Project acronym FMSystem
Project The European Fiscal-Military System 1530-1870
Researcher (PI) Peter WILSON
Host Institution (HI) THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2017-ADG
Summary FMSystem transforms the conventional narrative of the violent rise of the European states system by revealing how belligerent competition also involved cooperation. States were not autarkic actors. Their emergence was co-dependent and entailed developing ways to obtain war-making resources from beyond their jurisdictions. This project adds a new conceptual framework to understand this process and broadens the research focus to include the role of non-state actors in minor as well as major countries. It will identify the variety of war-making resources and assess how far their availability was dependent on accessing external expertise and sources of supply. The standard historical perspective will be decentred by shifting the analytical focus away from sovereign states and their political capitals, and instead towards urban ‘fiscal-military hubs’ functioning as centres of expertise, resource accumulation and production. Achieving these objectives will produce the first holistic study of the rise of the European states system, and of the relation between war and political development across the crucial phase between about 1530 and 1870. It will reveal the extent to which this process was doubly transnational, involving (i) transactions conducted through external hubs leading to (ii) the exchange of resources between states and non-state actors across political frontiers. Further, it will gauge the importance of this Fiscal-Military System to both the growing scale of warfare and the emergence of the modern sovereign state as defining the global political order. A team of researchers, closely coordinated by the PI and counselled by an international scholarly board, will examine the system through six key hubs across Europe. The research will produce a major monograph, a conference and volume engaging with global history and non-European scholarship, and a number of ground-breaking studies on regional and thematic aspects of the project.
Summary
FMSystem transforms the conventional narrative of the violent rise of the European states system by revealing how belligerent competition also involved cooperation. States were not autarkic actors. Their emergence was co-dependent and entailed developing ways to obtain war-making resources from beyond their jurisdictions. This project adds a new conceptual framework to understand this process and broadens the research focus to include the role of non-state actors in minor as well as major countries. It will identify the variety of war-making resources and assess how far their availability was dependent on accessing external expertise and sources of supply. The standard historical perspective will be decentred by shifting the analytical focus away from sovereign states and their political capitals, and instead towards urban ‘fiscal-military hubs’ functioning as centres of expertise, resource accumulation and production. Achieving these objectives will produce the first holistic study of the rise of the European states system, and of the relation between war and political development across the crucial phase between about 1530 and 1870. It will reveal the extent to which this process was doubly transnational, involving (i) transactions conducted through external hubs leading to (ii) the exchange of resources between states and non-state actors across political frontiers. Further, it will gauge the importance of this Fiscal-Military System to both the growing scale of warfare and the emergence of the modern sovereign state as defining the global political order. A team of researchers, closely coordinated by the PI and counselled by an international scholarly board, will examine the system through six key hubs across Europe. The research will produce a major monograph, a conference and volume engaging with global history and non-European scholarship, and a number of ground-breaking studies on regional and thematic aspects of the project.
Max ERC Funding
2 499 853 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-08-01, End date: 2023-07-31
Project acronym FraMEPhys
Project A Framework for Metaphysical Explanation in Physics
Researcher (PI) Alastair WILSON
Host Institution (HI) THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH4, ERC-2017-STG
Summary There is a growing consensus that causal explanation is not the whole story about explanation in science. Metaphysics has seen intense recent attention to the notion of grounding; in philosophy of physics, the focus has been on mathematical and structural explanation. But the grounding debate has been criticized for insularity and disconnection from scientific practice, while work on explanation in physics tends to overlook the sophisticated logical systems and conceptual distinctions developed in metaphysics. This situation hinders understanding of novel explanatory scenarios n philosophy of physics, where familiar models of causal explanation seem to break down. FraMEPhys addresses these challenges by combining new conceptual innovations and insights from both metaphysics and philosophy of physics to transform our understanding of the nature of explanation.
