48 minute read
PROTAX
Taking on a taxing challenge
Tax crimes cost governments large sums of money every year and undermine public faith in the system, so countering them is a major priority across Europe. Researchers in the PROTAX project have worked together with stakeholders to develop effective toolkits for the investigation and prosecution of tax crimes, as Professor Umut Turksen explains.
The American writer Benjamin Franklin once said that death and taxes were the only two certainties in life, and while we can’t avoid the former at some point, many individuals and companies put a lot of effort into avoiding the latter. While there are legal routes to reducing tax bills, tax evasion and related avoidance conduct are illegal and continue to cost governments across Europe large sums of money every year, a topic at the heart of the EU-backed PROTAX project. “Nobody wants to pay more tax than they have to, but when the law prohibits an activity, how can we then enforce that more effectively? How can we change behaviour?” says Professor Umut Turksen, the project’s Principal Investigator. An additional focus in the project’s research is on the operational aspects of how law enforcement agencies work, the powers they hold, and how they can share information and cooperate at EU level effectively. “We work with financial intelligence units, the judicial authorities and tax authorities, as well as economic crime units within police forces. They are effectively our stakeholders,” continues Professor Turksen.
PROTAX project
Researchers have worked together with these stakeholders to build a deeper picture of tax crimes in different countries, looking at several case studies, holding workshops and assessing the different approaches that are taken to investigating them and enforcing the law. Tax crimes are often highly complex, so Professor Turksen says it’s important to consider the context in which they occur.
“PROTAX has found that enablers – tax professionals such as bankers, tax advisors, asset managers and accountants – often have competing legal and ethical obligations placed upon them in the course of their work,” he explains. “On the one hand, enablers have obligations to maximise their client’s financial interests. On the other hand, however, they are duty-bound to inform financial authorities of wrongdoing and participate in strategic policymaking to reduce tax crime. This contributes to the complexity of tax crime and demonstrates the need to address the environment in which tax crime occurs, not only to consider whether the correct laws are in place.”
The project’s agenda also includes research into sometimes neglected issues, such as what Professor Turksen calls operational learning. “If a particular officer is involved in a tax evasion case, how did they then use that experience and the knowledge that they gained? If they were unsuccessful, did they record it? Why were they unsuccessful, can they learn from it? If they were successful, what contributed to that success, what were the important factors?” he outlines. Tax crimes are not always easy to detect in the first place; one way of assessing the extent of the problem is by looking at what is called the tax gap. “You look at how much tax should be collected in a financial year, and then you look at how much the revenue has actually collected,” explains Professor Turksen.
A discrepancy may not be entirely attributable to tax crime however, as other factors may also be involved. It could be that the tax authority is simply not that efficient in collecting tax for example, or an otherwise viable business has made a deal to defer taxes because they are in temporary financial difficulties, so it’s difficult to get a clear picture. “Simply looking at the tax gap is not going to tell you how serious the problem is, and tax crime is very difficult to measure. So this is one of the major challenges we face,” outlines Professor Turksen.
As part of the project, Professor Turksen and his colleagues have analysed publicly available data from several countries across Europe, looking at not only the definitions of tax crimes but also statistics on prosecution and conviction of tax crimes in several jurisdictions. However, Professor Turksen says there is currently no firm basis to then compare data that have been gathered in different countries. “Each country collects and collates information differently. Something may not be recorded as a tax crime in one country while it is in another,” he explains.
This points to a need to improve how tax crimes are recorded, while researchers are also considering the enforcement
• Situation calling for action.
Risks relating to terrorists and criminals seeking to pursue destructive and malicious ends against the pillars of the single market and the opportunities for prosperity.
PROTAX - a research platform seeking to rise to the call of countering the risks associated with tax crimes.
• The research and innovation intervention.
PROTAX in support of societal security in the EU.
• Horizon 2020 featuring investment in research and innovation as essential for
Europe 2020 strategy Europe’s for smart, sustainable future. and inclusive growth and jobs - presenting tools to counter the risks.
Tax crimes and other financial crimes presenting critical threats to EU’s economies.
• Need for targeted intervention.
of tax policy, where there is still often a perception that large companies are treated more leniently than smaller businesses and employees when they do break the rules. “In some cases, the authorities might agree not to prosecute a company if they pay a large fine. The authorities might then agree to inspect them again in future to ensure that they are in compliance,” outlines Professor Turksen.
The process of prosecuting tax crimes is also often very slow, and it can be delayed and frustrated, another area of interest in the project. Researchers have looked at the point at which a tax crime becomes a criminal offence as opposed to a civil and/or administrative offence, which changes the nature of a prosecution. “Different types of
evidence are required to convict someone under criminal law, so it is by nature more intense than a civil case. In some countries there may be a threshold of say 40,000 Euros before they criminalise it,” says Professor Turksen. An individual or company engaging in tax crimes may then choose to locate themselves in a country where they are less likely to face prosecution, or where the threshold is much higher, which they can do with relative ease within the EU. “The freedoms available to EU citizens enable ease of financial transactions, as well as the free movement of people,” continues Professor Turksen. “This is also a strength as there are many commonalities and established frameworks for information-sharing.” This research is part of the wider objective of dealing with tax crime more effectively and a number of toolkits have been developed in the project, which identify best practice and international standards. One example is a policy toolkit for EU Member States on how to improve policy and law on countering tax crimes, while Professor Turksen and his colleagues have also developed further toolkits. A second, very practical toolkit is designed for tax enforcement agencies. “We’ve created something called a tax fraud investigation framework. The first part of that toolkit is about the EU legal framework, and then the second part is tailored more to the national legal system,” he outlines. Another important outcome of the project centres on
Nobody wants to pay more tax than they
can we change behaviour?
risk assessment, and identifying vulnerabilities in terms of a country’s approach to dealing with tax crimes. “Each country is different. A country might have a gap in its legal system, or in training personnel, or in protecting whistle-blowers and journalists,” says Professor Turksen.
