The Faculty of Social Sciences is and will continue to be an important and visible part of the University of Oslo. The faculty has many highly qualified individual researchers and research groups that perform well both nationally and internationally. Additionally, the faculty has many committed and excellent educators, as well as many attractive study programs that attract students with the ability to benefit from their studies. Furthermore, the faculty has a highly competent administration and a solid financial foundation. In the coming period, we aim to build on the good work already being done and continue developing the faculty as a research environment and as a teaching and learning arena. We also wish to strengthen the faculty's role as a visible contributor to public debate and to the national and international knowledge society.
Society faces many challenges that require high-quality social science knowledge and research. Relevant examples include climate change and green transition, inclusion of children and youth, challenges to democracy, economic and social inequality both nationally and internationally, technological development, demographic changes in the population, mental health, pandemics and other crises, migration, and cultural diversity. We wish to facilitate the faculty's further development, management, and dissemination of social science knowledge through solid research and research-based education and contribute to putting this knowledge to use.
During the next four-year period, we particularly wish to focus on the following issues:
Research and researcher education
The faculty is and should continue to be an attractive workplace for Norwegian and international researchers with ambitions to advance the frontiers of knowledge and solve relevant problems. An overarching goal is to create conditions for outstanding research and relevance to the major societal challenges.
- The knowledge society and academic freedom are under pressure internationally. The society’s trust in established knowledge and research as a means of expanding the frontiers of knowledge depends on openness and transparency. Together with the central administration and departments and research centres, we will work to ensure that our staff have updated knowledge of and conditions for fulfilling the society and financiers’ expectations of openness in research. This includes routines for efficient and secure handling and sharing of research data as well as availability of methods, results, publications, and other outcomes of the research.
- To ensure the high quality of research at the faculty, we will continue our efforts to provide our staff with access to relevant and updated research infrastructure. This applies to scientific equipment and lab facilities, digital and computational tools, and competence. To strengthen the funding opportunities for research infrastructure for the social sciences, we will work to ensure that central and national definitions of research infrastructure cover the needs of the faculty.
- The faculty has done well in competitive applications for external funding, both from the Research Council of Norway (RCN) and other financiers, such as the European Research Council (ERC). Academic freedom is a fundamental principle, and the faculty has been particularly concerned with funding schemes that do not impose strict restrictions on researchers’ choice of topics and research questions. The government has announced a review of the research system, and RCN has recently undergone major changes. How these transitions will affect the faculty remains unclear. In the future, it will be important to utilize both free and thematic funding schemes, and we will work to ensure that the faculty's staff have available information about the breadth of national and international tools for external funding.
- Introducing quarantine provisions in the RCN has emphasized the value of good internal application processes and quality assurance. We will work to further develop and strengthen the constructive collaboration between researchers and research administration in the development of relevant and competitive applications.
- The growth in externally funded projects affects the development of the disciplines and subject areas at the units. We will work to raise awareness among all parties involved about the importance of external funding applications supporting the desired subject area development, an appropriate organizational structure, and effective use of space.
- Not all research at the faculty is naturally organized as large externally funded projects. To ensure the breadth and diversity of research, we will work for good framework conditions for research that is not organized in such a way.
- We want to facilitate staff to work on issues that require knowledge from more than one subject area. We will identify any obstacles to collaboration between different units and work constructively with these and the central administration to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration where necessary.
- The researcher education at the faculty shall develop researchers with updated knowledge and skills necessary for performing high-quality research and contributing to identifying and solving important societal tasks both in and outside academia. We will continue the important work of highlighting the competence that the faculty's candidates in the PhD program can contribute to in working life.
- The education part of the faculty’s PhD program consists of a combination of common faculty courses and sub-program-specific courses. We will follow up the ongoing quality assurance work of the PhD program and continuously assess the need for changes in the common courses and how these can complement the subject-specific courses in the best possible way.
- The postdoctoral researchers are an important and growing group at the faculty. We will work to support the career development and ensure good working conditions for the faculty’s postdoctoral researchers.
Education
The overall goal of all teaching at the faculty is to educate graduates with solid social science knowledge and qualifications and a high awareness of their own competence. The faculty will offer research-based teaching of high academic quality in both Norwegian and English. Utsynsmeldingen (Meld. St. 14 (2022–2023) gives universities a greater responsibility for educating candidates demanded by the labor market and dimensioning study programs in a way that contributes to achieving this goal. At the same time, we receive clear signals that we cannot expect new study places in the future.