FraMEPhys will engage systematically with the best work on explanation within metaphysics and philosophy of science to develop a new general framework for understanding metaphysical explanation in physics, based around the structural-equations approach to causation. The guiding idea is that the conceptual and methodological tools of structural-equations modelling can be extended beyond their familiar application to causal explanation. This promising strategy, based on ground-breaking recent work by the PI, will be applied in FraMEPhys to model the explanatory structures involved in three case studies from philosophy of physics: geometrical explanations of inertial and gravitational motion, explanation in the presence of closed time-like curves, and the explanatory connection between entangled quantum systems. FraMEPhys will develop new concepts for understanding the varieties of explanation, will provide a uniquely systematic treatment of some key cases in philosophy of physics, and will push forward fruitful interactions at the intersection of metaphysics, philosophy of science and philosophy of physics.
Summary
There is a growing consensus that causal explanation is not the whole story about explanation in science. Metaphysics has seen intense recent attention to the notion of grounding; in philosophy of physics, the focus has been on mathematical and structural explanation. But the grounding debate has been criticized for insularity and disconnection from scientific practice, while work on explanation in physics tends to overlook the sophisticated logical systems and conceptual distinctions developed in metaphysics. This situation hinders understanding of novel explanatory scenarios n philosophy of physics, where familiar models of causal explanation seem to break down. FraMEPhys addresses these challenges by combining new conceptual innovations and insights from both metaphysics and philosophy of physics to transform our understanding of the nature of explanation.
FraMEPhys will engage systematically with the best work on explanation within metaphysics and philosophy of science to develop a new general framework for understanding metaphysical explanation in physics, based around the structural-equations approach to causation. The guiding idea is that the conceptual and methodological tools of structural-equations modelling can be extended beyond their familiar application to causal explanation. This promising strategy, based on ground-breaking recent work by the PI, will be applied in FraMEPhys to model the explanatory structures involved in three case studies from philosophy of physics: geometrical explanations of inertial and gravitational motion, explanation in the presence of closed time-like curves, and the explanatory connection between entangled quantum systems. FraMEPhys will develop new concepts for understanding the varieties of explanation, will provide a uniquely systematic treatment of some key cases in philosophy of physics, and will push forward fruitful interactions at the intersection of metaphysics, philosophy of science and philosophy of physics.
Max ERC Funding
1 481 184 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-01-01, End date: 2022-12-31
Project acronym FunMagResBeacons
Project Functionalized Magnetic Resonance Beacons for Enhanced Spectroscopy and Imaging
Researcher (PI) Malcolm LEVITT
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), PE4, ERC-2017-ADG
Summary "This project will develop and demonstrate molecular agents called functional magnetic resonance beacons (fMRBs). These will provide a new set of versatile spectroscopic tools for the spatially resolved study of chemistry, biochemistry, diffusion, flow and percolation inside opaque objects. The fMRB agents support hyperpolarized nuclear spin order, which generates enormously enhanced nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signals. The agents are designed to maintain such order for long times (between 5 minutes and several hours) in ambient temperature solution, enabling their transport deep inside opaque objects. The molecules are functionalized, so that they “light up"" in an NMR or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) experiment, upon triggering by specific chemical signals or physical conditions (sensory functionality), and may also to bind to selected molecular targets (binding functionality). One set of proposed realisations possesses “lock-and-key” functionality, meaning that the hyperpolarized nuclear spin order is “locked” into a form which is invisible in the NMR spectrometer, but which may be “unlocked” at any chosen time by applying a suitable radiofrequency pulse sequence. The following molecular moieties are proposed as storage modules: (1) molecular cages, such as functionalized C60 fullerenes, encapsulating noble gas atoms such as 3He; (2) spin clusters supporting long-lived states, such as pairs of 13C or 15N nuclei, in shielded molecular environments. The sensory moieties include tailored peptide sequences, which may be activated by the presence of particular proteases, while binding modules include moieties such as biotin. The agents are designed to be conveniently transportable in a hyperpolarized state. Potential long-term applications include in vivo molecular imaging by MRI.
