Crisis | Research | Recovery

Our Mission Statement

Multiple crises negatively affect people in the UK and abroad – from the COVID-19 pandemic, climate crisis, cost-of-living crisis, the Ukraine or Sudan crisis, and more. The public, governments, international organisations, non-governmental organisations, and private companies all are trying to find ways to recover from crisis, and to prevent future crises. C2R aims to understand these overlapping crises and how to overcome them. C2R tackles three core problems:

• What are the causes of these multiple, and overlapping, crises?
• Why do crises persist, and how does overlap between crises explain their persistence?
• How can we recover from crises, especially when crises overlap?How can policies, interventions, and public engagement help recover from crisis and prevent or better respond to future crises?

Our Objectives

External

1. Jointly with C2R partners, produce a better understanding of these multiple and overlapping crises; how and why they emerge and persist; how to recover from crises; and how to prevent crises in the future.
2. Establish C2R as the go-to network and facilitator bringing together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in order to design policy and interventions to recover from and prevent crises.
3. Offer actionable education and public engagement in Essex, the UK, and beyond on the effects and management of crises, as well as the recovery from crises.

Internal

1. Improve our impact and research environment, and strategically use C2R to foster student recruitment and student experience, so that the REF and other important metrics reflect our commitment.
2. Generate greater community within the Department of Government, the University of Essex, other universities, and external partner organisations.
3. Build a narrative leading to greater visibility and acknowledgement of the Department of Government both within the University of Essex and externally.

What we offer

Our staff's research, methodological training and expertise have produce a track record of delivering results. The following include some of the potential collaboration avenues:

• Support navigation complex decision-making processes though research design, evaluation, metabolising data, modelling, data analysis.
• Translate scientific research findings by reviewing, contextualising, collecting and analysing public opinion data, administrative data, focus groups, etc.
• Use of published research to develop user-friendly handbooks, or Standard Operation Procedures (SOP) for various non-academic audiences.
• Provide tailor-made training and capacity building workshops through our Essex summer school in Social Science Data Analysis.