ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Bacteria in nature exhibit remarkable capacity to sense their surroundings and rapidly adapt to diverse conditions by gaining new beneficial traits. This extraordinary feature facilitates their survival when facing extreme environments. Utilizing Bacillus subtilis as our primary model organism, we propose to study two facets of this vital bacterial attribute: communication via extracellular nanotubes, and persistence as resilient spores while maintaining the potential to revive. Exploring these fascinating aspects of bacterial physiology is likely to change our view as to how bacteria sense, respond, endure and communicate with their extracellular environment. We have recently discovered a previously uncharacterized mode of bacterial communication, mediated by tubular extensions (nanotubes) that bridge neighboring cells, providing a route for exchange of intracellular molecules. Nanotube-mediated molecular sharing may represent a key form of bacterial communication in nature, allowing for the emergence of new phenotypes and increasing survival in fluctuating environments. Here we propose to develop strategies for observing nanotube formation and molecular exchange in living bacterial cells, and to characterize the molecular composition of nanotubes. We will explore the premise that nanotubes serve as a strategy to expand the cell surface, and will determine whether nanotubes provide a conduit for phage infection and spreading. Furthermore, the formation and functionality of interspecies nanotubes will be explored. An additional mode employed by bacteria to achieve extreme robustness is the ability to reside as long lasting spores. Previously held views considered the spore to be dormant and metabolically inert. However, we have recently shown that at least one week following spore formation, during an adaptive period, the spore senses and responds to environmental cues and undergoes corresponding molecular changes, influencing subsequent emergence from quiescence.

1 497 800 €

Start date: 2014-04-01, End date: 2019-03-31

"What kinds of self does it take to make a revolution? And how does revolutionary politics, understood as a project of personal as much as political transformation, articulate with other processes of self-making, such as religious practices? Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics (CARP) seeks fundamentally to recast our understanding of revolutions, using their relationship to religious practices in diverse social and cultural settings as a lens through which to reveal revolutions’ varied capacities for self-making. Developing a comparative matrix of revolutionary settings in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere, CARP’s core objective is to investigate the differing permutations and dynamics of revolutionary ‘anthropologies’ in the original theological sense of the term, i.e. charting revolutionary politics in relation to varying conceptions of what it is to be human, and of how the horizons of people’s lives are to be understood in relation to divine orders of different kinds, in order to reveal how revolutions come to define what persons may be, deliberately setting the social, political, cultural and ultimately ontological coordinates within which people are made who they are. Bringing close ethnographic investigation to bear on conceptions of revolution, statecraft, and subjectivity in political theory, CARP will produce comprehensive political ethnographies of nine major case-studies, comparing systematically the relationship between revolution and religion in a selection of countries in the Middle East and Latin America. Four smaller-scale case-studies from Europe and Asia will add complementary dimensions to this comparative matrix. Providing much-needed empirical materials and analytical insight into the dynamic comingling of political and religious forms in the making of revolutionary selves, CARP’s ultimate ambition is to launch the comparative study of revolutionary politics as a major new departure for anthropological research."

1 854 472 €

Start date: 2014-06-01, End date: 2019-05-31

"The proposal describes a project to deliver a comprehensive evaluation of the relationship between unemployment and social stratification in Europe and North America. The project’s core goal is to provide empirical estimates of the causal impact of unemployment on four critical domains of social life, namely household incomes, demographic behaviour, educational attainment, as well as social integration and civic participation. The analysis will examine the persistence of such effects in the medium and longer run, and will evaluate the role of moderating factors like coupled unemployment and unemployment duration. The distinction between the stratification impacts of household experiences of unemployment and those of aggregate macroeconomic conditions will be a particular focus in the analysis, as will be the evaluation of a mediation model including changing household incomes, changing economic expectations and changing norms and preferences as relevant factors. The project will also address heterogeneity in the effects of unemployment e.g. by level of education, household demographics, household income or social class, and will evaluate the extent of cross-country variation in the impacts of unemployment, as well as any mitigating role of labour market and social policies, along the four dimensions of stratification considered. The empirical analysis rests on cross-nationally harmonized multilevel life course datasets constructed from various representative household panel studies, notably the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) and several national panel studies, merged with time-series data on aggregate unemployment at the regional level. To achieve robust causal inference, the project utilizes multilevel panel data modelling, notably two-way fixed-effects and related estimators that statistically control for unobserved heterogeneity at both the household and contextual level."

1 876 758 €

Start date: 2014-09-01, End date: 2019-08-31

The deportation of irregular migrants is a burning issue in public debates all around the world. Most states invest heavily in effective deportation regimes, but when it comes to implementation, deportation regimes are notorious for not achieving their declared goals. Everywhere, marked discrepancies persist between deportation policies and actual practices of deportation. This project compares the implementation of deportation regimes in four different states – Israel, Greece, Spain and Ecuador – in order to provide a closely researched assessment of implementation practices. It interrogates a core assumption in much of the scholarly literature on the “deportation turn”, namely, that there is a global convergence of state deportation regimes. The project adds a crucial – yet, so far underexplored – perspective on irregular migration: the interface of street-level state agents and civil-society actors in shaping practices of deportation. Existing studies look either at the “top level” of the state (policies, laws, procedures, etc.), or at the “underground level” of its “victims” (irregular migrants’ survival strategies, trafficking networks, etc.). This project privileges the “meso level” of the deportation regime, bringing to light the agency of those who exercise discretion in interpreting laws and policies at the “implementation interface”. It makes an original contribution to the anthropology of the state, by demonstrating that the territorial sovereignty of states is constantly renegotiated at this level. The project will produce knowledge on the dilemmas, tactics and occasional alliances of those who carry out and those who obstruct deportation regimes. It will provide new insights into actors’ motivations and worldviews, and explore the dynamics of both “implementation deficits” and “implementation surpluses”. The fine-grained comparative methodology is aimed at producing findings that will be of theoretical significance and of vital importance for policymakers, street-level agents and civil-society actors in dealing with the realities of irregular migration in the 21st century.

1 488 410 €

Start date: 2014-03-01, End date: 2019-02-28