"
Summary
"This project will develop and demonstrate molecular agents called functional magnetic resonance beacons (fMRBs). These will provide a new set of versatile spectroscopic tools for the spatially resolved study of chemistry, biochemistry, diffusion, flow and percolation inside opaque objects. The fMRB agents support hyperpolarized nuclear spin order, which generates enormously enhanced nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signals. The agents are designed to maintain such order for long times (between 5 minutes and several hours) in ambient temperature solution, enabling their transport deep inside opaque objects. The molecules are functionalized, so that they “light up"" in an NMR or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) experiment, upon triggering by specific chemical signals or physical conditions (sensory functionality), and may also to bind to selected molecular targets (binding functionality). One set of proposed realisations possesses “lock-and-key” functionality, meaning that the hyperpolarized nuclear spin order is “locked” into a form which is invisible in the NMR spectrometer, but which may be “unlocked” at any chosen time by applying a suitable radiofrequency pulse sequence. The following molecular moieties are proposed as storage modules: (1) molecular cages, such as functionalized C60 fullerenes, encapsulating noble gas atoms such as 3He; (2) spin clusters supporting long-lived states, such as pairs of 13C or 15N nuclei, in shielded molecular environments. The sensory moieties include tailored peptide sequences, which may be activated by the presence of particular proteases, while binding modules include moieties such as biotin. The agents are designed to be conveniently transportable in a hyperpolarized state. Potential long-term applications include in vivo molecular imaging by MRI.
"
Max ERC Funding
2 762 223 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-10-01, End date: 2023-09-30
Project acronym GenderedPeace
Project A Gendered International Law of Peace
Researcher (PI) Christine Chinkin
Host Institution (HI) LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH2, ERC-2017-ADG
Summary The ambitious aim of this cutting-edge project is to develop the theoretical foundations for a ‘gendered international law of peace’. In so doing, the project will critically engage with the UN Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, first set out in resolution 1325, 2000. By 2015, the Security Council had adopted seven further resolutions, which together provide a political agenda for change in international relations. Notwithstanding the body of research that has been generated over the 17 years, conceptual ambiguity, normative indeterminacy and conceptual knowledge gaps continue to limit the transformative potential of the WPS agenda. In addition, a lack of political commitment has perpetuated its marginalisation from other contemporary agendas and initiatives relating to sustainable peace. This project will address some of these knowledge gaps through engaging feminist methodologies to provide an enriched, and gender-sensitive reading of the international legal obligations of states, international governmental organisations and other non-state actors, and in so doing produce research of academic excellence. In developing an innovative conceptual framework for interrogating through a gender lens what is implicated by ‘peace’ and ‘security’, the research will disrupt current international legal orthodoxy in its scope and approach. Through four distinct but inter-linked streams of study, this project will develop a new understanding of the WPS agenda within the changed (and changing) geo-political context and so provide additional tools for furthering gender equality and women’s empowerment during and following conflict that will form the building blocks of a gendered international law of peace.
Summary
The ambitious aim of this cutting-edge project is to develop the theoretical foundations for a ‘gendered international law of peace’. In so doing, the project will critically engage with the UN Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, first set out in resolution 1325, 2000. By 2015, the Security Council had adopted seven further resolutions, which together provide a political agenda for change in international relations. Notwithstanding the body of research that has been generated over the 17 years, conceptual ambiguity, normative indeterminacy and conceptual knowledge gaps continue to limit the transformative potential of the WPS agenda. In addition, a lack of political commitment has perpetuated its marginalisation from other contemporary agendas and initiatives relating to sustainable peace. This project will address some of these knowledge gaps through engaging feminist methodologies to provide an enriched, and gender-sensitive reading of the international legal obligations of states, international governmental organisations and other non-state actors, and in so doing produce research of academic excellence. In developing an innovative conceptual framework for interrogating through a gender lens what is implicated by ‘peace’ and ‘security’, the research will disrupt current international legal orthodoxy in its scope and approach. Through four distinct but inter-linked streams of study, this project will develop a new understanding of the WPS agenda within the changed (and changing) geo-political context and so provide additional tools for furthering gender equality and women’s empowerment during and following conflict that will form the building blocks of a gendered international law of peace.