The feedback on these toolkits so far has been extremely positive, and Professor Turksen believes they will bring tangible benefits to tax authorities. This research has already encouraged some countries to adopt a more rigorous approach to dealing with tax crimes, while Professor Turksen hopes the project’s findings will help to improve practice over the longer term. “I’m very hopeful that our research will have a significant impact beyond the project’s funding term,” he says.
New Methods to PRevent, Investigate and Mitigate COrruption and TAX Crimes in the EU
Project Objectives
PROTAX seeks to unravel the nature and legal frameworks of tax crimes and money laundering, and investigation and prosecution tools - focusing on producing toolkits and additional guidance to improve and harmonise EU-wide action against tax crimes and cooperation and information sharing between all actors involved in different European jurisdictions.
Project Funding
The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 787098.
Project Partners
There are a total of 9 project partners. For full details please see below link: • https://protax-project.eu/partners/
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Professor Umut Turksen Professor of Law, Centre for Financial and Corporate Integrity, Coventry University, United Kingdom T: +44 7530 832350 E: Umut.Turksen@coventry.ac.uk W: protax-project.eu
• European Commission, Horizon 2020 in brief: The EU Framework Programme for Research & Innovation (European Union, 2014), p.7. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/ programmes/horizon2020/sites/horizon2020/files/H2020_ inBrief_EN_FinalBAT.pdf (Accessed 19 October 2020). • PROTAX, ‘Law in Action: unpicking the contradictions that facilitate tax crime’ (18 March). Available at: https://protaxproject.eu/law-in-action-unpicking-the-contradictions-thatfacilitate-tax-crime/ (Accessed 19 October 2020).
Professor Umut Turksen
Umut Turksen is a Professor in the Faculty Research Centre for Financial and Corporate Integrity at Coventry University in the UK. He is interested in the practical application of the law in innovation, societal security and development. He has published several articles and books on energy, financial crime and international trade and economic law.
Mass atrocities and abuses leave significant scars on society, and transitional justice processes have been applied in countries where such events have occurred to identify the perpetrators and encourage reconciliation. What role should victims play in transitional justice? This question is at the heart of Professor Tine Destrooper’s work in the Justice Visions project.
The transition from an authoritarian
regime to a democratic state has often been driven by people on the ground who mobilised, formed groups and demonstrated on the streets. Public protests, for example, sparked the downfall of dictatorships in several Latin America, South-East Asian and Central European countries in the 1980s and 1990s. “The reason why there was a transition in the first place is often that people mobilised,” says Tine Destrooper, Professor of Transitional Justice at the University of Ghent’s Human Rights Centre. In these countries emerging from violent dictatorships, transitional justice processes have often been applied to deal with the abuses and atrocities committed under earlier regimes.
Yet, today, transitional justice is no longer the prerogative of post-authoritarian or postconflict countries or countries experiencing ongoing conflict. “We’ve observed a shift whereby mechanisms of transitional justice are now increasingly also being used in countries we tend to call consolidated democracies, to deal with their violent histories of – settler – colonialism,” outlines Professor Destrooper.
A good example is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was set up in Canada in 2008 to examine the impact of the country’s residential schools system on indigenous peoples. Similar bodies have also been established in Australia and New Zealand, and most recently, Belgium. These bodies were set up to document and record evidence of past injustices, which
Photograph by Tessa Boeykens.
still affect contemporary society. “That’s particularly relevant if you look at the issue of racial injustice in some consolidated democracies,” says Professor Destrooper, who argues that transitional justice processes also have a wider communicative and expressive function. “They are not there just to identify and punish the perpetrators of abuses. They also send a message about what crimes society decides are deserving of punishment and which injustices we, as a society, deem unacceptable.”
Victim participation in transitional justice
As the Principal Investigator of the Justice Visions project, Professor Destrooper is now looking at the effects of victim participation in transitional justice, with case studies on Guatemala, Cambodia, the DRC and Tunisia, all dealing with past crimes and injusticess. Over the last 10 years or so victim participation has become increasingly important in transitional justice, partly because victims know about the context, experienced the crimes that took place and can be agents of change, and partly because they can help to foster grassroots support for justice processes. “If you want processes to be sustainable, then you have to make sure you have the support and buyin of local communities,” outlines Professor Destrooper. These people are not just victims. “They are active people, who in some cases were victimized precisely because of their political activism.” In addition to playing a role in international justice processes, they are often active in their own forums, networks and support groups. “We want to look at how these various kinds of involvement can be complementary in supporting transitional justice,” continues Professor Destrooper.
To better understand victims’ priorities and strategies, deeper insights into the experiences of victims are required. This is a pre-requisite for arriving at better forms of victim participation in transitional justice. While the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted some of the plans to conduct interviews with remote victim communities, Professor Destrooper and her team have already started to analyse how victims are represented in reports, and have been actively
Photograph by Sangeetha Yogendran.
rethinking the way in which they normally conduct fieldwork. Previously this may have meant one researcher moving into a remote setting for a limited period of time and then coming back with research findings. “Instead we are looking for virtual and other ways to establish more permanent relations and networks with victim communities and their representatives,” underlines Destrooper, who will also be training local research assistants who are already on the ground, as part of the capacity-building objective of the project.