- The competence acquired by the faculty's students through their studies is in demand in the labor market, and we will work to ensure that the faculty's study programs continue to prepare students well for the job market that awaits them after completing their studies.
- An important condition for success in the labor market is that students have a high awareness of their competence. We will work to make students' competence awareness an integrated part of all teaching. We also want to develop, together with the departments and research centres and relevant parts of the labor market, educational offerings that allow our students to experience their own competence during their studies and thus contribute to giving them greater insight into their competence, their own academic interests, and academic goals. Part of this work must be done in dialogue with UiO's career services, which are undergoing reorganization. We will work to find appropriate forms of cooperation with these services.
- As part of a strategy to solidify the faculty's labor market network, we will, in collaboration with the departments and research centres, further develop and strengthen the offerings for continuing education and further education programs and support the development of a well-functioning alumni network.
- In collaboration with the Eilert's Learning Network EILIN, we will assist the faculty's educators in being innovative in their teaching and encourage and facilitate the use of student-active teaching and examination methods adapted to today's opportunities and challenges with digital tools and artificial intelligence. We will also create good spaces for teaching collaboration, exchange of experiences, and peer mentoring. We will work closely with the Utdanningsledermøte and Forum for studiespørsmål to achieve these goals.
- Changes in the degree regulations have opened for other institutions than UiO, UiB, NTNU, and UiT to offer professional education in psychology. It is very resource-intensive to build up academic communities and associated research infrastructure that are robust enough to offer research-based professional education in psychology, and there is already a shortage of relevant professionals in several of the subject areas included in the professional education in psychology. At the same time, it is difficult to recruit psychologists in many places in the South Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority’s area. We will actively support PSI's work to change the curriculum for professional education in ways that facilitate UiO, in close collaboration with the health trusts, to educate psychologists for the entire South Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority’s area.
Knowledge in use
Many of today's most important societal challenges require updated social science knowledge. It is a goal that the faculty's research is used by relevant actors.
- There is a long tradition of our employees contributing to societal changes through participation in public councils, committees, etc., and we will encourage employees to engage in such participation. We will also work to ensure that employees contribute to the public debate on topics they have research-based knowledge about.
- We will work to consolidate UiO's understanding that the concept of innovation also encompasses societal innovation. UiO's incentive and support schemes must be perceived as relevant for research with innovation potential at our faculty as well. We will support efforts to connect the ongoing research at the faculty to social innovation projects and to UiO's other innovation work, and we will mobilize participation in the innovation programs SPARK Norway and SPARK social innovation.
Organization and work environment
The faculty is based on a decentralized organizational form, and the departments and research centres have a high degree of autonomy. This organization creates good conditions for strategic subject development in strong academic communities with established quality requirements. This organization presupposes robust departments and centres that can make real subject-specific prioritizations and other strategic choices. We want to continue this decentralized organizational form. The faculty's economy is solid, but the departments’ and research centres’ economic situation varies somewhat. The government has announced a new allocation model for the higher education sector. UiO is likely to change its own allocation model as a result of changes in the ministry's allocation model. The faculty has a particular responsibility for services and measures that are not easily created in a decentralized system and where the quality of services and support functions improves by pooling resources.
- We will work to ensure that common services and administrative support are appropriately organized and dimensioned.
- We will continue the dialogue with the departments and research centres and work to ensure that there is good correspondence over time between the units' economic situation and their activity level.
- The work on a potential new allocation model at the faculty will be carried out in an organized and transparent manner.
- Both the work environment and subject development benefit from employees and students having a diverse background. The faculty faces gender equality challenges among both the scientific staff and the student body, although the challenges vary considerably between different units and study programs. We will follow up on the work done under the NFR-funded Balance project at the faculty and PSI in the previous board term. We will have an active attitude toward gender equality challenges and work for a good gender balance in the scientific staff in all units, as well as a better gender balance in the faculty's study programs.
- We support Opptaksutvalget’s proposal (NOU 2022: 17) to replace gender points with quotas for the underrepresented gender in selected study programs. At our faculty, this will be relevant for the professional program in psychology.
- We will also support initiatives to increase the proportion of students with immigrant backgrounds. In close collaboration with, among others, the school visit scheme and the faculty's communication resources, we will actively work for broad and diverse recruitment to our study programs.
- The faculty has space challenges. The renovation of Eilert Sundt's house led to significant densification, but did not solve all space challenges. We will work to ensure that the faculty's premises are well utilized.