This project will investigate fundamental changes in people’s relationship to age and health associated with the global rise of the smartphone. The aim is to combine an intellectual challenge in understanding the contemporary nature of age and the impact of new media, with an applied challenge to use this knowledge to help make mHealth a more effective intervention. Through simultaneous 15 month ethnographies in China, Japan, Iran, Ireland, Nigeria and Tanzania (and supplementary work in Trinidad) a team will explore the experience of age for those between 45-70 i.e. neither clearly young nor elderly, who represent an unprecedented population that has resulted from changed life expectancy and changed aspirations. We will examine how this shift in the experience of age is impacted by the rise of smartphones that bring access to technologies associated with the young. mHealth started with youth orientated issues of fitness and wellbeing but is increasingly becoming a significant intervention in helping older populations deal with disease and frailties. mHealth has potential both for helping those with low access to professional care but also threatens to bypass and undermine professional medical services. Our aim is to complement technology led mHealth interventions with ethnography led participatory design, consisting of a collaboration between mHealth professionals with our ethnographically informed team and our informants. The applied anthropology will inform our intellectual advances in the field of digital anthropology. Reflections on mHealth will contribute to the core aim of advancing our understanding of the experience of age in this new interstitial period of life, and to appreciate the major transformations in society and sociality represented by the new ubiquity of the smartphone. Both the intellectual and applied components will be shown to depend upon sensitivity to the forms of cultural diversity uncovered by our comparative ethnographic approach.

EULAC ENERGYTRAN intends to strengthen the cooperation between the European Union and Latin American and the Caribbean research infrastructures to tackle a common challenge: how to get a clean, sustainable and just energy transition. This project pursues its goal through the exchange, generation and transfer of knowledge among entities from a multidisciplinary approach (technological, environmental, social) and through the support to the development of public policies and regulatory frameworks towards climate neutrality. This general goal will be achieved by four specific goals that respond the multidisciplinary approach, in tune with the complexity of the energy transition. Therefore, the project supports technological R&I to overcome the existing limitations of renewable energies but acknowledging these developments may have an environmental and social impact which must be addressed. This proposal wants to come up with ideas about how to achieve an energy transition compatible with environment protection and social justice. Energy transition is at the top of the political agendas of both regions, EU and LAC, so this project may contribute to consolidating it as a priority area of interregional scientific cooperation. This project will be carried out by a heterogenous and interdisciplinary consortium composed of eleven partners with wide presence in the EU and LAC. They include ERICS and an international organization, among other entities, from different areas of knowledge. This way the complexity of the energy transition is better tackled. Under this scheme, EULAC ENERGYTRAN will create a network of an interconnected and sustainable EU and LAC research infrastructures that contributes to energy transition by technological, social and sustainably strengthening the performance of entities through shared knowledge and close interactions among researchers. This common effort will mean a step forward, in both regions, to reach a society that needs to be resilient.