Sharing insights
A practitioner from Guatemala may have a lot to learn from a practitioner from Cambodia, and Professor Destrooper is keen to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and sharing of best practice. To this end, her team established the Justice Visions podcast. “We really wanted to provide an effective platform, particularly to practitioners from the global South, to share their insights. And we wanted to facilitate a conversation between victims, practitioners, scholars and policy-makers, to ensure that we
While Professor Destrooper is a big believer in the existing international human rights architecture and the protections it offers, she also says care should be taken to ensure that international dynamics do not come to overshadow local efforts at justice-seeking. “Victims may have a very different understanding of justice. They may, for example, prioritize social and economic justice over criminal accountability for individual perpetrators,” she points out. “We need to prevent victims voices and priorities from being erased or rendered invisibile from internationally-driven processes, while not throwing over board the actual accountability mechanisms available at that level. Sometimes this may require us to think creatively about what is and is not possible within the existing international architecture, like using universal jurisdiction when there is an international deadlock, as is the case in Syria today for example,” illustrates Destrooper. These creative ways of using international and domestic justice mechanisms may also be relevant to justice actors in other contexts. don’t fall into the trap of only talking about victims and activists, and not to them, or not giving them a platform.” The current season of the podcast therefore zooms in on some remarkable justice seeking efforts of victims across the world and interprets those in light of what is happening at the international level.
A recent episode featured an interview with the Chilean anthropologist Loreto López, who was involved in recent protests that were ostensibly over transport costs but in reality were about problems yet to be resolved since the fall of the dictatorship. While Chile now has a democratically elected government, the same problems that were there before the fall of the dictatorship still beset the country. There’s still structural violence against indigenous groups, there’s still social inequality. “This shows that structural problems should also be addressed during transitional justice processes to ensure their sustainability,” argues Destrooper. It has been suggested that transitional justice mechanisms could be applied to push for social justice, which is also why, she argues, it is becoming increasingly popular in consolidated democracies dealing with vast injustices.
Righting Victim Participation in Transitional Justice Project Objectives
How should societies come to terms with large-scale abuses or atrocities perpetrated under previous regimes? And what role should victims play in this process? The victims of abuses and atrocities understand the context in which they occurred and their participation can enhance local trust in transitional justice processes, yet this must be based on a deep understanding of their experiences and priorities. The Justice Visions project aims to examine how the participation of victims in transitional justice processes should be organised, and to look at the long-term effects of this participation.
Project Funding
The project is funded by an European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant 804154.
Contact Details
Project Coordinator, Professor Tine Destrooper Justice Visions Universiteitstraat 4 9000 Gent, Belgium T: +32 9 264 68 98 E: tine.destrooper@ugent.be W: https://justicevisions.org/ W: https://justicevisions.org/research/rightingvictim-participation-in-transitional-justice/ W: https://justicevisions.org/podcasts/
Professor Tine Destrooper
Tine Destrooper is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of Ghent University and a member of the Human Rights Centre there. Her research interests are transitional justice, socio-economic rights and gender. She has conducted research on the consequences of violent conflict and the role of the international community in dealing with its aftermath.
Spirit project shines a light on the dark Web
The dark web provides a high degree of anonymity to users, and it is difficult to identify the people behind criminal activities conducted there. We spoke to Felice Ferrara and Costas Davarakis about the work of the Spirit project in developing tools to acquire and analyse data from different parts of the World Wide Web, which will help the police identify the perpetrators of crimes.
The surface Web is the part of the WWW most commonly used by the general public, to shop online, to communicate over social networks, and to publish information as well as to access it. The dark Web offers similar services with a higher degree of anonymity. This protects user privacy which is very beneficial, for example, to politically persecuted people. On the other hand, anonymity makes it challenging to identify the perpetrators of criminal activity conducted on the Web, an issue central to the work of the Spirit project. “The overall goal of the project is to address the issue of criminal activity in cyberspace. We are tackling it by developing tools to resolve the identities of potential perpetrators that are using the Web – be it the surface Web or the dark Web,” says Costas Davarakis, the project’s technical coordinator. The project consortium includes a number of police organisations, who have seen over the last few years that an increasing amount of criminal activity is conducted via the dark Web. “This is why we initially committed a large part of our resources in the project to developing and evaluating solutions for the dark Web,” explains Davarakis.
Spirit project
This does not mean that the surface Web is neglected however, and researchers in the project are working to develop solutions which are applicable to both parts of the Web, as a cyber-criminal may leave some traces of their real identity there as well. The ultimate aim here is to develop tools that will support law enforcement agencies (LEAs) in resolving identities, which first requires the gathering of information. “We have to collect information about possible identities, then extract relevant information from the collected resources and analyse it. The basic idea is to collect all the possible information, from all possible data sources, to identify where two or more seemingly distinct subjects are in fact the same individual,” outlines Felice Ferrara, a Senior Software Engineer at Lutech, one of the project partners. This is no easy task however, as many of the criminals that use the dark Web try to hide their identities when moving around social networks. “We collect information and try to identify where someone is trying to conceal their identity,” says Ferrara.
From a technical point of view, gathering content from the dark Web is fairly similar to gathering it from the surface Web, as it’s primarily a matter of using the right protocols. A large part of the project’s work is focused on developing tools capable of gathering content from the surface Web as well as other networks, such as the TOR networks. “The tool is able to recognise the specific characteristics of each of these networks, in order to get the
SPIRIT Identity Resolution jobs generating perpetrator clusters and matching hypotheses.
required information,” continues Ferrara. This is an area in which Ferrara and his colleagues at Lutech hold deep expertise. “In our work at Lutech we develop tools to crawl information from distinct data sources, in order to provide sufficient information to data recognition tools,” he explains. “The key is to provide enough information to use intelligent tools, which can then be used to identify people in pictures, for example by comparing images published on social networks with information from a police database.”
