ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Present-day financial markets are turning algorithmic, as market orders are increasingly being executed by fully automated computer algorithms, without any direct human intervention. Although algorithmic finance seems to fundamentally reshape the central dynamics in financial markets, and even though it prompts core sociological questions, it has not yet received any systematic attention. In a pioneering contribution to economic sociology and social studies of finance, ALGOFINANCE aims to understand how and with what consequences the turn to algorithms is changing financial markets. The overall concept and central contributions of ALGOFINANCE are the following: (1) on an intra-firm level, the project examines how the shift to algorithmic finance reshapes the ways in which trading firms operate, and does so by systematically and empirically investigating the reconfiguration of organizational structures and employee subjectivity; (2) on an inter-algorithmic level, it offers a ground-breaking methodology (agent-based modelling informed by qualitative data) to grasp how trading algorithms interact with one another in a fully digital space; and (3) on the level of market sociality, it proposes a novel theorization of how intra-firm and inter-algorithmic dynamics can be conceived of as introducing a particular form of sociality that is characteristic to algorithmic finance: a form of sociality-as-association heuristically analyzed as imitation. None of these three levels have received systematic attention in the state-of-the-art literature. Addressing them will significantly advance the understanding of present-day algorithmic finance in economic sociology. By contributing novel empirical, methodological, and theoretical understandings of the functioning and consequences of algorithms, ALGOFINANCE will pave the way for other research into digital sociology and the broader algorithmization of society.

1 590 036 €

Start date: 2017-05-01, End date: 2021-04-30

This proposal outlines a highly ambitious and path-breaking research program. Through a tightly integrated package of basic theoretical work, strategic empirical research projects, international workshops, and a large number of publications in leading journals, the research program seeks to move sociology in a more analytical direction. One part of the research program focuses on the epistemological and methodological foundations of analytical sociology, an approach to sociological theory and research that currently receives considerable attention in the international scholarly community. This work will be organized around two core themes: (1) the principles of mechanism-based explanations and (2) the micro-macro link. The empirical research analyzes in great detail the ethnic, gender, and socio-economic segregation of key interaction domains in Sweden using the approach of analytical sociology. The interaction domains focused upon are schools, workplaces and neighborhoods; domains where people spend a considerable part of their time, where much of the social interaction between people takes place, where identities are formed, and where important resources are distributed. Large-scale longitudinal micro data on the entire Swedish population, unique longitudinal data on social networks within school classes, and various agent-based simulation techniques, are used to better understand the processes through which schools, workplaces and neighborhoods become segregated along various dimensions, how the domains interact with one another, and how the structure and extent of segregation affects diverse social and economic outcomes.

1 745 098 €

Start date: 2013-03-01, End date: 2018-02-28

Current control applications necessitate the treatment of systems with multiple interconnected components, rather than the traditional single component paradigm that has been studied extensively. The individual subsystems may need to fulfil different and possibly conflicting specifications in a real-time manner. At the same time, they may need to fulfill coupled constraints that are defined as relations between their states. Towards this end, the need for methods for decentralized control at the continuous level and planning at the task level becomes apparent. We aim here towards unification of these two complementary approaches. Existing solutions rely on a top down centralized approach. We instead consider here a decentralized, bottom-up solution to the problem. The approach relies on three layers of interaction. In the first layer, agents aim at coordinating in order to fulfil their coupled constraints with limited communication exchange of their state information and design of appropriate feedback controllers; in the second layer, agents coordinate in order to mutually satisfy their discrete tasks through exchange of the corresponding plans in the form of automata; in the third and most challenging layer, the communication exchange for coordination now includes both continuous state and discrete plan/abstraction information. The results will be demonstrated in a scenario involving multiple (possibly human) users and multiple robots. The unification will yield a completely decentralized system, in which the bottom up approach to define tasks, the consideration of coupled constraints and their combination towards distributed hybrid control and planning in a coordinated fashion require for new ways of thinking and approaches to analysis and constitute the proposal a beyond the SoA and groundbreaking approach to the fields of control and computer science.

