ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

This project aims at producing new understandings of the changes in people’s sensory environmental relationships in three European cities during a particular period in history, 1950–2020. It will offer a focused window on cultural transformations of the sensory by introducing a new transgenerational methodology, ethnographic “sensobiography”. Why now? Firstly, innovative and thoroughly researched information about sensory environmental relationships is in great demand. If the findings are successful, their challenge to several conventional dichotomies will provide results whose interdisciplinary impact extends beyond cultural, sound, and music studies to areas of psychology, human geography, environmental aesthetics, and media history and theory. The research is urgent: at present we are still able to study people ethnographically who were born in the 1930s and 1940s,who therefore lived their early years without digital technologies. The moment is also ideally suited for studying generations born straight into the digital world, where there is a need to enable young and older people to maintain a many-faceted relationship with their environments. The project's three research strands are (1) transformations in mediations of sensory experience, (2) embodied remembering and senses, and (3) sensory commons. These strands will be studied via a research strategy linking individuals and groups to broader social, cultural, and political issues in the medium-sized European cities of Brighton (UK), Ljubljana (Slovenia), and Turku (Finland). Temporally and spatially tightly focused dynamic ethnography makes it possible to examine multiple modes of past and present sensory experiencing. The study of artists as “sensewitnesses” will become one of the pivotal endeavours. The project facilitates a significant step from earlier methodologies toward large-scale, multisensory, transgenerational investigation, providing significant insights into culture with a sustainable future.

1 860 264 €

Start date: 2016-08-01, End date: 2021-07-31

Understanding other peoples’ minds is one of the most fundamental human skills but also the most demanding challenge our brains pose every day: To understand each other, we need to share neural representations of the external world across brains. Studying how social information is represented similarly across individual brains and how it flows from brain to brain poses huge conceptual and technical challenges for neuroscientists, who have consequently resorted to experiments using simplistic and impoverished social stimuli. However, recent advances in brain signal analysis enable us to study the brain basis of social interaction under naturalistic settings with unparalleled accuracy. This neuroimaging project aims to bridge the gap between social psychology and cognitive neuroscience by building a comprehensive neurocognitive model of how individuals maintain and communicate shared neural representations of the dynamic social world. The framework relies on testing the assumption that similarities in sensory and higher-order processing across individuals can be quantified by measuring temporal synchronization of their brain activity. We use novel signal analysis methods, experimental techniques and rapid magnetic resonance image acquisition for testing i) whether selective synchronization of brain circuits during social interaction supports interpersonal understanding, ii) whether similarities in cognitive task sets across individuals are associated with increasingly synchronous brain activity, and iii) whether intense emotional experiences enhance synchronization of brain responses and flow of information from brain to brain. The results will significantly improve our understanding of the brain dynamics of social interaction, and the proposed naturalistic neuroscience approach and will potentially contribute to a significant paradigm shift in social and cognitive neuroscience.

1 280 479 €

Start date: 2013-04-01, End date: 2018-12-31

Administrative professionalization is the hallmark of a modern state, but its origins contain a dilemma. Why there were no offices in ancient Rome? How is it possible that it nevertheless formed the model for the Western administrative state? The purpose of this project is to challenge earlier research and to propose a new model of the Roman Republican governance that integrates domestic and private space and to reinterpret its links with the Republican tradition. The significance of these issues extends much beyond this: the development of administrative space in the European context amounts to nothing less than the emergence of the concept of public. Ever since Weber, the conceptual separation of the office and its holder has defined the European way of governance. The origin of this separation of public and private has often been seen in the Roman Republican state with its strict responsibilities, term limits and defined powers of its magistracies, who operated in open public spaces. Using unconventional methodological tools to challenge the conventional view, the project explores the social and cultural dimensions of legal and administrative space, transcending modern assumptions of public and private. Two main research questions explore the confrontation of ideas and their contexts from the Roman Republic to modern Republicanism: 1) How the conflict between Republican ideals, political power and administrative practices transformed the spaces of administration? 2) How this conflict changed the social topography of Rome, the public and private spheres of governance? While much of the earlier research on Republican administration has been constitutional, focused on sovereignty or the individual magistrates, this project advances a radical new interpretation through spatial and topographical analysis. It is a comprehensive re-evaluation of the Roman administrative tradition and its links with the European heritage through the lens of administrative space.

1 994 326 €

Start date: 2018-05-01, End date: 2023-04-30

We are changing the composition of Earth’s atmosphere, with profound consequences for the environment and our wellbeing. Tiny aerosol particles are globally responsible for much of the health effects and mortality related to air pollution and play key roles in regulating Earth’s climate via their critical influence on both radiation balance and cloud formation. Every single cloud droplet has been nucleated on the surface of an aerosol particle. Aerosols and droplets provide the media for condensed-phase chemistry in the atmosphere, but large gaps remain in our understanding of their formation, transformations, and climate interactions. Surface properties may play crucial roles in these processes, but currently next to nothing is known about the surfaces of atmospheric aerosols and cloud droplets and their impacts are almost entirely unconstrained. My recent work strongly suggests that such surfaces are significantly different from their associated bulk material and that these unique properties can impact aerosol processes all the way to the global scale. Very few surface-specific properties are currently considered when evaluating aerosol effects on atmospheric chemistry and global climate. Novel developments of cutting-edge computational and experimental methods, in particular synchrotron-based photoelectron spectroscopy, now for the first time makes direct molecular-level characterizations of atmospheric surfaces feasible. This project will demonstrate and quantify potential surface impacts in the atmosphere, by first directly characterizing realistic atmospheric surfaces, and then trace fingerprints of specific surface properties in a hierarchy of experimental and modelled aerosol processes and atmospheric effects. Successful demonstrations of unique aerosol surface fingerprints will constitute truly novel insights into a currently uncharted area of the atmospheric system and identify an entirely new frontier in aerosol research and atmospheric science.

1 499 626 €

Start date: 2017-03-01, End date: 2022-02-28