A tool capable of crawling significant amount of information available on the Web is the entry point for an investigation system where many intelligent services are combined to analyse heterogeneous data sources such as text, video and images. All the content collected by the Spirit crawler is examined by natural language processing services or video analyses
Spirit Project Partners
mechanisms in order to link entities and ultimately discover identities. “We also have some other models which work on images,” says Ferrara. There are several intelligent services within Spirit, since different approaches are required to gather information from different sources. “Social networks are very different from dark Web content for example. So we need different services to properly collect data from different data sources,” stresses Ferrara. “Then the huge mass of downloaded data needs to be analysed by a family of intelligent services in order to properly extract entities and identities by taking into account the specific characteristics of each collected resource.”
Evaluating the tools
This is an important issue for the police and LEAs that are the intended end-users of these tools. There are six police organisations within the project consortium, and Davarakis says their priorities in terms of the functions of these tools are clear. “The key aim for the police is to identify a person of interest, for example on the basis of a name or a specific physical attribute,” he explains. These police organisations are playing an important role in providing data, evaluating the system and offering feedback. “Our partners in the project have provided us with a set of anonymised cases. We can then use this to draw inferences regarding identity matching,” continues Davarakis. “Our endusers also have the experience to guide us in terms of the reasoning in these tools, and the use of the machine-learning algorithms that we are employing, in order to ensure that solutions do not infringe data protection laws. We want to make sure that the system does not generate either false positives or false negatives.”
The system itself is essentially an opensource intelligence tool, which is designed to help the police and LEAs identify people of interest. This promises to bring significant benefits to the police, providing another investigative tool to help identify perpetrators of crimes, yet this must not come at the cost of breaking data security laws and infringing civil liberties, an issue of which Davarakis is well aware. “Privacy preservation is a major consideration in all aspects of our activities. In the project we have an independent ethics board, which is comprised of experts coming from legal backgrounds and with ethical expertise,” he stresses. The next step could be to apply these tools in policing and law enforcement, and Davarakis says the project
partners are looking to exploit the research results. “There are several industrial partners in Spirit, and there is interest in promoting and exploiting these tools beyond the project life, together with conventional actors in the market,” he continues.
This reflects the rapidly-evolving nature of the field and the technical sophistication of cyber-criminals. Many cyber-criminals are very advanced and continuously develop new methods to evade detection, so it’s important for LEAs to keep pace. “This is why we are keeping the environment open,” stresses Davarakis. Close collaboration between academia, industry and LEAs is also very beneficial in terms of developing new tools to deal with emerging challenges, says Ferrara. “This project has given us the opportunity to work with LEAs and to understand their needs,” he outlines. “My team is working on cyber-security, and we’re developing anti-crime, anti-fraud, anti-terrorism solutions. We want to use our experience and knowledge gained through the project to extend our offering to our customers and provide stronger analytics tools.”
Scalable privacy preserving intelligence analysis for resolving identities Project Objectives
SPIRIT delivers a set of tools to empower LEAs to create semantically rich pictures over all available evidence to be presented at court. SPIRITtools is a platform delivering social graphs of heterogeneous named-entity relationships that performs social and criminal network analyses. It addresses surface and dark Web data acquisition, analysis, modelling and visualisation.
Project Funding
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 786993.
Project Partners
• LUTECH • NST - Nydor System Technologies AE • A E Solutions (BI) Ltd • SyNTHEMA Artificial Intelligence • SingularLogic SA • London Metropolitan University • West Midlands Police Authority • STAD Antwerp • POLICE AND CRIME COMMISSIONER FOR THAMES VALLEY • Innova Integra Limited • Ministarstvo Unutrasnjih Poslova Republike Srbije • Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona • Hellenic Police • Linköping University • European Center of Psychology Investigation Criminology • FraunhoferGesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. • Wyzsza Szkola Policji W Szczytnie
Contact Details
Dr. Costas Davarakis Senior Consultant - Research Coordinator SPIRIT Technical Coordinator E: costas.davarakis@spirit-tools.com E: cdavarakis@nydorsystem.com W: https://www.spirit-tools.com/ Felice Ferrara E: F.Ferrara@lutech.it Paolo Fabbri, SPIRIT Coordinator E: P.Fabbri@lutech.it
Dr. Costas Davarakis
Dr. Felice Ferrara
Dr. Felice Ferrara received his PhD in Computer Science in 2012. His research interests are mainly focused on User Modeling and Artificial Intelligence. He is currently working in Lutech as Security Consultant and Project Manager on Log Management and Anti-Fraud & Crime projects. Dr. Costas Davarakis contracted by Singularlogic, is the Managing Director of NST-AE. In the past he has worked as an R&D coordinator in European both public and private sectors. Being active during all eight EU research frameworks, he has coordinated many European consortia. Costas is the Technical Coordinator of H2020-SPIRIT.
Hinduism is a very broad religion containing several different devotional movements, including Śaivism, and evidence dating from the last centuries BCE shows it spread rapidly across South Asia from the 6th century onwards. The Śivadharma project aims to examine how Śaivism spread and to investigate its influence on religious identities in different regions, through studying the composition and spread of the ‘Śivadharma texts’, as Dr Florinda De Simini explains.
