ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

This project seeks to recover the processes by which religious beliefs and identities were defined through interreligious interaction and debate in the religious culture of a broader social base in the eastern Mediterranean (6-8th centuries AD) through examination of a neglected, unconventional corpus of medieval Greek, Syriac and Arabic literature of debate and disputation (consisting of collections of questions and answers, dialogues among others), treating authors such as Ps. Kaisarios, Anastasios of Sinai, and Ps. Athanasios. These sources help us to understand the kinds of perplexities that were being raised in Christian communities of the eastern Mediterranean as they negotiated a lively and contentious religious and social landscape, and they highlight the multifarious issues which Christian leaders had to be prepared to deal with in their pastoral, pedagogical, and apologetic work. At the same time these collections must be seen as an attempt by Christian authors to work out how Christianity was to define its position with regard to other religions (Hellenism, Judaism and Islam) in a period still characterized by considerable fluidity and change. As well as writing those doubts, challenges, objections, concerns, issues and anxieties back into the religious history of the eastern Mediterranean, when completed this full-length study of these texts will provide scholars not only with a detailed knowledge of the ways in which religious belief, practice and communities were defined in contrast to other religious systems, and a fuller sense of the religious, social and intellectual history of the eastern Mediterranean but also with a nuanced picture of their self-definition, one which will be more sensitive to the processes that led to its formation.

1 483 119 €

Start date: 2011-01-01, End date: 2016-12-31

This project uses an innovative anthropological approach to study gambling as a social and cultural activity, and uses these findings to establish a new research paradigm that is technologically astute, internationally focused and aggressively future oriented. Gambling in Europe is worth an estimated E89billion and is a rapidly expanding and changing industry. It is also a source of concern to legislators and consumers. Gambling legislation is not harmonised at the European level. National governments are currently moving at varying speeds between containment and revenue generation, driven on by operators who use constantly evolving technology to create new markets and exploit loopholes in existing ad hoc and obsolete legislation. Like legislators, the research community has failed to keep pace with these changes and continues to focus on quantifying and categorising gamblers and gambling activities within national boundaries. This project will craft a more critical and powerful alternative. Highly productive and proven anthropological approaches will be applied to four systematically integrated case studies: the UK remote gambling industry, spread betting among Chinese financial services workers in Europe, land based gaming in Cyprus and gamblers and non-gamblers in the Italo-Slovenian borderlands. The project will establish the value of a systematic ethnographic approach to gambling by conducting research in a number of contrasting settings, across a number of different scales. It will produce high quality and robust data that will form the basis of a new research paradigm that matches the dynamism and internationalism of the European gambling industry today.

1 200 000 €

Start date: 2011-01-01, End date: 2015-07-31

Research in economics suggests that business cycles are associated with population health: Physical health deteriorates during economic expansions and improves during recessions. At odds with these findings, research in epidemiology and sociology suggests that individual unemployment and job insecurity are associated with poor health and higher mortality. While studies on the impact of economic cycles have been hampered by the lack individual data to unravel causal pathways, employment studies have not adequately controlled for health selection effects when examining causality. This project aims to advancing understanding by exploiting historical fluctuations in the economy as exogenous shocks to identify causal effects of individual unemployment and job insecurity on health, disentangling the pathways that link business cycles, employment and health. Specifically, this study will assess whether patterns of individual employment induced by economic cycles during the last 50 years are associated with life-course health in 18 countries. The approach is based on a unique linkage of historical data on macro-economic cycles with (a) detailed life history event micro-data on employment and health in 18 countries recently collected in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the English Longitudinal study of Ageing (ELSA) and the US Health and Retirement Survey (HRS); and (b) mortality registry data individually linked to occupational histories from national census for entire populations in five European countries in the period 1960-2005. The project integrates insights and methodologies from sociology, epidemiology and economics, elucidating the pathways through which economic fluctuations influence health in societies with different institutions.

1 273 280 €

Start date: 2011-04-01, End date: 2016-03-31

The metabolic network has a modular architecture, is robust to perturbations, and responds to biological stimuli. The balance of the network, and the passageway of network substructures to operate at different activity, requires intensive interactions between the metabolic network, the transcriptome and the proteome. However, the biochemical mechanisms monitoring the metabolic network are only barely understood. Changes in network activity are often mediated through so called reporter metabolites: general -network interconnecting cofactors and reaction substrates - and specific pathway intermediates. These metabolites bridge the gap between the small molecule and macromolecular universe of the cell. Here we propose combining systematic yeast genetics with targeted metabolomics and proteomics to understand mechanisms of metabolic regulation on a genome-scale level. In principle, we will elaborate multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) assays that facilitate quantification of enzymes and intermediates of selected metabolic pathways via liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. The analysis will be performed on metabolic processes that influence aging; those will be analyzed and the results validated by chemical-genetic profiling and competitive lifespan experiments. The anticipated results will yield in a system-wide picture of interactions between the metabolome and regulatory components of the cell. Furthermore, it will identify novel genetic and biochemical interactions of the aging process. Understanding these mechanisms will stimulate new research directions in Systems Biology and support the development of therapeutic strategies against diseases of aging.

1 499 996 €

Start date: 2011-06-01, End date: 2016-05-31

The proposed project takes up the fundamental question of how the state orders society and applies it to an unexpected, but highly insightful case of disasters. It takes disasters as moments when the state attempts to reorder society and thus analyses the encounter between civil protection as state organisation and the population. What happens when civil protection encounters the population in case of disasters? How does civil protection conceive of the population and how does it influence what happens in case of disasters? How does the population conceive of civil protection in turn? By answering these questions the project reacts to omissions of both disaster studies and research on the state. Both of these research traditions tended to either look exclusively at the state or at resistant or subjected citizens. By drawing on Science and Technology Studies and the sociology of expertise these omissions are averted. This allows first looking at civil protection as a knowledge-based and organised attempt to order society. Second it allows understanding disasters as a process involving a reordering of society mediated by knowledge and objects. Combining these approaches allows to precisely analyse the relationship between experts and lay people, without focusing on either of these. The project seeks to answer the above questions by combining a set of empirical methods, namely document analysis of civil protection manuals, participant observation and visual ethnographies of civil protection trainings and qualitative interviews in the aftermath of flood-disasters. The empirical fields chosen in this project are England, Switzerland and India, to allow for comparison of different forms of centralization and different forms of professionalization of civil protection organisations. The empirical research progresses in three steps. First, a study of programmatic texts and training manuals of civil protection agencies looks at how civil protection conceives of the relationship between the organisation and the population on paper and how these views have changed along with organisational structures since the 1950ies. Second, ethnographic studies of civil protection training and narrative interviews with civil protection officers look at how civil protection currently conceives of the population in practice and how these views are mediated by recent organisational and technological changes. Last, recent disaster events are used for an interview-based and ethnographic study to look at what happens when civil protection encounters the population.

1 180 471 €

Start date: 2011-01-01, End date: 2015-06-30

The twentieth century model of security, based on the rule of law and policing within nation-states and conventional military forces externally is no longer easily applicable to twenty first century global security risks. The security gap refers to the fact that millions of people live in situations of intolerable insecurity as a consequence of armed conflict, organised crime, terrorism, financial crisis, poverty and inequality, environmental degradation, vulnerability to natural disasters to name but some of these risks and yet current public security provision is not designed to address these sources of insecurity and, indeed, as recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown, sometimes makes them worse. Security in transition’ is about investigating and identifying the nature of the security gap and tracking the ways in which public and private agents are adapting. It has five components: narratives; indicators; rules; tools; and geographies

2 391 670 €

Start date: 2011-06-01, End date: 2016-11-30