1 498 729 €

Start date: 2015-03-01, End date: 2020-02-29

"Considerable investments have been made in Europe and worldwide in research data infrastructures. Instead of a general lack of data about data, it has become apparent that the pivotal factor that drastically constrains the use of data is the absence of contextual knowledge about how data was created and how it has been used. This applies especially to many branches of SSH research where data is highly heterogeneous, both by its kind (e.g. being qualitative, quantitative, naturalistic, purposefully created) and origins (e.g. being historical/contemporary, from different contexts and geographical places). The problem is that there may be enough metadata (data about data) but there is too little paradata (data on the processes of its creation and use). In contrast to the rather straightforward problem of describing the data, the high-risk/high-gain problem no-one has managed to solve, is the lack of comprehensive understanding of what information about the creation and use of research data is needed and how to capture enough of that information to make the data reusable and to avoid the risk that currently collected vast amounts of research data become useless in the future. The wickedness of the problem lies in the practical impossibility to document and keep everything and the difficulty to determine optimal procedures for capturing just enough. With an empirical focus on archaeological and cultural heritage data, which stands out by its extreme heterogeneity and rapid accumulation due to the scale of ongoing development-led archaeological fieldwork, CAPTURE develops an in-depth understanding of how paradata is #1 created and #2 used at the moment, #3 elicits methods for capturing paradata on the basis of the findings of #1-2, #4 tests the new methods in field trials, and #5 synthesises the findings in a reference model to inform the capturing of paradata and enabling data-intensive research using heterogeneous research data stemming from diverse origins. "

1 944 162 €

Start date: 2019-05-01, End date: 2024-04-30

The hypothesis of this project is that Ireland has a unique and hitherto underexplored history of cultural engagement with models from ancient Greece and Rome. Unlike Britain and mainland Europe, Ireland was never part of the Roman Empire. Yet the island has an extraordinarily vibrant tradition of classical learning that dates back to its earliest recorded literature, and is unparalleled in other northern European countries. Research for this project will address why this is the case, by examining sources through nine significant diachronic themes identified by the PI: language; land; travel and exile; Troy; satire; Neoplatonism; female voices; material culture; and global influence. This multi-thematic approach will enable analysis of what is remarkable about classical reception in Ireland. It will also provide a heuristic framework that generates dialogue between normally disparate fields, such as classical reception studies, Irish and British history, English-language literature, Irish-language literature, medieval studies, postcolonial studies, philosophy, material culture, women's studies, and global studies. The project will engage with contemporary preoccupations surrounding the politics and history of the divided island of Ireland, such as the current decade of centenary commemorations for the foundation of an independent Irish state (1912-1922, 2012-2022), and the on-going violence and political divisions in Northern Ireland. These issues will serve as a springboard for opening new avenues of investigation that look far beyond the past 100 years, but are linked to them. The project will thus shed new light on the role of classical culture in shaping literary, social, and political discourse across the island of Ireland, and throughout its history.

1 888 592 €

Start date: 2019-10-01, End date: 2024-09-30

The statement that individuals’ immediate social circumstances influence how they think and act in the political sphere is a truism. However, both theoretical and empirical considerations have often prevented political scientists from incorporating this logic into analyses of political behavior. In the CONPOL project we argue that it is necessary to return to the idea that politics follows a social logic in order to push the theoretical and empirical boundaries in explaining political behavior. That is, people do not act as isolated individuals when confronting complex political tasks such as deciding whether to vote and which party or candidate to vote for. Instead politics should be seen as a social experience in which individuals arrive at their decisions within particular social settings: the family, the peer group, the workplace, the neighborhood. In what way do parents and other family members influence an individual’s political choices? What is the role of workmates and neighbors when individuals arrive at political decisions? Do friends and friends’ friends affect how you think and act in the political sphere? To answer such questions the standard approach to gather empirical evidence on political behavior based on national sample surveys needs to be complemented by the use of population wide register data. The empirical core of the CONPOL project is unique Swedish register data. Via the population registers provided by Statistics Sweden it is possible to identify several relevant social settings such as parent-child relations and the location of individuals within workplaces and neighborhoods. The registers also allow us to identify certain network links between individuals. Furthermore, Statistics Sweden holds information on several variables measuring important political traits. A major aim for CONPOL is to complement this information by scanning in and digitalizing election rolls with individual-level information on turnout across several elections.

