IFRIS brings together 180 researchers and academic researchers with widely diverse international experience in terms of:
- the kind of actions they have participated in, from providing occasional expertise to institutional support for projects
- themes of cooperation
- partner countries (24 partnerships in 2009, outside European network).
In terms of research, the international activities of the members of IFRIS mainly focus on countries that have high levels of competency in the specialties concerned (i.e. Europe, USA and, to a lesser extent, Asia).
At an international level, the most active centres within the fields of research of IFRIS are the following:
In Europe
- Institute for the Study of Science, Technology, and Innovation (ISSTI), University of Edinburgh
- Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS), University of Oxford
- Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR), University of Manchester
- Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (website)
- Science and Technology Policy Research (SPRU), University of Sussex
- Institute for Innovation and Governance Studies (IGS), University of Twente, NL
- Department of Technology & Society Studies, University of Maastricht, NL (website)
In the United States
- Science, Technology, and Society Center, UC Berkeley (website)
- Department of Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University (website)
- Program on Science, Technology and Society, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University (website)
- Department of the History of Science, Harvard University (website)
- Science and Technology Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison (website)
- Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society, UC Berkeley (website)
- GeorgiaTech, School of Public Policy (website)
IFRIS has close relationships with most of the following centres:
- Like IFRIS, many European centres are affiliates of the EU SPRI Forum, a European research consortium set up to extend certain activities of the (REX) PRIME network of excellence.
- Certain members of IFRIS are also affiliates of different research centres (e.g. BIOS, MIoIR, Harvard, Georgia Tech, MPI Berlin, CSTMS UC Berkeley, etc.) or have spent long periods there.
- IFRIS collaborates on a regular basis (e.g. common research projects, seminars, conferences, committees, etc.) with most of these centres (e.g. BIOS, ISSTI, ISSIS, MIoIR, SPRU, Berkeley, Cornell, Harvard, Georgia Tech).
By way of an example, IFRIS hosted the 11th Annual Meeting of the Science and Democracy Network (SDN), which was held on 25-27 June 2012 on the premises of the CNAM in Paris. The SDN, created in 2002 and headed by Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of Harvard University, aims to promote exchanges between researchers and teaching staff in the field of Science, Technology and Society. To this end, it organizes an annual meeting which brings together sixty or so researchers from different countries.
IFRIS has also developed a research project with South Korea, as follow up to the interaction started with the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STEPI) over the course of two seminars organized in Seoul in September 2007 and in Paris in April 2008. Under this project, which will be financed for 2 years by the French Ministry of European and Foreign Affairs within the framework of the STAR Hubert Curien partnership, a conference was organized in 2009 in co-operation with STEPI. Two missions in Korea in 2009 and 2010 within the framework of the STAR Hubert Curien Partnership enabled the partnership between IFRIS and the Korean STS community to be extended, on the theme of the emergence of “science studies”.
We also worked with our partners on the organization of two workshops, the first of which was held in France in 2012 and the second in Korea in 2013.
IFRIS is actively contributing to the structuring of the European STIS community. Many members of the Expert Groups of the European Union are part of the Institute’s teams. Such is the case for the Expert Groups on Science and Governance (Felt et al. 2007) and on Historical Perspectives on Science, Society and the Political (Pestre, Ed. 2007). Many of IFRIS’ researchers are members of the panels of the European Research Council.