ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

OPPSEXRIGHTS will be the first large-scale, transnational study to consider the effects of recent Sexual and Gender Rights and Equalities (SGRE) on those who oppose them, by exploring opponents’ experiences of the transformation of everyday spaces. It will work beyond contemporary polarisations, creating new possibilities for social transformation. This cutting-edge research engages with the dramatically altered social and political landscapes in the late 20th and early 21st Century created through the development of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans, and women’s rights. Recent reactionary politics highlight the pressing need to understand the position of those who experience these new social orders as a loss. The backlash to SGRE has coalesced into various resistances that are tangibly different to the classic vilification of homosexuality, or those that are anti-woman. Some who oppose SGRE have found themselves the subject of public critique; in the workplace, their jobs threatened, while at home, engagements with schools can cause family conflicts. This is particularly visible in the case studies of Ireland, UK and Canada because of SGRE. A largescale transnational systematic database will be created using low risk (media and organisational discourses; participant observation at oppositional events) and higher risk (online data collection and interviews) methods. Experimenting with social transformation, OPPSEXRIGHTS will work to build bridges between ‘enemies’, including families and communities, through innovative discussion and arts-based workshops. This ambitious project has the potential to create tangible solutions that tackle contemporary societal issues, which are founded in polarisations that are seemingly insurmountable.

1 988 652 €

Start date: 2019-10-01, End date: 2024-09-30

Corruption is a global challenge that affects the lives of millions of citizens. In the past decade, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have become indispensable tools in the fight to reduce corruption, especially when employed from the bottom-up by civil society organizations. While pioneering initiatives in this direction have flourished, to date we only have unsystematic and descriptive evidence regarding how they work and the associated consequences. With the objective of significantly advancing knowledge on this topic, BIT-ACT will open a new line of inquiry by investigating what I call anti-corruption technologies (ACTs) to: (1) assess how civil society organizations engage with ACTs to counter corruption, (2) appraise how ACTs enable intersections between bottom-up and top-down efforts against corruption, and (3) evaluate how ACTs blend with the transnational dimension in the struggle against corruption. Based on an interdisciplinary framework that combines corruption studies, science and technology studies and social movement studies, BIT-ACT will use the constructivist grounded theory method to analyze a combination of textual and visual data in a comparative and transnational research design including nine countries – Algeria, Bangladesh, Brazil, Estonia, India, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Uruguay. BIT-ACT will be groundbreaking in three ways. At the theoretical level, it will expand the debate on anti-corruption providing grounded concepts and models to explain ACTs; at the empirical level, it will advance knowledge on how the usage of ACTs is changing the relationship between citizens and democratic institutions; at the methodological level, it will innovate in the use of grounded theory assessing a new standard for cross-national comparative grounded theory. Finally, BIT-ACT will produce sound and useful knowledge for the stakeholders involved in the fight against corruption worldwide by suggesting how to best employ ICTs from the bottom-up.

1 489 115 €

Start date: 2019-07-01, End date: 2024-06-30

Climate change may be undermining the stock of seasonal representations that society draws on to understand and live according to the weather. The CALENDARS project studies how modern society represents seasons, and how these representations shape institutions and help people live with seasonal change. The project opens an important emerging field in climate adaptation research by examining the representations of ‘normal’ seasons underlying key institutions, assesses their quality for successful adaptation to rapid climate change, and analyses facilitators and barriers to adopting representations more flexibly to new climates. It contributes a novel perspective on how to transform our institutions – from schools to farmer cooperatives – from the foundational culture and representations up, to better fit the changing seasonal cycles we are experiencing. CALENDARS empirically explores the relationship between different institutions’ ideas of seasons and their successful adaptation through an in-depth comparative study of a set of institutions in two local communities, in Norway and New Zealand. It is steered by an overall objective to: ‘Advance knowledge and understanding of how seasonal representations shape and are shaped by institutions, and critically appraise the quality of these representations for contributing to successful adaptation to seasonal change’. Conceptually, CALENDARS looks at representations as continuously ‘co-produced’ at the boundary of nature and society, and society and institutions. It tests a novel reconceptualisation of co-production as a prism; with each of the project’s three phases looking at the complex processes by which representations emerge through different ‘lenses’ of co-production. Methodologically, the project tests the feasibility of a novel basket of bespoke methods spanning narrative interviews, calendar boundary objects and collaborative sustainability science.

1 489 426 €

Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31

The world is in the midst of a sea change in approaches to development. The rise of nationalist politics in the U.S., U.K. and Europe have questioned commitments to global governance at the same time that China has emerged as a champion of globalization, a turn of geo-political events that would have been unfathomable ten years ago. Through its own multi-lateral institutions, China is setting a new agenda for development from Europe to Oceania. China’s approach differs from Anglo/Euro/American approaches to “law and development” (LD). Whereas LD orthodoxy has sought to improve legal institutions in poor states, Chinese do not foster rule of law abroad. Instead, Chinese view law as one set of rules, among others, to facilitate economic transactions and not to foster democratization. This distinction has sparked a global debate about the so-called “China model” as an alternative to LD. Yet there is little empirical data with which to assess the means and ends of China’s expanded footprint, a question with long-term implications for much of the developing world. This project addresses that problem by proposing that even if Chinese cross-border development does not operate through transparent rules, it nonetheless has its own notion of order. The project adopts a multi-sited, mixed method, and interdisciplinary approach—at the intersection of comparative law, developmental studies, and legal anthropology—to understand the nature of China’s order. The project has two objectives: 1. To establish the conceptual bases for the study of China’s approach to law and development by developing the first systematic study of the impacts of Chinese investment on the legal systems of developing economies. 2. To experiment with a comparative research design to theorize how China’s approach suggests a type of order that extends through a conjuncture of regional and local processes and manifests itself differently in diverse contexts.

1 499 381 €

Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31