Max ERC Funding
1 999 705 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31
Project acronym GenTime
Project Temporal structures of gender inequalities in Asian and Western welfare regimes
Researcher (PI) Man Yee KAN
Host Institution (HI) THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH3, ERC-2017-COG
Summary An important part of sociological understanding of how welfare regimes are shaped by culture and history derives from Esping-Andersen’s 'three worlds' account. But these worlds, and later developments in this field, including the extension and application of the framework to gender roles, derive exclusively from Western models. What will emerge as we seek to develop a global perspective on other models of welfare regimes and how they handle gender inequalities? We will answer this question, using newly available data deriving from beyond the conventional Anglophone and European theatres: from China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to explore patterns emerging from other cultural and social traditions.
GenTime will be a study of gender inequality in patterns of time use across East Asian and Western societies. We will investigate the development trajectories and provision of unpaid work in different welfare regimes, and the systematic differences between men and women in the amount of time they spend on daily activities and their daily life schedules. It will examine time use as an important parameter of public policies. We will establish if East Asian regimes represent a distinct typology. The project will shed new light on the gender division of labour and social inequality across different regime types.
Furthermore, we will examine how the use of modern technology in care provision and domestic labour may shape the trends in gender inequality. We will investigate the impacts on gender differences in leisure time and enjoyment in daily activities. High quality cross-national and historical comparative time diary data and household panel data will be analysed to study gender inequality 1) at the household level on how couples divide their roles in work and family; 2) at the societal level on the role of welfare regimes in shaping the trends in domestic division of labour; and 3) from a life course perspective on the impacts of time use on later family outcomes.
Summary
An important part of sociological understanding of how welfare regimes are shaped by culture and history derives from Esping-Andersen’s 'three worlds' account. But these worlds, and later developments in this field, including the extension and application of the framework to gender roles, derive exclusively from Western models. What will emerge as we seek to develop a global perspective on other models of welfare regimes and how they handle gender inequalities? We will answer this question, using newly available data deriving from beyond the conventional Anglophone and European theatres: from China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to explore patterns emerging from other cultural and social traditions.
GenTime will be a study of gender inequality in patterns of time use across East Asian and Western societies. We will investigate the development trajectories and provision of unpaid work in different welfare regimes, and the systematic differences between men and women in the amount of time they spend on daily activities and their daily life schedules. It will examine time use as an important parameter of public policies. We will establish if East Asian regimes represent a distinct typology. The project will shed new light on the gender division of labour and social inequality across different regime types.
Furthermore, we will examine how the use of modern technology in care provision and domestic labour may shape the trends in gender inequality. We will investigate the impacts on gender differences in leisure time and enjoyment in daily activities. High quality cross-national and historical comparative time diary data and household panel data will be analysed to study gender inequality 1) at the household level on how couples divide their roles in work and family; 2) at the societal level on the role of welfare regimes in shaping the trends in domestic division of labour; and 3) from a life course perspective on the impacts of time use on later family outcomes.