The Śaiva religion developed around the cult of the God Śiva, and is one of the main branches of modern Hinduism. This devotion to Śiva distinguishes the Śaiva religion – or Śaivism – from other branches of Hinduism, such as Viṣṇuism, which are devoted to other Gods. “Hinduism is very broad, and contains several different devotional movements,” says Dr Florinda De Simini, Associate Professor in the Ancient and Medieval History of India at the University of Naples. While Śaivism is primarily a movement devoted to the God Śiva, this does not tell the whole story, and Dr De Simini says there are also other dimensions to the religion. “A whole philosophical system developed around it. This is about theology, but it’s also about culture and art,” she explains. “This religion has a huge level of cultural and political influence.”
Śivadharma project
As the Principal Investigator of the Śivadharma project, Dr De Simini is now exploring this very complex cultural phenomenon and how it spread across parts of South Asia to areas with different linguistic traditions, covering a period from the early Middle Ages right up to the 18th century. Together with her colleagues, Dr De Simini is studying the Śivadharma texts, which were written in Sanskrit around the 6th/7th centuries, a period when Śaivism started to become a public religion. “Scholars have seen that Śaivism becomes more prominent at this time – meaning that it is increasingly associated with political power. So it attracts more patronage at a certain point – and these texts really give an overview exactly of that period in which Śaivism started to become very prominent,” she says. “The main part of our research is about investigating how it spread very quickly throughout South Asia.”
Researchers are investigating this phenomenon through the lens of the regions to which it spread, including Nepal, NorthEast India, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The Śivadharma texts became popular and influential in these regions, while they are also the very important regions in the history of Śaivism, two factors which Dr De Simini believes are connected. “These texts were popular in places where Śaivism was strong. We are trying to understand how these texts influenced the growth of Śaivism in those places,” she outlines. Researchers are also investigating the people and communities responsible for the spread of these texts, as well as how Śaivism was adapted to the specific local context. “For example, the Śivadharma texts were brought to Nepal before the 9th century, and a whole collection of texts was then built around them,” continues Dr De Simini.
This collection reflects the local community, which included adherents of several different religions. These texts were integrated within a collection that also incorporated elements of Vaiṣṇava and Buddhist culture for example. “There was a process of hybridisation in Nepal,” explains Dr De Simini. This also occurred elsewhere in India, as in some areas certain practices and rituals were adopted that had previously been associated with other traditions. “When we look at medieval texts, we see that there is a common syntax in the rituals for the followers of different Gods,” continues Dr De Simini. “This common syntax meant that it was relatively easy to adapt the teachings of a successful school to another that was maybe still growing. Rituals and practice could be translated into new environments.”
The picture was however different in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where the Śivadharma texts were not hybridised with other religions. Instead, they were used to create a ‘stronger’ form of Śaivism, in the sense of providing strong scriptural support. “This stronger form of Śaivism came to be identified by some adherents with the nature of Tamil culture in a way,” explains Dr De Simini. The Śivadharma texts and a number of other Sanskrit scriptures were translated by local intellectuals, which Dr De Simini says was a way of grounding the community. “Along with Śaiva scriptures written in the Tamil language, they were using these texts to provide roots, and to provide them with the additional authority of Sanskrit scripture,” she says. “These were public texts promoting public rituals. So when they translated the texts they also translated the rituals.”
There is no single text in the Indian religious tradition, but rather a continuous production of scriptures that claim to be authoritative and to come directly from a certain God. This made it difficult to identify authoritative
Śivadharma Project Kickoff Workshop at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” (October 2019).
Śivadharma reading workshop at the EFEO, Pondycherry (January 2020)
scriptures, both for scholars and the wider population. “One of the main criteria was whether scripture was orthodox – meaning whether it was coherent and consistent with the Vedas, a set of primary Hindu scriptures,” outlines Dr De Simini. The Śivadharma texts were seen as orthodox, meaning they were consistent with the Vedas, while they were also aimed at the wider population rather than a specific caste, both factors which Dr De Simini believes contributed to their success. “These texts were quite general and adaptable as well as open, to both common people and powerful people,” she says.
While the initial plan was to focus on the period between roughly the 6th and 14th centuries, further materials have since been discovered from more recent times, especially from Tamil Nadu. “We have actually extended our work now to the 18th century,” says Dr De Simini. Researchers are working to publish these texts and make them available in Sanskrit and English, with accompanying notes. “We are also studying them of course in Tamil, in Bengali, as well as in Kannada, which is the language of Karnataka. There is a lot of work still to do,” acknowledges Dr De Simini. “Besides studying the main sources, The Śivadharma texts were popular in places where Śaivism was strong. We are trying to understand how these texts influenced the growth of Śaivism in those places.
Converting the King
The texts also show that there was a clear strategy to try and convert the King to Śaivism, on the basis that the wider population would then follow, and it might be argued that this strategy proved successful. Many Kings professed their allegiance to Śaivism in their inscriptions, a topic of great interest to Dr De Simini and her colleagues in the project. “We are studying inscriptions and epigraphical materials, to document this phenomenon,” she explains. Some of these inscriptions relate to public readings of the Śivadharma texts. “We are looking at situations where these texts were recited by public command, for instance in monasteries and public areas, or in which they are quoted and expressly referred to,” says Dr De Simini.
There are a huge number of further texts to consider in terms of the project’s overall agenda, and many have not yet been studied. we are also trying to better understand these local languages.”
This work has been disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, yet Dr De Simini hopes to travel to India in the next year or so. For the moment, the focus is on the textual sources, with the goal of publishing these texts and bringing them to wider attention. “One of our main aims is to make this tradition known to other historians,” says Dr De Simini. One part of the project involves developing a database in which the texts and translations will be presented, which Dr De Simini believes will prove valuable to other researchers. “We would like historians from other traditions to have the opportunity to learn about the history of Śaivism, we think that there is room for comparisons and learning,” she says. “We also see very strong possibilities in research on the Dravidian languages, which are spoken in South India.”
