ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

This project investigates how and why environmental concerns have become so important to our conceptions of the polar regions today. Through a historical study of both the Arctic and Antarctic from 1945 to the turn of the past century, the project explores the connections between how environments are described - particularly through the natural sciences and economics - and the judgments made about how those environments should be administered. The key hypothesis of this project is that the process of describing an environment cannot be separated from the process of controlling and managing it. Changing perceptions of concepts such as development, ecological fragility, and wilderness have provided frames for describing and understanding the polar regions. Why has natural resource extraction been deemed appropriate (or even necessary) in some contexts, and wholly forbidden in others? Why did the concept of sustainable development become important during the 1980s? Can we think of scientific research programs as instruments of colonialism? And why did national parks and conservation agreements become politically useful? GRETPOL will produce a new understanding of how far from being the passive frames for human action, environments (in the polar regions but indeed also beyond) are constructed by human agency. As anthropogenic climate change reduces polar ice extent and threatens the entire globe, the question has never been timelier.

1 499 952 €

Start date: 2017-02-01, End date: 2022-01-31

“History will remember Barack Obama as the great Slayer of Patent Trolls.” The headline from the 2014 March 20 issue of Wired credits POTUS with, perhaps, an unexpected feat. Referring to companies in the sole business of enforcing patents beyond their actual value, trolls are a recent installment in the history of an intellectual property whose ubiquitousness the Latin word PASSIM (“here and there, everywhere”) neatly captures. In the eye of the storm stands the patent bargain: disclosure of information in return for a limited monopoly. This contractual moment makes patents a source of information, the basis of new innovation. Or does it? By posing this simple question, PASSIM’s bold take on the legitimacy of intellectual property in the governance of informational resources follow patents as legal and informational documents during three historical “patent phases,” producing a visionary and theoretically savvy interpretation of intellectual property that stems from its humanities-based and interdisciplinary project design. PASSIM shows a way out of current analytical gridlocks that earmark the understanding of the role of intellectual property in knowledge infrastructures—most notably the enclosure/openness dichotomy—and provides a fresh take on the complexity of informational processes. A key steppingstone in the PI’s career, her own contribution to PASSIM will be a work of synthesis, highlighting major tendencies in the history of patents as scientific information from 1895 to the present. Four complementary empirical studies target specific themes that strengthen PASSIM’s validity and impact: questions of copyrights in patents, scientists’ patenting strategies both historically and today, the relationship between bibliometrics and patentometrics, and the status of the patent as a legal and informational document. Outputs include workshops, articles, monographs, policy papers and documentation of the project’s experiences with interdisciplinary self-reflexivity.

2 261 523 €

Start date: 2017-10-01, End date: 2022-09-30

SeaLiT explores the transition from sail to steam navigation and its effects on seafaring populations in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea between the 1850s and the 1920s. In the core of the project lie the effects of technological innovation on seafaring people and maritime communities, whose lives were drastically altered by the advent of steam. The project addresses the changes through the actors, seafarers, shipowners and their families, focusing on the adjustment of seafaring lives to a novel socio-economic reality. It investigates the maritime labour market, the evolving relations among shipowner, captain, crew and their local societies, life on board and ashore, as well as the development of new business strategies, trade routes and navigation patterns. Maritime labour and shipping remains an understudied case of the transition from the premodern working environment of the sailing ship to that of the steamer, in a period of rapid technological improvements, economic growth and market integration. Therefore, the project will address a major gap in maritime historiography: on the one hand, the transition from sail to steam, and on the other, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, “the extended Mediterranean” according to F. Braudel. The project examines in a comparative approach seven maritime regions: the Ionian, Aegean, Tyrrhenian, Adriatic and Black Seas, Spain and southern France. The research team composed of the PI, three postdoctoral fellows, four senior researchers and four Ph.D. candidates from Greece, Italy, Spain, France and Ukraine will study unpublished sources: ship logbooks, crew lists, business records, and private correspondence. They will produce a collective volume, several articles, a final synthesis by the PI, four Ph.D. dissertations, three workshops, one international conference and a website with an online open access database, an archival and bibliographical corpus and reconstruction of ship voyages on a web G.I.S. application.

1 372 350 €

Start date: 2017-02-01, End date: 2022-01-31