Welcome to the first ever World Congress on Undergraduate Research. Our aim is to bring together the best undergraduate research in the world to focus our collective minds on some of the most significant challenges facing the global communitiy today. We invite you to be part of this new international movement. We recognise that no academic discipline on its own can meet these challenges; therefore we are bringing together undergraduate researchers from all academic fields to address them together,. Through debate and collaboration, we will develop new solutions and a greater understanding of these issues. Today's undergraduate researchers are tomorrow's leading academics, politicians, technological innovators, health care professionals and business leaders - but the work they engage in is already leading the way. The World Congress will be a global dialogue across many different fields of enquiry. We invite you to read the themes below and determine which one your research best aligns with all of the themes require responses from every discipline - scientific papers are equally as welcome as creative arts pieces, scholarship in the humanities and social science studies. There is much that we can learn from each other. One of the ambitions of the World Congress is to foster meaningful and stimulating collaborations across the sciences and arts. 

Please read through the themes below and determine which best fits your research. When you submit your abstract you will be asked to indicate. You will have the option to elect up to two additional themes that connect to your research discipline.

Conference Themes
 

Climate Change, Environment and Sustainability

Protecting the natural environment is one of the biggest challenges facing the world today. We invite papers on the science of climate change, including studies of the climate, new technologies to assist countries in meeting climate change targets, and technologies to enable communities around the world to develop sustainable energy. We also invite papers on the impact of climate change on society, on environmental protection and endangered species, and on the challenges of developing sustainable businesses as well as papers on how particular business segments might respond under new climate conditions to create new enterprises or revise current ones. The arts have an important role to play in helping us to better understand the impact of climate change so we also invite papers and creative works that engage with the environment.

Global Health

The world is facing significant challenges in maintaining global health. These include the threat posed by new diseases, the management of existing diseases, guidance on lifestyle and the development of new medicines. We also face challenges from the growing resistance to anti-biotics. We invite papers from Science, Medicine and Health students that investigate new methods for understanding and meeting these challenges. We also invite papers from Social Science and Humanities students on the impact of Health issues on Culture and Society. This might include, for example, studies of the literature and art relating to AIDS, the social impact of the Ebola scare, the representation of global health issues in cinema and social studies of the obesity epidemic. We also welcome arts projects that engage directly with Health issues.

The Global and the Local

This theme considers the relationship between the Global and the Local in society, politics, arts, business and science. To what extent has Globalisation created a global culture – and how has this impacted on local cultures? Are we losing as much as we gain in our increasingly connected world? How are businesses meeting the challenges and exploiting the opportunities provided by Globalisation? How do we protect people from the impact of Globalisation? Are all local cultures destined to be assimilated or can we protect cultures and languages which are at risk?We invite abstracts on any aspect of global and local culture, including the relationship between culture and society, the science of art, the use of technology in enabling new global cultural forms and reflections on the ethics of globalisation.

Information and Technology

The ‘information age’ has brought rapid change to the world. We invite abstracts on the circulation of information in the modern world and the promise of technology as a solution to many of the world’s problems. This might include scientific papers on new advances in information technology, linguistic studies of language and information exchange, social studies of the impact of new information technologies on politics and society, and humanities papers on the representation of the information age in literature and culture. Papers that focus on the array of questions that “Big Data” creates are welcome.  This might include works that focus on its use in commerce, politics, science, as well as how it enables us to ask questions that we might not have considered in the past.  We also invite studies which reflect on the challenges of including developing cultures in the information age and broader reflections on what it means to be human in an increasingly technological world.

War and Peace in the 21st Century

The level of threat to global security is a significant challenge facing the world. As we mark the centenary of the First World War, how are we going to meet the security challenges of the future? How do we balance the demands of security with liberty and human rights? Is lasting world peace possible? We invite research on any aspect of global security and peace, including science papers on new discoveries in forensics, papers on emerging technologies, and studies which reflect on the politics of security and the artistic representation of war and peace.

The World We Live In and the World we Make

Our understanding of the world is constantly developing and today we have a better understanding of the physical world and the cultural world than we ever have had before. But we are also acutely aware of how much there is left to discover about the world we live in. For this theme, we invite papers on a range of topics that either contribute to our knowledge of the world we live in or expose the gaps in our broad knowledge. This might include studies of the natural and physical world, on the microscopic and macroscopic worlds, and on our place in the wider universe. This theme will also explore the environments that societies construct for themselves, including urban and rural spaces, fashion, social structures and language.