ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The way in which normative principles (“norms”) matter in world politics is now a key area of international relations research. Yet we have limited understanding of why some norms emerge and gain traction globally whereas others do not. The politics of loss and damage related to climate change offers a paradigm case for studying the emergence of - and contestation over - norms, specifically justice norms. The parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have recently acknowledged that there is an urgent need to address the inevitable, irreversible consequences of climate change. Yet within this highly contested policy area - which includes work on disaster risk reduction; non-economic losses (e.g. loss of sovereignty); finance and climate-related migration - there is little consensus about what loss and damage policy means or what it requires of the global community, of states and of the (current and future) victims of climate change. Relying on an interdisciplinary theoretical approach and an ethnographic methodology that traverses scales of governance, my project - The Politics of Climate Change Loss and Damage (CCLAD) - will elucidate the conditions under which a norm is likely to become hegemonic, influential, contested or reversed by introducing a new understanding of the fluid nature of norm-content. I argue that norms are partly constituted through the practices of policy-making and implementation at the international and national level. The research will examine the micro-politics of the international negotiations and implementation of loss and damage policy and also involves cross-national comparative research on domestic loss and damage policy practices. Bringing these two streams of work together will allow me to show how and why policy practices shape the evolution of climate justice norms. CCLAD will also make an important methodological contribution through the development of political ethnography and “practice-tracing” methods.

1 471 530 €

Start date: 2018-05-01, End date: 2023-04-30

This project explores the meaning of social justice in an age of datafication. It is premised on two significant developments: 1) the shift to a focus on the collection and processing of massive amounts of data across social life and 2) the increasing concern with the societal implications of such processes. Whilst initial concern with the technical ability to ‘datafy’ and collect information on ever-more social activity focused on surveillance and privacy, increasing emphasis is being placed on the fact that data processes are not ‘flat’ and do not implicate everyone in the same way, but, rather, are part of a system of ‘social sorting’, creating new categories of citizens, and premised on an emerging order of ‘have’ and ‘have nots’ between data profilers and data subjects. In such a context, questions of social justice and datafication require detailed study. This project frames this research agenda around the notion of ‘data justice’. It will provide a European framework of study and take a holistic approach by situating research on data processes in the context of a) the concrete experiences and practices of particular communities; b) technological analyses of data sources, algorithmic process and data output; c) policy frameworks that relate to the interplay between digital rights and social and economic rights; and d) conceptual engagement with new social stratifications emerging with datafication. The project is ground-breaking in five different respects: i) it conceptually advances the meaning of social justice in a datafied society; ii) it shifts and challenges dominant understandings of data by highlighting its relation to social and economic rights; iii) it addresses an uncharted but rapidly growing response to datafication in civil society; iv) it breaks down disciplinary boundaries in understandings of technology, power, politics and social change; and v) it pursues a combination of engaged research and socio-technical modes of investigation.

1 383 920 €

Start date: 2018-01-01, End date: 2022-12-31

This project will investigate the origins, acquisition, and evolution of linguistic tone: the use of pitch to distinguish between the meaning of words. Despite the typological ubiquity of tone, there is still no phonetic, structural, or psychological model that explains how and why tones emerge (or fail to emerge) in language after language, nor how they evolve once they are formed. This is because there has never been a systematic analysis of the principles that govern the evolution of tone systems. EVOTONE will provide the first comprehensive study of tonal emergence and evolution, combining detailed phonetic and perceptual studies of Himalayan and Southeast Asian minority languages with innovative experimental methodologies and large-scale computational analysis of the structural principles correlated with the emergence of tone. EVOTONE is guided by a novel hypothesis that, if correct, will have important repercussions for the study of sound change. The core idea is deceptively simple: rather than being the result of small, incremental changes in pronunciation, features like tone come about due to a sudden failure to articulate a particular aspect of a sound. If the risk of focusing on tone is to overemphasize a single feature, the potential reward is enormous: an opportunity to transform our understanding of how physical and cognitive pressures interact to shape human behavior and language change. The outcomes of this project will provide a new empirical foundation for the typology and evolution of tone systems; break new ground in the study of how structural and phonetic factors interact in sound change; and establish, for the first time, an empirically grounded set of principles of tonal evolution. In addition to resolving a number of outstanding questions about tonogenesis, the results will substantially advance our more general understanding of how language changes over time.

1 481 154 €

Start date: 2018-06-01, End date: 2023-05-31

Food Security is a grand challenge of our time, but three factors inhibit our ability to meet global targets. First, interdisciplinary approaches incorporating ecological, social, and health sciences are fundamental, but lacking. Second, a disproportionate focus on food quantity overlooks ‘hidden hunger’, or micronutrient deficiencies, which are implicated in over a million deaths annually. Third, small-scale fisheries (SSF) reach 100s of millions of people in the developing world, hold potential for achieving food security, but remain ‘forgotten food’ in global discourse. Consequently, an interdisciplinary approach that tackles hidden hunger within SSF is a critical frontier for food security research. Fish are particularly high in many micronutrients, but a systematic understanding of which species have the greatest concentrations of key nutrients is needed. Inadequate access to nutritious food is one of the most significant problems of the modern age, which can be illuminated through analyses of power. The failure to realise the tremendous potential for improving food security through fisheries stems from a lack of understanding of how social drivers exacerbate or ameliorate nutritional inequalities. Consequently, an in-depth analysis that quantifies how key social drivers impact nutritional inequality, is essential. FAIRFISH will address these gaps to uncover the ecological and socio-cultural determinants of the contributions SSF make to human health: 1. Establish the ecological and environmental determinants of nutrient availability among fish species using a traits based approach. 2. Advance social practice theory, by integrating an analysis of power, to determine what power relations enable or constrain access to nutritious food. 3. Progress interdisciplinary science, by integrating findings from 1 and 2, to quantify the impact of key social drivers on nutritional inequality, and uncover opportunities to meet nutritional needs.

1 493 605 €

Start date: 2018-02-01, End date: 2023-01-31