Mapping the Social Sciences in EU funding schemes

In the last three decades science policies and science funding has become ever more important in the EU. Hence, more money and political attentions has been devoted to the area. In this paper we analyses the social science project funded through the EU framework programs from the 1990s and onwards. Using data from the CORDIS database and geometric data analysis we seek to shed light on how social science knowledge production has entangled with EU politics through research projects. We construct a social space of social science research project in order to understand the internal differences between projects. More specific we analyses the relations between topics, funding schemes, involved institutions –both academic and others, grant size and researchers in order to further our understanding of the internal principles of differentiation in EU research funding. Hence, the paper aims at understanding the role of Europeanisation processes in relations to the intuitional and cognitive structure (or epistemic culture) of European social science knowledge production.