Max ERC Funding
1 999 739 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-10-01, End date: 2023-09-30
Project acronym GLO
Project Refiguring Conservation in/for 'the Anthropocene': The Global Lives of the Orangutan
Researcher (PI) Liana CHUA
Host Institution (HI) BRUNEL UNIVERSITY LONDON
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2017-STG
Summary In recent years, conservationists have engaged in heated debates about whether and how conservation should respond to the challenges posed by ‘the Anthropocene’—a term increasingly used to encapsulate the overwhelming, transformative impact of human activity on the Earth system. How are these debates—and the wider ‘Anthropocenic’ awareness they embody—reshaping conservation philosophy, strategy and practice? How are they manifested in and across diverse contexts? How, conversely, are global conservation developments and ‘Anthropocenic’ phenomena apprehended and reshaped on the ground? This project explores such urgent questions through an unprecedented study of the global nexus of orangutan conservation at a unique historical juncture marked by flux and uncertainty. Combining in-depth ethnography and multiply-scaled cross-cultural comparison, it approaches orangutan conservation as a sprawling, uneven terrain across which the rapidly-evolving relationship between conservation and ‘the Anthropocene’ is being played out. Its objectives are 1) to examine if and how contemporary conservation is being ‘scaled up’ and re(con)figured in and for ‘the Anthropocene’; and 2) to cut ‘the Anthropocene’ down to size by exploring how it is experienced, conceptualized, contested or indeed refused across multiple conservation settings. Comprising four interlinked studies to be carried out simultaneously at the main nodes of orangutan conservation, this project seeks to pioneer a new synchronic, multi-sited approach to the analysis of global conservation and lay the groundwork for an empirically-driven, theoretically ambitious new field of scholarship on conservation in/for ‘the Anthropocene’—one that will revitalize social scientific understandings of conservation while adding much-needed empirical depth and nuance to emerging cross-disciplinary discussions about ‘the Anthropocene’.
Summary
In recent years, conservationists have engaged in heated debates about whether and how conservation should respond to the challenges posed by ‘the Anthropocene’—a term increasingly used to encapsulate the overwhelming, transformative impact of human activity on the Earth system. How are these debates—and the wider ‘Anthropocenic’ awareness they embody—reshaping conservation philosophy, strategy and practice? How are they manifested in and across diverse contexts? How, conversely, are global conservation developments and ‘Anthropocenic’ phenomena apprehended and reshaped on the ground? This project explores such urgent questions through an unprecedented study of the global nexus of orangutan conservation at a unique historical juncture marked by flux and uncertainty. Combining in-depth ethnography and multiply-scaled cross-cultural comparison, it approaches orangutan conservation as a sprawling, uneven terrain across which the rapidly-evolving relationship between conservation and ‘the Anthropocene’ is being played out. Its objectives are 1) to examine if and how contemporary conservation is being ‘scaled up’ and re(con)figured in and for ‘the Anthropocene’; and 2) to cut ‘the Anthropocene’ down to size by exploring how it is experienced, conceptualized, contested or indeed refused across multiple conservation settings. Comprising four interlinked studies to be carried out simultaneously at the main nodes of orangutan conservation, this project seeks to pioneer a new synchronic, multi-sited approach to the analysis of global conservation and lay the groundwork for an empirically-driven, theoretically ambitious new field of scholarship on conservation in/for ‘the Anthropocene’—one that will revitalize social scientific understandings of conservation while adding much-needed empirical depth and nuance to emerging cross-disciplinary discussions about ‘the Anthropocene’.
Max ERC Funding
1 407 676 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-01-01, End date: 2022-12-31
Project acronym GlobalLIT
Project GLOBAL LITERARY THEORY
Researcher (PI) Rebecca GOULD
Host Institution (HI) THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2017-STG
Summary Literary theory is often regarded as a twentieth century invention, with no precedents prior to modernity. This relegates older discourses on literature to the status of source material, pertaining to literature’s past, rather than as springboards for literature’s future. While the self-understanding of literary theory’s modernity helped to bring about the discipline’s birth, and hence was innovative in its own time, at present it accounts for many gaps and limits within its current structure, whereby European aesthetic categories remain normative and lesser-known geographies are marginalized within synthetic accounts of literary form. Even when the literatures studied are non-European, the literary theory used to understand these texts often circulates within a restricted set of modern European traditions.
