ZNANSTVENORAZISKOVALNI CENTER SLOVENSKE AKADEMIJE ZNANOSTI IN UMETNOSTI

Their core work

The Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) is Slovenia's leading humanities and social sciences research institution, conducting interdisciplinary work across cultural heritage, environmental research, linguistics, and gender studies. They contribute to pan-European research infrastructures for ecosystem monitoring and earth sciences (eLTER, EPOS), while also running projects on digital cultural heritage, discourse analysis, and institutional change. Their strength lies in bridging humanities scholarship with digital methods — combining visual analytics, natural language processing, and semantic web technologies with traditional research in history, art, and social processes.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

In the early H2020 period (2015–2018), ZRC SAZU focused heavily on environmental and ecosystem research — biodiversity mapping, long-term ecological monitoring, and socio-ecological systems through the eLTER and ESMERALDA projects. From 2019 onward, a clear shift emerged toward gender equality, responsible research and innovation (RRI), open science, and digital cultural heritage, with projects like ACT, GRACE, InTaVia, and their two coordinated projects on socialist cultural history and pandemic discourse. The organization has moved from being primarily an environmental research infrastructure participant to a broader social sciences and humanities actor engaging with contemporary societal challenges.

ZRC SAZU is increasingly positioning itself at the intersection of humanities, digital methods, and societal challenges — expect future work combining cultural analysis with climate justice and democratic participation themes.

How they like to work

ZRC SAZU operates overwhelmingly as a consortium partner (14 of 17 projects), stepping into the coordinator role only for focused MSCA fellowships in humanities topics close to their core identity. They work in large European consortia — 297 unique partners across 45 countries indicates they are comfortable in big, distributed projects. This is not an organization that leads massive infrastructure builds, but one that reliably contributes specialized social science and humanities expertise to broad interdisciplinary efforts.

With 297 unique consortium partners across 45 countries, ZRC SAZU has an exceptionally wide European network for its size. Their connections span environmental research infrastructure communities (eLTER/EPOS networks), gender equality research organizations, and digital humanities groups — giving them unusual reach across disciplinary boundaries.

What sets them apart

ZRC SAZU occupies a rare niche: a national academy research centre that bridges environmental sciences, digital humanities, and critical social theory within EU projects. Few organizations can credibly contribute to both a geophysical observation network (EPOS) and a project analyzing pandemic metaphors in post-Yugoslav discourse. For consortium builders, they offer humanities and social science depth with proven ability to work in large technical infrastructures — a combination that is increasingly required by Horizon Europe's demand for SSH integration.

Highlights from their portfolio

• InTaVia
  Largest single grant (EUR 254,500) combining cultural heritage with visual analytics, NLP, and semantic web — their most technically ambitious digital humanities project.
• CRISMET
  Coordinator role analyzing pandemic discourse and nationalism through metaphor in post-Yugoslav societies — showcases their independent research leadership in critical linguistics.
• eLTER
  Part of a flagship ESFRI research infrastructure for long-term ecosystem monitoring, with continued involvement across four related projects spanning 2015–2026.