The Eye of Europe (EoE) project has reached an important milestone: Using an interactive approach, the members of the consortium came up with eleven exciting topics that will be addressed in Foresight Workshops with experts, citizens, entrepreneurs, scientists, policymakers, journalists and many other stakeholder groups within the coming 16 months. In the workshops, Eye of Europe partners will apply both established and novel Foresight approaches to dive deep into topics of common interest to stakeholders across the European Research Area. These workshops will take place in cities such as Madrid, Prague, Berlin, Bucharest, Paris and Thessaloniki, as well as online.

The final set of topics for EoE pilot workshops is as follows:

• Democracy – a long term Project: This online workshop will gather domain experts to shed light on a large spectrum of future challenges to democracy.
• The Knowledge of our Civilisation(s) in 2040: In this two-day Berlin based workshop participants with diverse domain expertise will explore the future of knowledge in human civilisation in the face of multiple drivers of change.
• European Industrial Decarbonisation: This two-day workshop in Madrid will gather diverse stakeholders to debate alternative pathways of industrial decarbonisation for Europe in the face of different geopolitical scenarios.
• Emotion Ecosystems: This Bucharest based two-day workshop will investigate the impact of technologies like affective computing and brain-machine interface on individuals and collectives with different stakeholder groups.
• Democracy and Technology: In this workshop citizens in Prague will jointly reflect on democratic approaches to risks connected with new technologies and their impacts on various societal groups.
• Aging and Assisted Living Technologies: This workshop in Berlin with international research and policy actors is dedicated to future ways of integrating smart and digital technologies into assisted living and care for older adults.
• Fashion Futures: In two Thessaloniki based workshops citizens and domain experts will explore the future of sustainable fashion in interaction with values and identities both with a regional and international perspective.
• Public Policy and Change of Diets: In this workshop in Paris a diverse group of citizens will reflect on policy inroads into future pathways towards healthy and sustainable diets.
• Science and Conflicts: In this online workshop, experts and actors of the science system will jointly dive into possible implications of growing geopolitical tensions for science.
• Future of Knowledge and Emotions: This futures survey will provide input for the two interrelated topics the future of knowledge and the future of emotion ecosystems that will feed the respective workshops.
  
  
  These Eye of Europe Foresight pilot workshops have a twofold purpose.
  
  First of all, the workshops serve the project’s aspirations expressed by Eye of Europe coordinator, Radu Gheorghiu, namely to nurture the “vibrant community of individuals engaging in a conversation about our collective future” and to fuel the “continuous loop of dialogue, learning and inspiration”.
  
  Secondly, by addressing topics of common interest to R&I actors across ERA and major R&I challenges, they aim to mobilise collective anticipatory intelligence. In particular, we hope to shed light on the evolution of research and innovation and its contribution to a wide range of important future questions.
  
  How did the team arrive at these topics?
  
  The topic generation process involved three major elements:
  
• Analysis of R&I strategy documents from a range of different EU countries
• interviews with R&I actors from different positions in ERA’s research and innovation ecosystem,
• and interactive discourse among EoE partner organisations.
  
  It was important to the topic identification team, led by Pier Francesco Moretti from CNR - Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Italy, not to remain at the surface of the challenges that are expressed in key documents but to dive deeper into underlying root causes and dynamics. So when in the document analysis, topics like energy, artificial intelligence, digitalisation, health and security emerged at top positions, we strived to identify crosscutting underlying aspects.

There is a fascination with the future, as a repository of both opportunities and threats that affects all of us. Concern for what we call "the future of work" is part of this mosaic. Regardless of their geographical space, people think of their work as being, in varying doses, a source of material well-being, but also a component of their identity. Uncertainties about how will people work in the future – how will they earn income and build a purpose, a meaning through their work – is an important topic, and often a source of concern.
What are we heading for? What kind of future is desirable? What is possible, respectively probable, from what we deem desirable? What can be done to get there? All these are legitimate questions that deserve our attention.
In the context of recent waves of technological progress, the future of work is the subject of intensive controversy. Often in the public space there is an overwhelming emphasis on the impact of new technologies on work, neglecting other shaping forces relevant to labor market dynamics. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to open a wider conversation about the future of work on the 2030 horizon.

The perspective used in this paper is a causal and hierarchical one: from drivers of change towards their impact on labor. Most studies on labor market developments start from a context modeled by several global megatrends. Following this logic, the second chapter describes the four main trends identified in literature: i) technological developments, especially automation; ii) globalization, especially cross-border flows and widening inequalities; iii) demographic changes, in particular the ageing population in the global North; iv) climate change, environmental degradation and the development of the green economy.
Within these trends, ongoing or likely transformations have been identified that have or could have an impact on global labor market dynamics. The section describing each megatrend is accompanied by a box with what we call "signals of change" - contextualizing empirical data that serve as justifications/explanations of the phenomena described in that section. In the context of the global transformations we outline here, the fourth chapter presents a catalogue of emerging occupations, by which we mean both existing (highly dynamic) or incipient occupations and occupations that do not yet exist but are likely to exist in 2030 or beyond
The third chapter was added later in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and is a brief overview of the transformations in the global labor market – some already visible, others likely - due to this global crisis.

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The study was published in Romanian as part of the project POCU INTL - Quality in higher education: internationalization and databases for the development of Romanian higher education.

Project webpage: pocu-intl.uefiscdi.ro

Eleven exciting topics have been selected by the Eye of Europe Consortium for Foresight Workshops to take place in the next year and a half.