1 621 940 €

Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31

Linked to terrorism, moral breakdown, and societal decay, Transnational Organised Crime (TOC) has come to embody current global anxieties as a figure of fear and cause of disquiet. Yet despite its central position on the social and political radar, our knowledge of it remains limited and fragmentary. Quantitative analyses may have identified the scale of the problem, but its underlying socio-cultural logic and practices remain under-researched and largely obscure. TOC is on the rise, and we need better insights into how it develops and expands, who engages in it and why, and how it is linked to and embedded in social networks that straddle countries and contexts. CRIMTANG proposes a unique approach to the study of the social infrastructure of contemporary TOC. It develops a research strategy that is ethnographic and transnational in design and so attuned to the human flows and formations of TOC. The project comprises a trans-disciplinary research team of anthropologists, criminologists and political scientists, and builds on their prior experience of the people, regions and languages under study. It explores the illegal and overlapping flows of migrants and drugs from North-West Africa into Europe, following a key trafficking trajectory stretching from Tangiers to Barcelona, Paris and beyond. In so doing, CRIMTANG sheds new light on the actual empirical processes in operation at different points along this trafficking route, whilst simultaneously developing new theoretical and methodological apparatuses for apprehending TOC that can be exported and applied in other regions and contexts. It reimagines the idea of social entanglement and proposes new transnational and collective fieldwork strategies. Finally, it will advance and consolidate the European research environment on TOC by creating a research hub for transnational ethnographic criminology at the University of Copenhagen.

1 999 909 €

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

Human social interaction and learning depends on making the right inferences about other people’s thoughts, a process commonly called mentalizing, or Theory of Mind, a cognitive achievement which several decades of research concluded was reached at around age 4. The last 10 years has radically changed this view, and innovative new paradigms suggest that even preverbal infants can think about others’ minds. This new developmental data has created arguably one of the biggest puzzles in the history of developmental science: How can infants be mentalizing when years of research have shown that a) pre-schoolers fail at mentalizing tasks and b) mentalizing depends on the development of cognitive control, language, and brain maturation? The key issue is whether behaviour that looks like infant mentalizing really is mentalizing, or might infants’ success belie alternative processes? The most powerful strategy for resolving this puzzle is to look to brain activity. By applying the same methods and paradigms across infancy and early childhood, DEVOMIND will investigate whether infants’ success on mentalizing tasks recruits the same network of brain regions, and neural processes, that we know are involved in success in older children and adults. In the second half of the project, we will use our neural indicators of mentalizing to test a completely novel hypothesis in which infants’ success is possible because they have a limited ability to distinguish self from other. Although novel, this hypothesis deserves to be tested because it has the potential to explain both infants’ success and preschoolers’ failures under a single, unified theory. By bringing a neuroimaging approach to the puzzle of early mentalizing, DEVOMIND will allow us to move beyond the current impasse, and to generate a new theory of Theory of Mind.

1 761 190 €

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

The rise of social media, coupled with intensifying demands for more transparency and democracy in world politics, brings new challenges to international diplomacy. State leaders and diplomats continue to react to traditional media, but now also attempt to present themselves proactively through tweets, public diplomacy and nation branding. These efforts often take place simultaneously and sometimes interfere directly with closed-door negotiations and its culture of restraint and secrecy. Yet the relationship between confidential diplomacy and public representation remains understudied. DIPLOFACE will develop a sociologically and anthropologically informed approach to studying how state leaders and diplomats manage their nation’s ‘faces’ in the information age. The project will explore the relationship and tensions between confidential diplomatic negotiations and publicly displayed interventions in various media, applying the micro-sociological concept of ‘face-work’. DIPLOFACE will analyse the complex interactional dynamics that shape the diplomatic techniques and strategies used to convey a nation’s ‘face’ or ‘image of self’. Such face-work is increasingly important for national leaders and diplomats who perform simultaneously on the ‘back-stage’ and the ‘front-stage’ of international relations. DIPLOFACE will identify, theorize and analyse the repertoire of face-saving, face-honouring and face-threatening practices that are employed in confidential negotiations and in public. DIPLOFACE advances our theoretical understanding of diplomacy in the 21st century significantly beyond existing International Relations and diplomatic theory. Combining participant observation, interviews and media analysis, DIPLOFACE will generate important new knowledge about the relationship between public and confidential multilateral negotiation, how state leaders and diplomats handle new media, and the role of face-saving and face-threatening strategies in international relations.

