Mission and Definition of the BSRS:
Global Development Challenges

The Bergen Summer Research School is an initiative of the Bergen academic milieu’s commitment to produce and disseminate research-based education to address some key global challenges posed by an increasingly knowledge-based, complex, multicultural, religiously diverse, and unequal global society. Climate and environmental changes, health challenges and new diseases as well as pervasive severe poverty and marginalization of certain groups and regions, call for interdisciplinary spaces for debate, dialogue and joint learning.

The Bergen Summer Research School is is a joint venture under the leadership of the
University of Bergen with the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration (NHH), the Christian Michelsen Institute on Human Rights and Development (CMI),
the Bergen University College (HIB) and UNIFOB (research organization affiliated to the University of Bergen)

Our mission is:

- to offer high quality disciplinary, inter-disciplinary and problem-oriented research-based
  education to a broad audience of doctoral students and junior researchers from all areas
  of the world.
- to form an international platform for discussion and dissemination of new perspectives
  on key global challenges:

• Global Poverty
• Climate, Environment and Energy
• Global Health
• Norms, Values, Language and Culture

Norway is a committed donor country and a wealthy economy endowed with important natural resources. The Bergen academic milieu has committed to the rethinking of the implications of Norway’s position in the world today, emphasizing these key themes and research areas as our institutions already have extensive research on them.

As a leading donor country concerned with sustainable development and poverty issues but also as a country ranking first in the Human Development Index, the Bergen academic milieu wishes to take a leadership position in addressing these themes as truly global challenges and interrelated to one another. This challenges us in advanced economies to seek both alternative knowledge and alternative solutions.

The Bergen Summer Research School is both a strategy for internationalization at home and a commitment to reach out to young researchers all over the world to share and to learn together. Our courses and activities are led by Norwegian scholars, but always in equal partnership with our networks in both the south as well as the north. We aim to build opportunities and lessons based on high quality disciplinary and inter-disciplinary and problem-oriented research. We will have a balanced geographic representation of students from all areas of the world.

Our portfolio of doctoral courses advances the mission of the Bergen Summer Research School, each organized in small groups with full scientific independence led by teams of Bergen researchers in collaboration with internationally recognized scholars from all fields of study.

The courses are structured around a conference-like event with plenary roundtables, social and cultural activities and keynote speakers. The Bergen Summer Research School reaches out to other social, cultural, political and economic organizations in the Bergen area, such as the Bergen Chamber of Commerce, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Private Foundations, and the City of Bergen.

A set of plenary events: keynote speakers and plenary roundtables, and social and cultural activities will offer students and guest researchers the possibility to interact with other participants, learn from other disciplines, and explore the socio-cultural life of the city of Bergen and its beautiful natural surroundings. The Bergen Summer Research School contributes to the profiling of Bergen as a knowledge city.