ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The everyday lives of contemporary youths are awash with chemicals and pharmaceutical compounds to boost pleasure, moods, sexual performance, vitality, appearance and health. Nevertheless, most studies of chemical use among young people have focused on the abuse of specific recreational drugs and their role within deviant youth sub-cultures. Instead of explaining drug abuse with the purpose of controlling it, this project aims to examine the pervasive use of chemicals from the perspectives of youths themselves. It aims to understand what chemical and pharmaceutical substances, and not only illicit narcotics, ‘do’ for youths. How are chemicals a part of their everyday lives? What role do they play in calming their fears or in achieving their dreams and aspirations? How can we understand the ways in which chemicals affect their bodies and minds? The theoretical innovation promised by this project lies in its combining of disciplines – most notably medical anthropology, science and technology studies and youth studies – to formulate a new groundbreaking framework for understanding the complex sociality of chemicals in youths’ everyday lives. The framework will have both scientific and societal impact. Ethnographic research will be conducted in four medium-sized cities: Marseille in France, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Makassar in Indonesia, and Batangas in the Philippines.

2 489 967 €

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

The Great Hunger (1845-49) radically transformed Ireland: it led to the wide-scale eviction of farmers, killed one million of the rural population, and caused massive emigration to other parts of the British Empire and the United States. Moreover, the Great Famine encouraged anti-English, nationalist sentiments and its trauma is pivotal to the development of an Irish postcolonial consciousness between 1847-1921. There is a vast unexplored transatlantic corpus of prose fiction, written between the aftermath of the Famine and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which remembers the years of starvation and diaspora. My project is the first to inventorise and bring together this under-researched body of literature, written in Ireland and by Irish immigrants in England, Canada and the United States. This fiction requires intensive examination for significant reasons, offering alternative perspectives on how the Famine was culturally experienced than previous studies have displayed, and representing subaltern voices and recollections. Moreover, the texts are written in the homeland as well as in diaspora, by migrated Irish or their descendants. An examination of the corpus will therefore move beyond the largely nation-oriented frontiers of cultural memory studies towards innovative, transnational approaches. The project specifically investigates how remembrance is mediated through time, from one generation to another, and space, in diaspora. It aims to evolve a novel theoretical model about the interaction between temporal and spatial relocation in literary remembrance. This pioneering model will generate groundbreaking insights into the interaction between memory and ethnic identity in comparative contexts of cultural dislocation, a colonised homeland and migrant communities; and in processes of cultural relocation: de-colonisation and ethnic integration. At the same time, the project will analyse genre aspects which play a dynamic role in processes of cultural remembrance, contributing a new perspective to the interdisciplinary debate on media of recollection in cultural memory studies.

741 000 €

Start date: 2010-10-01, End date: 2015-09-30

"The mid-2000s saw the emergence of large-scale land acquisitions. While processes of agricultural ‘land grabbing’ have received considerable global attention, particularly in Africa, the land grabbing issue in the countries of the post-Soviet region has gone largely unnoticed This research proposal aims to explore this omission in the ‘land grab’ debate by studying the case of Russia. The main research question is: To what extent and how has global land grabbing occurred in Russia, with what implications to local communities, and how have local communities resisted or modified these land deals (if at all)? The proposed research is pertinent by providing a case distinct from other regions, which is likely to raise new insights on global land grabbing. Several features make the case of Russia remarkably divergent. First, whereas in most parts of the world the current trends see an increase in population density and marginal and forest land being converted into cultivated land, Russia is witness to massive land abandonment and reforestation. Another particular feature is the low level presence of an autonomously organized civil society (which also manifests on the issue of land grabbing contestation). This research will be the first comprehensive study of land grabbing and related rural social movements in Russia and the post-Soviet area at large. Rural movements have been studied mainly in Latin-America, Africa and Asia. In contrast, research on rural movements in post/reform socialist contexts (such as China) is still in its infancy, and practically absent in Russia. The proposed research aims to establish a new field of ‘(post)-socialist land grabbing and rural social mobilisation’ studies. Moreover, it will contribute to more broad debates on civil society and protest in state dominated, post/reform-socialist countries, by studying these issues from the perspective of the (mostly ignored) rural areas."

820 832 €

Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2017-12-31

T cells display many different phenotypes and functions, depending on the nature of previously encountered signals. If we want to understand how these different T cell subsets arise, we need to be able to follow individual T cells and their progeny through time. With the aim to map the life histories of individual T cells we have developed unique technologies that allow us to determine whether different T cell populations arise from common or distinct progenitors. Within this project we will utilize genetic reporter systems to determine: 1. How T cell recruitment, proliferation and death shape antigen-specific T cell responses 2. At which stage the resulting T cells commit to the effector or the memory T cell lineage 3. The self renewal potential of the tissue-resident memory T cells that remain after infection is cleared By following T cells and their progeny through time, this project will describe the regulation of cell fate in antigen-specific T cell responses. Furthermore, this project will lead to the creation of novel reporters of cellular history that will be of broad value to analyze cell fate and kinship for a variety of cell types.

2 499 640 €

Start date: 2011-05-01, End date: 2017-01-31