The Centre for Research on Environment and Community ran as a project for four years in Waterford Institute of Technology. The underlying idea, developed in the introduction to the Centre, was to find ways that social research could contribute to social movements. The history of the Centre's work gives an overview of the results. One projects associated with the Centre was the Alternatives get-together of participants in the alternative movement; others, such as Ireland from Below, the social-movements activist/academic mailing list, or resistance to the project for an incinerator for the Southeast, are detailed elsewhere on these pages.
An unfinished project was that of a degree in Environment and Community, aimed in particular at capacity-building for participants in local and regional social movements and written by a team of activists with academic credentials (or vice versa!) As well as the overall outline, two individual courses are unusual enough to be worth mentioning here: a course on how to make friends with computers for the technically terrified, and one on sustainable activism designed to counter burnout.
The future of this project, and of the Centre, is now somewhat uncertain and depends largely on WIT's future appointments in the area, but the history seems interesting enough to be worth putting up here for people who may be thinking of developing similar projects.