Centre for Future Societies Research
Centre for Future Societies Research carries out interdisciplinary investigations into complex ways of making our future world a better place. The Centre membership consists of nearly 120 academic and research members of staff. This creates an exceptionally diverse collection of knowledge and expertise that is commensurable with the hard and open problems of increasing our understanding for the ways of creating better future societies.
The Centre links to the six university research themes of food, global economy, health and wellbeing, heritage, cultures and communities, information and security, and space. Its research areas are compatible with the areas of the University Alliance (UA) Doctoral Training Alliance focus on Future Societies, including:
- Resource Sustainability: food / water / energy;
- Citizen Equality: poverty / education / justice / inequality; and
- Societal Challenges: health / ageing / housing / climate / security / transport.
While the research themes and the Doctoral Training Alliance research strands have the ingredients of future societies, the Centre combines these ingredients in a range of joined-up ways to seek recipes for future societies. These recipes are evaluated using rigorous interdisciplinary methods in the context of global scenarios and the UN Sustainable Development Goals to create insights into the pathways towards values-led change in the global development.
The Centre members have national and international collaborations with over 100 institutions, which makes the Centre ideally placed to apply its critical mass and collective knowledge towards a better future for all.
Professor Hulya Dagdeviren
Centre Director
Hulya is Director of the Centre for Future Societies Research at the University of Hertfordshire. She is also a Professor of Economic Development. Her research focuses on social consequences of economic structure and policy for poorer sections of society in two areas. The first is related to the dynamics of the crisis and austerity programmes post 2008, especially with respect to inequalities associated with household debt, local government debt and resilience. The second is related to the governance of environmental resources such as water, energy and land with implications for access, inequality, affordability and sustainability.