The Śivadharma and the Making of Regional Religious Traditions in Premodern South Asia Project Objectives
In the framework of the Śivadharma Project, Dr de Simini will work on the Sanskrit text of the Śivadharmottara and investigate its spread and impact on various forms of Śaivism throughout South Asia, as well as focus on Śaiva inscriptions from the Deccan. Other members of the team are investigating the impact of the Śivadharma texts in Nepal, East India and Tamil Nadu through texts, inscriptions, and iconography. She is also scientific coordinator for the University “L’Orientale” within the ERC Synergy Project DHARMA, “The Domestication of Hindu Asceticism and the Religious Making of South and South-East Asia.”
Project Funding
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 803624)
Project Partners
• Università di Napoli “L’Orientale” (Host
Institution) • École Française d’Extrême-Orient.
Pondycherry (Partner Institution) • Università di Bologna (Partner Institution)
Contact Details
Florinda De Simini, Associate Professor History of Ancient and Medieval India Principal Investigator of the ERC-2018Starting Grant Project “Śivadharma” Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale Dipartimento Asia, Africa e Mediterraneo Largo San Giovanni Maggiore 30 - 80134, Napoli secondo piano T: +39 373 712 8883 E: fdesimini@unior.it W: https://shivadharmaproject.com/
Florinda De Simini
Florinda De Simini is associate professor in Ancient and Medieval History of India at the Dipartimento Asia, Africa Mediterraneo of the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. Her scholarly interests encompass the history of Śaivism through written sources, South Asian epigraphy in Sanskrit and Kannada, as well as the cultural aspects of the production and transmission of handwritten documents in South Asia.
A path towards strategic participatory research
The InSPIRES project has developed a new conceptual framework that will make Science Shops more responsive to the concerns of the communities around them, and will help further open up the research process to different stakeholders, as well as integrating requirements from the Open Science concept and an impact evaluation strategy throughout the process. We spoke to the ISGlobal team, which is in charge of coordinating InSPIRES, about the project’s work.
A Science Shop provides a link between scientists and civil society, with regular meetings helping researchers to identify issues of concern to the local community and also develop plans to address them. This also represents a route to widening participation in science and engaging the general public in research. “It’s a bottomup, demand-driven type of structure,” explains Anne-Sophie Gresle. As the Project Manager of InSPIRES, she and the consortium partners are working to develop innovative models for Science Shops, which will help open up the research process. “Our philosophy in the project is that the research agenda shouldn’t be determined solely by researchers. We should seek collaborations, and listen more to the concerns of communities,” says Dr. María Jesús Pinazo, the principal investigator of InSPIRES.
Extreme citizen science
This means involving citizens in identifying research priorities, with a particular emphasis on working with marginalised groups, such as the elderly, migrants and refugees. The project brings together partners from several different countries,
InSPIRES
Ingenious Science shops to promote Participatory Innovation, Research and Equity in Science Anne-Sophie Gresle Rosselló 132, 08036 Barcelona, Spain T: +34 93 227 2182 E: inspires@isglobal.org W: https://inspiresproject.com/ W: https://app.inspiresproject.com
Professor Pinazo (left) is doctor and graduate in Medicine and Surgery, specialized in Internal Medicine at the International Health Service of the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona. Mrs. Gresle (right) specialized in Patient in Public Involvement in Health Research and Project Management of international participatory health research project. and while not all have an established tradition of engaging the public in health research, Dr Pinazo believes widening participation brings significant benefits. “In order for these types of project to really function, you need the participation of all the different stakeholders, including people from civil society,” she stresses. On the research side: “How can you re-formulate a civil society concern into a research question? says Mrs Gresle. A Science Shop will help you do that. Besides, Masters or PhD students are often involved in Science Shops, helping to bridge the gap between academia and civil society. The students
themselves also benefit from this process, which gives them the opportunity to acquire different types of skills and competencies. Involvement in a Science Shop project brings students into contact with a wider variety of people, which Mrs. Gresle believes exposes them to new ideas, real life problems, and different perspectives. “Researchers become more aware of challenges and issues in the community, and this can open up new lines of research,” she explains. The research institution itself also benefits from participating in Science Shops or citizen science, as outreach activities lead to stronger relationships with the organisations, businesses and people around them. “Institutions also become more open to their communities,” highlights Dr Pinazo.
These benefits are now more widely recognised, and a number of new Science Shops have sprung up across Europe over recent years, with researchers in InSPIRES now developing new models designed to make them more responsive to societal needs. An Open Platform, working both as an open repository and impact evaluation tool, has been developed in the project to enable the different stakeholders in the project to share knowledge and insights. “It’s free for units to register. This includes not only academic units, but also civil society organisations,” says Mrs. Gresle. A self-reflection and impact evaluation methodology has also been developed in the project, which again is free and open. “The
Our philosophy in the InSPIRES project is that the research agenda shouldn’t be determined solely by researchers. We, as researchers, should seek collaborations, and listen more to the concerns of our communities.
idea is to have a harmonised impact evaluation approach for all the projects, so that they can learn from each other,” explains Mrs. Gresle.
The evaluation methodology captures indicators in five different dimensions and provides a snapshot of a project’s impact, from which other Science Shops can then learn and adapt their approach. The aim here is to provide resources that meet the needs of those involved in the Science Shop movement, and help them work more effectively. “We wanted to develop a model of Science Shop that was more aligned with the Responsible Research and Innovation approach, while also systematically introducing an impact evaluation,” says Dr Pinazo. “We hope that people will find the platform and the evaluation methodology easy to use, while we are also developing the help section and the guidelines materials.”
