ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Datafied living develops a communication-centric conceptual and empirical research agenda on the relationship between infrastructures for tracking of the self and forms of agency and meaning in datafied living. It focuses on the mundane experiences and implications of voluntary, pushed, coerced and imposed forms of self-tracking that unfold as we practice ourselves and pursue the good life through digital media. Despite a general, growing scholarly and public concern about the power that big tech companies have amassed in shaping societal developments and individual life possibilities through datafication, we lack knowledge about how exactly datafication is experienced, what it means to ordinary people, and how it shapes diverse contexts of everyday life. Such knowledge is crucial to intervene in tech development and its regulation in support for human flourishing: in facilitating good, safe and meaningful datafied living for all. Datafied Living is groundbreaking in five respects: 1) by framing datafication as conditioned on communication, I develop a novel communicative framework that cuts across domains of application and significantly advances both communication theory and datafication research; 2) I cover uncharted empirical territory of “datafication as viewed from below”, unifying data-driven and classic methods in an ambitious, context-sensitive methodology to study infrastructures and experiences of self-tracking and tracking of the self by others across personal, work and institutional life in the welfare state of Denmark, one of the most digitized and datafied countries in the world; 3) I unify and synthesize infrastructural analyses and experiential perspectives to elicit agentic potentials of mundane self-tracking across contexts; 4) I bring a much needed European, and context-sensitive perspective to an otherwise US-dominated debate; 5) I offer a well-tested methodology, and software, to scale the study of datafied living to cross-national comparison.

1 426 201 €

Start date: 2021-01-01, End date: 2025-12-31

Children who lie, learn this from a very young age. While some forms of lying are harmless, or even adaptive, other types are maladaptive. Yet, social origins of lying are grossly understudied. Parents sometimes lie (claiming to leave the child behind, when misbehaving) or model lying to children (telling someone they love a gift, while admitting to the child their dislike). How parental deception affects children is unknown. In fact, socialization of child lying is paradoxical: despite lying or modelling lying, parents usually teach that lying is wrong. Thus, many children receive mixed messages about the value of honesty. To begin the crucial study of this paradox, I coin a novel term: “parental moral dissonance”, a mismatch between what parents teach about lying and what they actually do. In the multimethod FAMI-LIES project, I will explore and explain how and why parents lie to children, how this contrasts with what they teach, and how lying and moral dissonance relate to child socio-emotional and moral outcomes. The problematic scarcity of research on social origins of lying reflects in a lack of valid measures to assess variation in parental lies. Therefore, I will first design a new, necessary questionnaire and behavioural observation codes to assess parental lying. Second, I will explore parental and child correlates of moral dissonance to generate hypotheses about its appearance, origins, and effects. Third, I will assess longitudinal associations (including bidirectional patterns) between parent and child lying, and child outcomes. Fourth, I will experimentally test causal socialization pathways from parent to child lying. A unique integration of insights of psychology and family studies frames lying in a psychosocial context. Findings will impact various disciplines, aid evidence-based prevention and intervention programs for parents and children, and provide foundations for further expansion of this societal and clinically relevant research line.

1 498 250 €

Start date: 2021-11-01, End date: 2026-10-31

"Scholarship has not responded satisfactorily to the current crisis of interreligious misunderstanding, sectarian strife, and rising fundamentalism. Ethical attempts to respect difference have resulted in reifications and the encouragement of difference. Could the kinds of experiences that scholars and practitioners call religious, divine, spiritual, or mystical share a ""common core""? Notwithstanding that this old hypothesis has been rejected by scholars as a universalization of Western and Christian concepts of experience and religion, this project sets out to investigate the possibility of undisclosed commonalities with a new set of methods. The project specifically focuses on the experience and cultivation of love in religious, spiritual, and contemplative practice; first among Tibetan Buddhists, Pentecostals, and Sufis in Denmark; secondly with Tibetan Buddhists in Nepal, Pentecostals in Papua New Guinea, and Sufis in Egypt. In this endeavour the project takes on the central anthropological task of comparing not only things that look alike but also phenomena which are seemingly dissimilar. Through audiovisual and microphenomenological methods of experiential elicitation, the project will examine in minute detail the synchronic and diachronic structures of concrete experiences of love – including the complex sensory and emotional qualities of such experiences and the micro-acts and micro-events that may be involved as they unfold. Furthermore, through participant observation and life history interviews the project will examine how such experiences of love impact upon and emerge from people's everyday practices, how research participants themselves understand the ways in which such experiences shape their lives, and how different life trajectories may relate to particular experiences. By combining these methods the project will pave the way for new interreligious understandings based on in-depth experiential detail that has not been achieved before."

1 498 189 €

Start date: 2021-05-01, End date: 2026-04-30

Hybrid systems combining artificial and human intelligence hold great promise for training human skills. I propose to develop Hybrid Human-AI Regulation (HHAIR) to develop learners’ Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) skills within Adaptive Learning Technologies (ALTs). HHAIR targets young learners (10-14 years) for whom SRL skills are critical in today’s society. Many of these learners use ALTs to learn mathematics and languages every day in school. ALTs optimize learning based on learners’ performance data but even the most sophisticated ALTs fail to support SRL. In fact, most ALTs take over (offload) control and monitoring from learners. HHAIR on the other hand aims to gradually transfer regulation of learning from AI-regulation to self-regulation. Learners will increasingly regulate their own learning progressing through different degrees of hybrid regulation. In this way HHAIR supports optimized learning and transfer (deep learning) and development of SRL skills for lifelong learning (future learning). This project is ground-breaking in developing the first hybrid systems to train human SRL skills with AI. The design of HHAIR resolves four scientific challenges: i) identify individual learner’s SRL during learning; ii) design degrees of hybrid regulation; iii) confirm effects of HHAIR on deep learning; and iv) validate effects of HHAIR on SRL skills for future learning. The four design challenges are addressed by investigating ALTs’ trace data in exploratory studies (WP1), applying these insights to develop HHAIR in design studies (WP2), investigating immediate effects on deep learning in short-term field studies (WP3) and effects on SRL-skills for future learning in long-term field studies (WP4). The AI@EDU infrastructure will connect HHAIR to ALTs used daily in schools across Europe. The project will develop advanced measurement of SRL and algorithms to drive hybrid regulation for developing SRL skills in ALTs.

1 499 248 €

Start date: 2021-02-01, End date: 2026-01-31