ICUR-URECA 2026

Undergraduate research has expanded dramatically over the past three decades, evolving from a niche activity at a handful of research-intensive universities into a structured part of higher education across much of the world. Conferences such as ICUR (the International Conference of Undergraduate Research) and URECA (Undergraduate Research Experience on Campus) emerged in this period to give students a forum to present original work and to engage across disciplines and national borders. The underlying premise is that the most pressing intellectual problems — from climate adaptation and antimicrobial resistance to algorithmic bias, democratic backsliding, and the reproducibility crisis in science — cut across fields and require early-career researchers to develop both depth in their discipline and the ability to communicate beyond it. The core issue this topic asks delegates to grapple with is what constitutes a 'current research issue' in their own field and how that issue connects to wider scholarly and societal debates. In the natural sciences, contemporary debates center on open data, AI-assisted discovery, and replication; in engineering and computing, on safety, sustainability, and the governance of emerging technologies; in the social sciences and humanities, on decolonising curricula, methodological pluralism, and the ethics of research involving human subjects. Across all disciplines, questions of research integrity, authorship in the age of generative AI, equitable access to publication, and the global imbalance in who produces and funds knowledge have moved from the margins to the center. The contemporary landscape is shaped by several converging pressures: tightening research budgets in many states, geopolitical competition over strategic technologies, growing public scrutiny of universities, and rapid changes in scholarly communication including preprints, open access mandates, and AI tools. Undergraduate researchers sit at the intersection of these forces — they are trained within national systems but increasingly publish, collaborate, and compete internationally. Briefings under this topic typically ask presenters to situate their own project within an active scholarly conversation, identify the methodological or ethical tensions involved, and articulate why the question matters now.