From the Disciplinary Domain Board – 5 February

New instruction for Democracy and higher education

The Disciplinary Domain Board adopted a new instruction for the third-cycle programme Democracy and higher education based on the evaluation made of the programme. The new instruction includes an adjustment of the composition of the programme board to include more external members and fewer members from the University. An international advisory board will also be attached to the programme, and the roles of the programme board and the programme manager have been clarified.

The new instruction stresses that the focus of the programme should be on cutting-edge research, internationalisation, and competitiveness for external funding. The Disciplinary Domain Board tasked the programme board of Democracy and higher education with submitting a three-year plan for how the programme should be run in order to achieve a focus on developing cutting-edge research and on renewal, exploiting the potential of a third-cycle programme, and enhancing the programme’s capacity to attract external funding.

Reg. no.: HUMSAM 2024/2305

Annual accounts follow-up and agency capital

The Disciplinary Domain Board presented an annual accounts follow-up as of 31 December 2024. The aggregate outcome within Education activities financed by direct government funding at the disciplinary domain level is SEK -17 million, after which agency capital in Education amounts to SEK 64 million (5%).

Within Research financed by direct government funding, the aggregate outcome was SEK -37 million at the disciplinary domain level, after which agency capital amounts to SEK 27 million (2%).

The analysis in the annual accounts follow-up is that savings are needed in Research in the coming years. Note that the situations for Education and Research differ per faculty.

Decision on withdrawal of agency capital

Since 2018, the Disciplinary Board has applied the University Board’s regulations, which means that half of the agency capital that exceeds a certain limit is withdrawn from the faculty boards in conjunction with the annual accounts. In Education that limit is 10% and in Research it is 15%.

In Research, no faculty has exceeded the limit, while in Education, the Faculty of Educational Sciences has. The Disciplinary Domain Board therefore decided to withdraw more than SEK 2 million in agency capital from Education in the Faculty of Educational Sciences.

Reg. no.: HUMSAM 2024/2573 and HUMSAM 2025/311

Funding for research infrastructures

In December 2024, the Disciplinary Domain Board issued a call for applications for funding for local research infrastructures. Twelve applications were received and after preparation within the infrastructure committee for the disciplinary domain, the Disciplinary Domain Board decided that the following ten research infrastructures would each receive SEK 100,000 in 2025:

• GaW database (Maria Ågren, Department of History)
• Digital Innovations for Sustainable Heritage (Patrick Randolph-Quinney, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History and Conservation)
• Corpus in Swedish as a second Language, UPPSVA (Josefin Lindgren, Department of Scandinavian Languages)
• The legislative process flow in the Riksdag’s printing office (Måns Magnusson, Department of Statistics)
• An expansion of posteriordb – a reference database for posterior distributions to support the development of computationally intensive Bayesian inference (Måns Magnusson, Department of Statistics)
• The Sanctions and Nuclear Disarmament Dataset (Armend Bekaj, Department of Peace and Conflict Research)
• History of Swedish Rhetoric, Svenskatal.se (Jon Viklund, Department of Literature and Rhetoric)
• Historical Swedish patents (Fredrik Tell, Department of Business Studies)
• Swedish Liturgical Music Sources, SweLiMuS (Mattias Lundberg, Department of Musicology)
• Uppsala Child and Baby Lab Infrastructure (Pär Nyström, Department of Psychology).

Reg. no.: HUMSAM 2025/360

Requesting funds to continue infrastructure initiative

The Disciplinary Domain Board decided to request funds from the Vice-Chancellor to keep funding the infrastructure initiative in the humanities and social sciences in the amount of SEK 3 million per year for the period 2026–2030. The Centre for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences manages the infrastructure initiative and during the same period receives SEK 2 million per year in funding from the Disciplinary Domain Board, and from the Faculty of Arts in the amount of SEK 1.5 million per year.

The Disciplinary Domain Board also tasked the infrastructure committee within the disciplinary domain with reviewing the mission and organisation of the Centre for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences with the aim of making it easier for the entire disciplinary domain to be able to benefit from the Centre’s expertise.

Reg. no.: HUMSAM 2025/346

Action plan for Uppsala University Future Institute on migration submitted

The Disciplinary Domain Board decided to submit to the Vice-Chancellor the action plan for an interdisciplinary Future Institute with a focus on migration, which was developed by a working group. The Vice-Chancellor tasked the Disciplinary Domain Board with developing a Future Institute with a focus on migration as part of the recent UUniFI initiative.

Reg. no.: HUMSAM 2024/1842

Anders Berndt