ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The transition to a low-carbon society is vital and requires major changes in everyday life for European households, including new prosumer roles linking renewable energy production and household consumption by use of smart technologies. This implies major alterations in the materiality as well as the social organisation of everyday life. To guide this low-carbon transition, new theory development on the role of technological systems in everyday life is needed. Practice theories represent a strong approach in this; however, they have developed in opposition to understanding actors and structures as mutually interlinked. This means that major drivers, as well as consequences, for sustainable transition are being overlooked. This project will contribute with important new theory development to understand and promote a low-carbon transition as well as to ensure that this transition does not indirectly become a driver of gender and social inequality. Three theoretical lines within theories of practice will be developed: 1. The importance of gender and social structures when studying household practices, including how these social structures influence formation of practices and how, in turn, social structures are formed by the development of practices. 2. The role of the ethical consumer in developing new practices, including how learning processes, media discourses and institutionalised knowledge influence formation of practices. 3. The inclusion of non-humans as carriers and performers of practices, rather than seeing the material arrangements only as the context for practices, especially when dealing with automated and internet connected technologies. Quantitative and qualitative empirical research guided by these theoretical approaches will contribute with work on how future low-carbon living can be achieved and the theoretical developments will form an essential foundation for policy development towards a mandatory low-carbon transition.

2 116 000 €

Start date: 2018-11-01, End date: 2023-10-31

Well-designed mobile, human responsive geographic information technology could improve the lives of millions who daily need to make time critical and societally relevant decisions on the go. However, what are the basic processes with which humans make visuo-spatial decisions when guided by responsive geographic information displays? Visualization research todate has been driven by technical and computational advances to overcome data deluges, but we still have a poor understanding whether, how, and when visual displays support spatio-temporal decision making and action, and for which kinds of users. We will break new ground to overcome this transdisciplinary knowledge gap and aim to: (1) integrate fragmented human-visualization-environment research across the sciences including natural, social/behavioral, and the engineering sciences, all critical to tackle this interdisciplinary problem, (2) develop missing, empirically evaluated design guidelines for human-computer interfaces of current/emerging mobile geographic information technology to support affective, effective, and efficient spatio-temporal decision-making, (3) develop unconventional evaluation methods by critical examination of how perceptual, cognitive, psycho-physiological, and display design factors might influence visuo-spatio-temporal decision making across broad ranges of users and mobile use contexts, and (4) scale up empirical methods from to-date controlled behavioral lab paradigms towards a new in-situ mobile human sensor science. A paradigm shift from current lab-based neuro-cognitive and affective science towards a location-based, close human sensing science will radically change the way we study human behavior across science. In doing so, we can improve spatio-temporal every-day decision making with graphic displays, and facilitate sustainable solutions for the increasingly mobile digital information society having to mitigate environmental emergencies, human refugee crises, or terror attacks.

2 500 000 €

Start date: 2017-11-01, End date: 2022-10-31

This proposal develops a new perspective on social systems by combining analytical sociology with evolutionary game theory, agent-based modeling, computational social science, complexity science, and experimental research. Our focus on co-evolutionary processes will shed new light on emergent phenomena in social systems and elaborate a “social ecosystem” perspective. We will overcome problems of previous approaches by implementing social mechanisms, learning rules, and parameters in an evolutionary way. Our major goal is to show how a “homo socialis” can emerge as the result of an evolutionary competition. For this, we will demonstrate that strict payoff maximization or mechanistic, stimulus-response interactions may eventually be replaced by other-regarding behaviors. In particular, we will study how social cooperation and social norms emerge from repeated social interactions. We will furthermore equip agents with small virtual “brains” and simulate the co-evolution of individual and societal complexity. This will add cognitive complexity to our modeling approach and allow us to study origins and effects of subjectivity, but also early stages in human social evolution. We plan to demonstrate that, in a complex society, boundedly rational agents can perform equally well as a perfect “homo economicus”, and that both types of agents emerge and spread under different conditions. Our project is broad and highly interdisciplinary. It combines various methodologies and pursues an innovative complexity science approach to solve long-standing scientific puzzles. It has the potential to bridge previously incompatible research traditions by revealing unexpected and seemingly paradoxical relationships between them. Thereby, it will help to overcome existing controversies and the related fragmentation in the social sciences.

2 498 831 €

Start date: 2013-06-01, End date: 2018-05-31

International law erects high hurdles for change – typically unanimity or a uniformity of practice of states – and this high threshold has provoked much criticism for hindering the pursuit of justice, the provision of public goods, and the democratic revision of political choices. Yet in different areas, such as international criminal law or the law of international organizations, international law has in recent times undergone more rapid change than the traditional picture would allow, and often in informal ways that do not fit classical categories. However, this greater dynamism has found little sustained attention in scholarship so far. The PATHS project seeks to fill this gap and understand when and how international law changes, how this change is registered among participants in legal discourses and how the pathways of change differ across issue areas and sites of international legal practice. Drawing on scholarship in international law and international relations, it aims to trace attempts at informal change in international law in six issue areas, identify relevant factors behind the developments in those cases, and understand how they relate to the formal categories of international legal change. The project expects significant variation in the ‘paths’ of change in different contexts and issue areas, with an important role for global institutions – international organizations, courts, and expert bodies – in many of them. PATHS also seeks to assess these paths normatively: it explores what mechanisms for change would be legitimate in an international legal order that has increasingly turned from a quasi-contractual institution into a structure of governance with a far more limited role for state consent than in the past. With this focus on change, PATHS aims to make a major contribution to our understanding of international law, its political dynamics, as well as its normative grounding in a globalised world.

2 475 275 €

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