Coming up in 2024

Grant Equality and structural reform 

We will carry our demands for grant equality and structural reforms into 2024 and look forward to working with the new president towards these goals.  We have high hopes that the new President will recognize the long-standing and structural issues that plague EUI and work together with us towards successful and sustainable reforms. 

Mission Funding 

Looking into the new year of 2024, we have heard your demands for a discussion surrounding Mission funding, travel costs, and the effects of grant inequality on questions of research missions and conference travel. For this we are happy to announce a General Assembly on the 7th of February that will focus on this issue. We will send out a formal invitation with an agenda in the coming days. Meanwhile, we invite you to send us an email and contribute your experiences, struggles, and urgent matters related to mission funding challenges. Your input is crucial in shaping effective solutions!

EUIRU and post-doctoral fellows

We are in talks with the representatives of the post-doctoral fellows on how we can work together towards inflation adjustments and better working and living conditions. We are also in discussion of how to better include them in the EUIRU and how researchers and post-doctoral fellows can most effectively work together towards improving the EUI. 

External Network 

The EUIRU Board has decided to focus on building a network of contacts beyond the EUI, focusing especially on contacts in EU institutions and with other researcher unions. We are currently contacting the European Trade Union Committee for Education to explore possible avenues of collaboration. We have also established initial contacts with members of the European Parliament and hope to continue our advocacy efforts towards raising awareness about grant inequality at EUI among MEPs and the EU Commission. In regards to establishing contacts across universities and researcher unions, we are very happy to see the initial collaboration between The Postgraduate Workers' Organisation of Ireland and the EUIRU, pushed by Irish researchers at EUI. We are also in contact with the CEU student protest group and CEU student Union to explore how we may work together on our respective demands for liveable wages for PhD researchers. We hope to further expand the number of researcher unions we collaborate with and if anyone would like to support our efforts or has contacts to researcher unions, or political actors, please reach out to the Union board.

AltSOU 2024

The Union is happy to see the continued effort by researchers at EUI to critique the State of the Union and work on establishing an alternative format that empowers us researchers and addresses the issues we see as important and often forgotten or marginalized in top-down and elitist spaces like the State of the Union. 

The AltSOU Taskforce is pleased to announce the Alternative State of the Union 2024! We are looking for any person who might be motivated to organize sessions, activities, debates or artistic performances! The AltSOU is an independent grassroots initiative led by researchers. It aims at bringing forth key social and political issues which may not be fully reflected in institutionally-led events: the climate crisis, the fortification of borders in Europe, austerity, human rights violations… It is up to us researchers to create the conference we would like to see.

Looking into the new year of 2024, we hope to continue our efforts made in the past year and continue pushing for improvements in the living and working conditions of researchers, towards grant equality,  improving the sustainability of EUI, and pushing for high quality and accessible education and research for all. 

We are looking forward to another year of impactful collaboration.