A wide variety of settings across Europe promote curiosity, inquiry and exploration through various combinations of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and the arts. Partners in the SySTEM 2020 project aim to build a deeper picture of science learning initiatives outside the classroom, and their importance in boosting scientific literacy, as Mairéad Hurley explains.
Many of the jobs in tomorrow’s world are likely to require specialised technical knowledge, as scientific research progresses and innovation continues apace. While schools, colleges and universities all have important roles to play in helping students acquire and develop scientific skills, education also takes place outside formal settings, a point central to the work of the SySTEM 2020 project. “In the project we aim to highlight the extensive science education that happens outside the formal system, and to highlight the value that it can have in developing scientific literacy,” says Dr Mairéad Hurley, Head of Research & Learning at Science Gallery Dublin, the project coordinator. There are many opportunities to learn about science outside the classroom, be that attending a family festival and encountering a science show, regularly taking part in a coding club, or occasionally joining a workshop at a science centre or an art museum, all of which can help people to think about the presence of science in their lives. “You’re exposed to, or you’re practising, the kinds of critical skills that are needed for everyday science,” outlines Hurley.
SySTEM 2020 project
This doesn’t mean just technical, scientific skills but also core competencies like critical thinking, communication and collaboration. “Some young people are more comfortable developing and exercising these competencies in an out-of-school setting than they are in formal education, where they may feel greater pressures,” says Hurley. These are important not just in terms of employment prospects, but also in evaluating data and identifying misinformation, skills which are becoming increasingly crucial for all citizens as we face a climate crisis, widespread vaccine denial, and the prevalence of digital data misuse. “Science education has to be about educating the scientists of the future – but equally it also has to get people excited about science and able to engage with it. This will then put them in a position to use it in their everyday lives to benefit them and make evidence-based decisions,” continues Hurley.
The wider aim in the project is to generate a broad picture of the different STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics) learning opportunities available across Europe, and to study in greater depth the learning happening in a subset of these. The project consortium brings together 22 different organisations involved in science education outside the classroom, including researchers and practitioners. The consortium has developed a map covering 19 countries across Europe & Israel which shows over 1,400 organisations active in informal science learning and describes the activities they provide. “We want educators, funders and scientists to know about the kinds of activities going on in their locality,” outlines Hurley. With an effective means of sharing information about learning activities, SySTEM 2020 hopes to support these organisations and help them work together more effectively. “There’s a valuable network to be tapped into, and the map has gathered a wealth of openlyaccessible data. It’s a snapshot of the vibrancy of the informal science education sector in Europe & Israel,” says Hurley (Figure 1).
There are thousands of organisations across Europe which provide these kinds of learning opportunities for young people, now researchers hope to strengthen the relationships between them and encourage greater participation. SySTEM 2020 is coordinated by Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, a space which aims to make science and the arts accessible to all. “We want to create a much more neutral space, where the sciences and the arts are on an equal footing and where people learn by exploring their interests,” says Hurley. The other organisations in the consortium also have similar interests. “Ars Electronica in
Figure 1: SySTEM 2020 map.
Figure 2: Ars Electronia’s Create your World Festival: A yearly programme for young people up to the age of 19 to give them the opportunity to produce and present their concepts and ideas of the world of tomorrow.
Austria is a world-leading organisation dedicated to art, technology and society – they run a huge international festival every year and have a large centre in Linz,” (Figure 2) continues Hurley. “We have a partner, Kersnikova Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia who run amazing exhibitions and learning programmes connecting art, science and technology”
A major priority in the project has been to link the underlying research in this field with the expertise and knowledge of consortium members who are practitioners working directly with young people, to design and deliver their learning programmes. This partnership has led to the development of a set of tools and guidelines for informal science educators to engage learners more effectively, and more equitably.
“Not everybody has the same access to science learning outside school. If the opportunities are limited to a physical location there are geographical barriers. If the activities are online, there may be a digital divide between those with access to internet infrastructure, and those without. If the learning activities and interactions are designed by those who are representative of the dominant social groups in science, and we don’t listen to the voices of a diverse audience when designing such activities, we risk reproducing existing inequities, and instead of making science more diverse, more equitable and more inclusive, we do the opposite, and increase the gaps,” says Hurley.
“As well as taking these factors into consideration we are strongly interested in transdisciplinary spaces which try to break down the boundaries between science and other disciplines, and highlight the creativity and curiosity inherent to science. We are trying to prove that having the freedom and opportunity to learn through creative exploration in an informal setting can stimulate an interest in science that may not take hold in the classroom.”
Such an experience may lead to improved formal outcomes, but that is only one part of a bigger picture for the consortium. “Ultimately we want science at all levels to be representative of our diverse society, and by being more diverse, lead to better outcomes for everyone,” emphasises Hurley. To address this lofty vision, one of the outputs of the project is a set of design principles to support the development of activities related to science learning outside the classroom, available on the project website. These design principles are aimed at practitioners within the informal science learning sphere, for example staff of science centres or science museums, as well as those who work to engage the public with cutting edge scientific research. Alongside the design principles, there are use-case examples from the project partners highlighting some of the work they are doing to extend educational opportunities to marginalised groups and reduce inequity. “For example LATRA, our partner on the island of Lesvos – Greece – works with a number of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum as well as children and young people living in refugee camps (Figure 3). They have gathered evidence that the positive impact that informal science learning has on these young people includes building up their confidence in their abilities, increasing their trust towards educators as well as self-appreciation of their thoughts and opinions.’’ The perspective of the learners themselves and their attitude towards scientific subjects is also an important consideration in terms of improving overall scientific literacy, with evidence showing that many of the learners are highly self-motivated. In one part of the project, researchers surveyed students over a period of two years, aiming to build a deeper picture of their science learning and how it connects into their wider world. “We were looking at attitudes towards science both in and out of school, and we also gathered socio-demographic information about the learners to try to understand the role science plays in their lives,” outlines Hurley. “Unsurprisingly, we found evidence of persistent inequality - male learners from highly educated families are the most likely to connect with science. The analysis points to a need for inequities to be addressed at a systemic level, tackled together by educators, families, and policy makers.”
