The 2015 AESOP PhD workshop is going to be organised by SPECTRA Centre of Excellence of the EU and Institute of Management of Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava in association with the AESOP Young Academics Network and will be held from Monday 6th to Saturday 11th July 2015 in Congress Centre Academia, Stara Lesna.  PHD workshop is part of the annual AESOP Congress that will be held from 13 to 17 July in Prague.

The topic of the workshop is corresponding with the topic of the Annual AESOP Congress 2015 „Fuzzy Responsibility - Multi-actors Decision Making under Uncertainty and Global Changes”, in particular focused on:

  • Spatio-structural, temporal, functional and conceptual dimensions of softness and fuzziness in spatial development
  • Growing uncertainty in decision making
  • Multi actors decision making
  • Governance as a cultural phenomenon (diverse)
  • Perspective  for fuzzy soft polycentric  governance for soft and fuzzy spaces


Doctoral candidates are invited to share their ideas and experiences during the PhD workshop. The workshop will be structured from intensive study modules in small groups together with plenary sessions and presentations from academic mentors from the team collaborating with the team of Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom.

Active participation of PhD students, including presentations of their research issues related to the theses, is required, as the workshop is going to be organised in the form of in-depth workshops in small groups, tutors interventions focused on current challenges in thematic orientation of the workshop, optimisation of research methodology including experiments and other research methods, data gathering and analyses techniques. A field trip on Saturday will be the part of the workshop on July 11th.

The student who attended an AESOP PhD workshop in the past would not be eligible to attend for the second time.

Those interested in participating in the PhD Workshop are expected to fill in the application form and submit this together with their abstract. Abstracts should not exceed 500 words, and must include:

  • The name of the doctoral candidate,
  • Institutional affiliation of doctoral candidate,
  • The thesis title including  keywords
  • The main aim and objectives of the PhD research, methods and expected outputs.


The abstracts will be reviewed by the Organising committee under participation of AESOP Young Academics representative and tutors. Notification about results of review process will be emailed until 31st March 2015.

Opening of the abstract submission will be announced separately.