A more pluralistic approach to literary knowledge that takes account of the radically different temporalities in the genesis of literary form across different literary traditions, and which explores the different meanings of literature across varying historical and cultural contexts, will reinvigorate the discipline of literary studies with new understandings of the capacity of critique, new views of the role of aesthetic judgment and its ontological foundations, and new ways of imagining the status of literature—poetry in particular—in the public sphere. Through four case studies of Arabic, Persian, Turkic, and Georgian literary theory in the Islamic world (especially the Caucasus), we will produce co-authored articles, individual monographs, and a cumulative anthology of key contributions to literary theory from the Islamic world. Moving beyond the parameters of modernity itself, GlobalLIT seeks to invigorate the discipline of literary studies with new answers to ancient questions. While some of our texts have been studied before, most have not been the subject of sustained scholarly research, and have never before been placed into systematic comparison.
Summary
Literary theory is often regarded as a twentieth century invention, with no precedents prior to modernity. This relegates older discourses on literature to the status of source material, pertaining to literature’s past, rather than as springboards for literature’s future. While the self-understanding of literary theory’s modernity helped to bring about the discipline’s birth, and hence was innovative in its own time, at present it accounts for many gaps and limits within its current structure, whereby European aesthetic categories remain normative and lesser-known geographies are marginalized within synthetic accounts of literary form. Even when the literatures studied are non-European, the literary theory used to understand these texts often circulates within a restricted set of modern European traditions.
A more pluralistic approach to literary knowledge that takes account of the radically different temporalities in the genesis of literary form across different literary traditions, and which explores the different meanings of literature across varying historical and cultural contexts, will reinvigorate the discipline of literary studies with new understandings of the capacity of critique, new views of the role of aesthetic judgment and its ontological foundations, and new ways of imagining the status of literature—poetry in particular—in the public sphere. Through four case studies of Arabic, Persian, Turkic, and Georgian literary theory in the Islamic world (especially the Caucasus), we will produce co-authored articles, individual monographs, and a cumulative anthology of key contributions to literary theory from the Islamic world. Moving beyond the parameters of modernity itself, GlobalLIT seeks to invigorate the discipline of literary studies with new answers to ancient questions. While some of our texts have been studied before, most have not been the subject of sustained scholarly research, and have never before been placed into systematic comparison.
Max ERC Funding
1 498 982 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-05-01, End date: 2023-04-30
Project acronym GLOBALMUN
Project GLOBAL REMUNICIPALISATION AND THE POST-NEOLIBERAL TURN
Researcher (PI) Andrew CUMBERS
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH2, ERC-2017-ADG
Summary This project will undertake a transnational comparative study investigating the phenomenon of remunicipalisation. This refers to a global trend since 2000 (involving 835 cases in 45 countries) for cities to take formerly privatised assets, infrastructure and services back into public ownership. As such, it marks a significant departure in existing urban governance processes, signaling a decisive shift against the dominant form of neoliberalism that has held sway since the 1980s. The research advances the distinctive thesis that remunicipalisation represents a critical moment in the demise of neoliberalism, signifying a shift towards a new post-neoliberal urban governance regime. This has fundamental implications for cities in terms of how they are managed, who is involved and who benefits from urban development processes, with the re-introduction of more state-driven and potentially more democratic public forms.
The overarching aim of the research is to critically interrogate remunicipalisation and its implications for an emergent post-neoliberal urbanism. To address this aim it has three objectives: to develop a typology and conceptualisation of remunicipalisation that captures its diverse spatial, political and social forms; to assess whether it leads to more progressive forms of state and public action; and, to critically evaluate the democratic potential of the new forms of municipal public ownership. The research employs a multi-method transnational comparative analysis over five years, which involves an extensive global survey element, a three-country comparative analysis (Argentina, Germany, US), and a multi-site ethnographic phase of individual remunicipalisation case studies in each country.
