the project aims to understand the essence and mechanisms of relationship-building in education and to enable more intentional approaches to shaping it. “How do you create the kind of environment where people can be who they are?” Pantić asks. “Our social networks influence how we behave, but we also create them ourselves. They don’t just exist. My hope is that we can learn how these relational environments are malleable through people’s behavior at both the individual and collective levels.”
ERC Consolidator grants support ambitious, curiosity-driven research across a wide range of scientific fields. Funded projects are expected to have strong potential to reshape their fields and open new areas of inquiry. Pantić sees multidisciplinary collaboration as a key to achieving this aim: “Combining different disciplinary perspectives is not just a nice idea – it’s essential for the project. Schools are complex spaces shaped by learning, diversity, and organizational culture. Understanding relationships requires insights from multiple fields,” she emphasizes.
“I feel excited about the opportunity to collaborate with schools across Europe, and with my wonderful colleagues at the Universities of Belgrade, Brussels and Stockholm, as well as a wider network of scholars to bring the sociological, phycological, and ethnographic perspectives to understanding the relational agency across different cultural and structural conditions.”
HCAS-RJ Fellow Olle Blomberg has, together with two co-investigators, received funding from the
“In Sweden, there have been public debates about how co-authors of scientific publications are held responsible in cases of misconduct. In some cases, whistleblowers who were co-authors were also held responsible – something many consider unfair. The aim of the project is to figure out a fair way to hold co-authors responsible – acceptable to both the scientific community and the public.”
Although rooted in philosophy, the project investigates real-life cases by collecting empirical data in Sweden. “There’s actually very little empirical research on how these decisions are made – who is held responsible and what sanctions universities impose when someone is judged to be responsible,” Blomberg says. “I’m really excited about the project. It’s a very practical area where issues of collective responsibility are especially salient. There’s also a lot of interesting theoretical discussion about collective responsibility, and I think it’s productive to bring these areas together.”
Blomberg hopes the project will lead to practical tools and a more nuanced understanding of accountability: “For example, you can be responsible without being deserving of sanction. Even if you’re not at fault as a co-author, you’re still involved in some way and have a duty to answer questions and assist with investigations.”
Ethical guidelines for researchers often refer to joint or collective responsibility, yet how to apply these notions remains unclear. “Philosophers have shown that you could in principle hold a group responsible without holding each individual responsible. But how do you do that in practice?” Blomberg asks. To address this, the project examines research ethics literature and develops a framework for evaluating models of responsibility assignment in different cases. It will consider a genuinely collectivist model of co-authorship – a novel contribution to discussions about co-author responsibility and, more broadly, research ethics.