Despite emotions being a driver of political choices, building democratically meaningful emotional narratives in politics remains an uncharted territory. Hence the main venture of ENCODE is to decode the meanings of emotions and encode them to policy-making strategies aiming for a positive emotional turn, breaking the cycle of depolarisation. To meet this ambitious goal, ENCODE builds its conceptual frameworks arising from a novel concept of affective pluralisation, as opposed to affective polarisation. This term serves to frame empirical research carried out in 6 geographically diverse European countries, representing both EU member states and candidates. This study will span desk research, sentiment analysis, biometric research, in-depth interviews, experiments and panel survey. Such triangulation of research techniques ensures the accuracy and validity of the findings. These are further encoded into main outputs: catalogue of best practice to tackle disinformation in social media, emotional gap maps, validated survey questions and democratic resilience heatmaps. These outputs are not expected only to enhance current scientific framework, but also are planned to underpin the future emotional narratives co-designed by diverse groups of citizens in innovations labs and further validated by Delphi expert panels and vignette experiments. This bottom-up approach anchored in citizen science ensures that policy-making strategy are in first place created by citizens and only in the next step discussed by expert teams who will elaborate policy-making strategies, the roadmap for their implementation, alongside future foresight scenarios which will be disseminated widely across EU and EU wide community of 1000+ members. This strategy creates emotional bonds between ordinary citizens, increases trust in governance and supports better informed political decision-making and communication.

The European Solar Telescope (EST) will be a revolutionary Research Infrastructure that will play a major role in answering key questions in modern Solar Physics. This 4-meter class solar telescope, to be located in the Canary Islands, will provide solar physicists with the most advanced state-of-the-art observing tools to transform our understanding of the complex phenomena that drive the solar magnetic activity. The principal objective of the present Preparatory Phase is to provide both the EST international consortium and the funding agencies with a detailed plan regarding the implementation of EST. The specific objectives of the proposed preparatory phase are: (1) to explore possible legal frameworks and related governance schemes that can be used by agencies to jointly establish, construct and operate EST as a new research infrastructure, with the implementation of an intermediate temporary organisational structure, as a previous step for future phases of the project; (2) to explore funding schemes and funding sources for EST, including a proposal of financial models to make possible the combination of direct financial and in-kind contributions towards the construction and operation of EST; (3) to compare the two possible sites for EST in the Canary Islands Astronomical Observatories and prepare final site agreements; (4) to engage funding agencies and policy makers for a long-term commitment which guarantees the construction and operation phases of the Telescope; (5) to involve industry in the design of EST key elements to the required level of definition and validation for their final production; (6) to enhance and intensify outreach activities and strategic links with national agencies and the user communities of EST. To accomplish the aforementioned goals, this 4-year project, promoted by the European Association for Solar Telescopes (EAST) and the PRE-EST consortium, encompassing 23 research institutions from 16 countries, will set up the Project Office