Summary
This project will undertake a transnational comparative study investigating the phenomenon of remunicipalisation. This refers to a global trend since 2000 (involving 835 cases in 45 countries) for cities to take formerly privatised assets, infrastructure and services back into public ownership. As such, it marks a significant departure in existing urban governance processes, signaling a decisive shift against the dominant form of neoliberalism that has held sway since the 1980s. The research advances the distinctive thesis that remunicipalisation represents a critical moment in the demise of neoliberalism, signifying a shift towards a new post-neoliberal urban governance regime. This has fundamental implications for cities in terms of how they are managed, who is involved and who benefits from urban development processes, with the re-introduction of more state-driven and potentially more democratic public forms.
The overarching aim of the research is to critically interrogate remunicipalisation and its implications for an emergent post-neoliberal urbanism. To address this aim it has three objectives: to develop a typology and conceptualisation of remunicipalisation that captures its diverse spatial, political and social forms; to assess whether it leads to more progressive forms of state and public action; and, to critically evaluate the democratic potential of the new forms of municipal public ownership. The research employs a multi-method transnational comparative analysis over five years, which involves an extensive global survey element, a three-country comparative analysis (Argentina, Germany, US), and a multi-site ethnographic phase of individual remunicipalisation case studies in each country.
Max ERC Funding
1 766 278 €
Duration
Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31
Project acronym GRIEVANCE
Project Gauging the Risk of Incidents of Extremist Violence Against Non-Combatant Entities
Researcher (PI) Paul GILL
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH3, ERC-2017-STG
Summary GRIEVANCE seeks to make significant advances in increasing our understanding, and thereby reducing the risk, of extremist violence against non-combatants. An inter-disciplinary project underpinned by crime prevention principles is needed to help quantify the risk of such offences. The barbarity of such violent acts, coupled with the fact that participation in them is characterised by an extremely low base rate, has led researchers to seek out individual qualities of the offender with a particular focus upon what radicalisation is and how its drivers can be countered. This search has proven unproductive and impractical. In fact, it has most likely limited and unduly narrowed a wider consideration of the ways in which social scientists can bring what conceptual tools we have to bear on the problem of controlling and managing such behaviour. By doing so, this project shifts the focus from individual qualities (what we think terrorists and other similar offenders “are”) to a consideration of the situational qualities of their behaviour – in other words, what violent offenders do and how they do it (Horgan, 2009: 143). This is consistent with developments in the area of crime control (Cornish and Clarke, 1986; Brantingham & Brantingham, 1981) and crime science more generally. More specifically, GRIEVANCE will utilise a number of unique datasets to understand the risk of extremist violence across a number of phases of analysis. GRIEVANCE characterises risk in terms of a process and dedicates a work package (WP) to each stage of the process from the risk of radicalisation (WP1), to the risk of recruitment (WP2), to the risk of violent action (WP3), to the temporal (WP4) and spatial (WP5) risk of offending behaviour followed by an assessment of the risk of adverse consequences from intervention (WP6). GRIEVANCE will both synthesise the existing knowledge within the literature and produce innovative new findings by utilising cutting edge inter-disciplinary research methods.
Summary
GRIEVANCE seeks to make significant advances in increasing our understanding, and thereby reducing the risk, of extremist violence against non-combatants. An inter-disciplinary project underpinned by crime prevention principles is needed to help quantify the risk of such offences. The barbarity of such violent acts, coupled with the fact that participation in them is characterised by an extremely low base rate, has led researchers to seek out individual qualities of the offender with a particular focus upon what radicalisation is and how its drivers can be countered. This search has proven unproductive and impractical. In fact, it has most likely limited and unduly narrowed a wider consideration of the ways in which social scientists can bring what conceptual tools we have to bear on the problem of controlling and managing such behaviour. By doing so, this project shifts the focus from individual qualities (what we think terrorists and other similar offenders “are”) to a consideration of the situational qualities of their behaviour – in other words, what violent offenders do and how they do it (Horgan, 2009: 143). This is consistent with developments in the area of crime control (Cornish and Clarke, 1986; Brantingham & Brantingham, 1981) and crime science more generally. More specifically, GRIEVANCE will utilise a number of unique datasets to understand the risk of extremist violence across a number of phases of analysis. GRIEVANCE characterises risk in terms of a process and dedicates a work package (WP) to each stage of the process from the risk of radicalisation (WP1), to the risk of recruitment (WP2), to the risk of violent action (WP3), to the temporal (WP4) and spatial (WP5) risk of offending behaviour followed by an assessment of the risk of adverse consequences from intervention (WP6). GRIEVANCE will both synthesise the existing knowledge within the literature and produce innovative new findings by utilising cutting edge inter-disciplinary research methods.