Learners may pick up a lot of knowledge and skills outside the classroom, but it’s also important that they are able to reflect on what they have learned. “The development of core competencies is really important, to point learners towards self-reflection, which then leads towards self-directed or autonomous learning. Within SySTEM 2020, we have been developing a tool which can be used in informal science learning settings to allow students to monitor their own progress in areas such as collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and communication.”
These competencies are highly valued by employers, yet progress or achievement in them is quite difficult to capture and accredit. Young people across the different locations in the project have worked with the tool, from which the team hope to gain fresh insights. “We’re working on the data analysis at the moment, in terms of what we can gather from the young people who have tried it,” says Hurley. “Initial results show that
Figure 3: Exhibition curated by the Center for Refugee Art Technology & Environment, established by LATRA in 2018 as a refugee-led contemporary arts centre to assist the social and cultural integration of diverse young refugees. This initiative empowers the refugee participants with access to resources, funding and expertise.
Figure 4: A sample of zines created by SySTEM 2020 workshop participants in Science Gallery Dublin and Ars Electronica, allowing ideas to emerge which may be difficult to communicate through text alone.
creativity, collaboration, and communication are activated during participation in the STEAM activities of the SySTEM 2020 partners, and awareness is raised concerning critical thinking. The activation seems to be connected to the task in question: a creative learner in, say, electronics, may not be so in 3D printing. This implies that the good pedagogical design of activities may boost attainment in these areas.”
Researchers also gathered learners’ opinions on whether they wanted accreditation for the learning activities they had participated in, and gained mixed the content of what they had learned, and how the topic affected them (Figure 4). This helps us to evaluate our programme, while simultaneously allowing them to be creative, and to reflect on what they have learned, and how it fits into the wider context of their life, and society as a whole”
This research is part of the wider goal of improving scientific literacy and helping all learners to develop the competencies they will need to deal with the complex challenges of the future. As well as resources and articles aimed at practitioners and others interested in informal science learning,
In SySTEM 2020 we aim to highlight the extensive
developing scientific literacy for all.
results. “Learners were not uninterested in paper or digital credentials for their activities, on the condition that these would bear some future utility,” Hurley states. “In general, they can see that it could be useful, but right now, many cannot think of a practical setting in which they would use such a certification.”
A more creative reflective tool has also been developed in the project, which involved getting participants in STEAM learning settings to develop learning portfolios based on their experiences. “For example, in Science Gallery Dublin we run programmes where 15-16 year-olds come in for five consecutive days and participate in art-science workshops,” outlines Hurley. “We trialled a learning portfolio method called zines, which are little hand-folded booklets. Through drawing, collage, or even poetry, learners responded to daily prompts that were crafted to help them reflect on SySTEM 2020 also has a forthcoming policy recommendation. “We’ve got a white paper on equity-focused science learning outside the classroom, which will be available on the project website in March 2021,” says Hurley. The project itself is nearing its conclusion, but in advance of that, the consortium is planning the publication of a final report which will highlight the scale of the project, and act as an advocacy tool for the informal science learning sector, outlining the vision of the project partners for a more equitable future. “The SySTEM 2020 project has shown the value of the work that happens in the out-of-school science and STEAM learning space, and overall, that there is a need for structured and systematic partnerships between all the relevant stakeholders if we are to address the persistent inequities in science learning” says Hurley. “As a community, we’re going to carry on working together on these topics.”
SySTEM 2020: Connecting Science Learning Outside The Classroom Project Objectives
SySTEM 2020 is examining science learning outside the classroom in more than 19 countries across Europe and Israel to highlight the value that it can have in developing scientific literacy. The project brings together 22 different organisations involved in this field, from research to practitioners, to produce new tools and approaches in supporting the development of flexible and rich learning ecosystems for students.
Project Funding
SySTEM 2020 has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement no. 788317
Project Partners
• Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland • WAAG, Netherlands • Aalto University, Finland • Ecsite – the European Network of Science Centres and Museums, Belgium • Ars Electronica, Austria • Bloomfield Science Museum, Israel • Kersnikova, Slovenia • Centre for the Promotion of Science, Serbia • Museo Nazionale Della Scienza E Della Tecnologia Leonardo Da Vinci, Italy • Noesis – Thessaloniki Science Centre, Greece • Parque de las Ciencias, Spain • Technopolis, Belgium • Science Gallery London, United Kingdom • Traces, France • Raumschiff, Switzerland • EMBL – European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Germany • Tom Tits Experiment, Sweden • Museiko, Bulgaria • Fundação Da Juventude, Portugal • ZSI, Austria • Latra, Greece • Utesla, Czech Republic https://system2020.education/about-partners/
Contact Details
SySTEM 2020 T: +353 86 379 7272 E: system2020project@gmail.com W: www.system2020.education : @system2020eu : @system2020eu : @SySTEM2020
Mairéad Hurley
Mairéad Hurley is Head of Research & Learning at Science Gallery Dublin. She holds a PhD in astronomy and is a qualified science teacher. At Science Gallery Dublin, she oversees the development of art-science learning programmes, and is Principal Investigator of the SySTEM 2020 project, through which a team of researchers and practitioners are investigating science learning in informal contexts.