Max ERC Funding
1 458 345 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-01-01, End date: 2022-12-31
Project acronym HANDMADE
Project Handmade: Understanding Creative Gesture in Pottery Making
Researcher (PI) Lampros MALAFOURIS
Host Institution (HI) THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH5, ERC-2017-COG
Summary Human beings have always relied on the skills of the hand for exploring their creative potential. The process of making by hand lies at the intersection between embodied cognition and material culture – linking the plasticity of the brain to the incredibly variety of bodily techniques, materials and forms of material culture. Still, the full creative dimensions of this process as well as the changing relationship of the human hand with past and present material culture are not well understood and require cross-disciplinary research. This project aims to fill this gap in our knowledge focusing on one specific material with long archaeological history and cross-cultural significance, i.e., clay and the craft of ceramics. The morphogenetic potential and plasticity of clay offers a unique kinaesthetic resource for studying the creative ecology of handmaking and exploring questions about skill, memory, distributed intelligence, material agency, tradition and innovation. Our plan is to study pottery making at first hand through sustained multi-sited participant observation in several traditional ceramic workshops spread around mainland Greece and the Islands. We will use a combination of methods from anthropology, archaeology and embodied cognitive science to record, measure, describe, compare and analyse the exact ways by which craft practitioners use their hands to produce a variety of material forms. We shall be collecting our data using extensive video recording, photography as well as through semi-structured interviews and interaction analysis. Our research procedure, grounded on material engagement theory, is designed to facilitate a heightened responsiveness to the details of action and the properties of the materials and the tools involved. Our broader aim is to use our knowledge about the creative entanglement of the hand and the clay and lay down the basic conceptual foundation for an archaeology of handmaking over the long term.
Summary
Human beings have always relied on the skills of the hand for exploring their creative potential. The process of making by hand lies at the intersection between embodied cognition and material culture – linking the plasticity of the brain to the incredibly variety of bodily techniques, materials and forms of material culture. Still, the full creative dimensions of this process as well as the changing relationship of the human hand with past and present material culture are not well understood and require cross-disciplinary research. This project aims to fill this gap in our knowledge focusing on one specific material with long archaeological history and cross-cultural significance, i.e., clay and the craft of ceramics. The morphogenetic potential and plasticity of clay offers a unique kinaesthetic resource for studying the creative ecology of handmaking and exploring questions about skill, memory, distributed intelligence, material agency, tradition and innovation. Our plan is to study pottery making at first hand through sustained multi-sited participant observation in several traditional ceramic workshops spread around mainland Greece and the Islands. We will use a combination of methods from anthropology, archaeology and embodied cognitive science to record, measure, describe, compare and analyse the exact ways by which craft practitioners use their hands to produce a variety of material forms. We shall be collecting our data using extensive video recording, photography as well as through semi-structured interviews and interaction analysis. Our research procedure, grounded on material engagement theory, is designed to facilitate a heightened responsiveness to the details of action and the properties of the materials and the tools involved. Our broader aim is to use our knowledge about the creative entanglement of the hand and the clay and lay down the basic conceptual foundation for an archaeology of handmaking over the long term.
Max ERC Funding
1 889 292 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-04-01, End date: 2023-03-31