1 493 062 €

Start date: 2016-04-01, End date: 2021-03-31

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

This project will open up new horizons in the study of emotional learning by describing and modeling its role in social interaction. It brings together a novel set of experimental manipulations with two hitherto unconnected lines of research; biology of aversive learning and social cognition, with the aim to answer four specific objectives, namely to identify the mechanisms of aversive learning (1) about others and its dependence on stimulus bound (e.g. ethnic group belonging) and conceptual (e.g. moral and social status) features; (2) from others through observation, and its dependence on processing of stimulus bound (e.g. emotional expressiveness) and conceptual (e.g. empathy and mental state attributions) features; (3) during interaction and its dependence social characteristics as described in 1 and 2; and (4) build and test a neural model of social-emotional learning. To achieve these objectives, this project proposes a multi-method research program using novel behavioral experimental paradigms and manipulated virtual environments, drawing on cognitive neuroscience, psychophysiology, and behavioral genetics. It is predicted that social emotional learning will be accomplished through the interaction of four, partially overlapping, neural networks coding for affective, associative, social cognitive and instrumental/goal directed aspects, respectively. Whereas it is expected that the two first networks will be common to classical conditioning and social learning, the latter is hypothesized to be distinguished by its reliance on the social-cognitive network. The fourth network is predicted to be integral to the social learning through interactions and the shaping of behavioral norms. The proposed research will enhance our understanding of important social phenomena, such as the emergence and maintanance of group conflicts and norm compliance. It will also shed light on common psychological disorders, such as social anxiety, autism and psychopathy that are characterized by dysfunctions of the social emotional learning system.

1 498 244 €

Start date: 2012-12-01, End date: 2018-11-30

Social norms in general, and norms of cooperation in particular, are the cement of all human societies. For the difficult problems of the maintenance and enforcement of social norms and of cooperation, humans have developed surprisingly complex solutions. Reputation mechanisms and gossip are certainly among the compound informal solutions. According to common wisdom, gossip channels mainly negative and often fictitious information. If it is so, how can dishonest gossip and the resulting biased reputations legitimize social order and promote cooperation? This is the main puzzle we tackle in the proposed project exploiting a wide scale of instruments. We use analytical modeling and agent-based simulation to derive hypotheses. We test simple hypotheses in small group experiments. We develop new methodological tools to appropriately analyze the triadic nature of gossip embedded in network flows of information. We utilize dynamic network datasets from primary and secondary school classes, and we gather qualitative and quantitative information from organizations to test conditional hypotheses about the role that gossip plays in reputation and cooperation in different developmental and social contexts of life. In addition, we apply new communication technologies currently under development to explore the hidden world of gossip and the dynamics of reputations in dormitories and organizations. With the insights gained, we can overcome common stereotypes about gossip and highlight how gossip is related to credible reputational signals, cooperation, and social order. Expected results will help us to outline the conditions that can promote cooperativeness in work groups, and they will help to construct successful prevention strategies of social exclusion and other potentially harmful consequences of the evil tongue.

1 973 500 €

Start date: 2015-12-01, End date: 2020-11-30

The study of democratization lies at the center of political science and is increasingly important in economics, sociology, and history, and has become a central foreign policy objective. Yet, there is little conclusive evidence about in particular endogenous sequences of democratization critical to our ability to provide sound policy advise. FASDEM promises to revolutionize our understanding of the trajectories that fail to lead to democracy, and the pathways that are successful, by addressing two key questions: Which are the failing versus successful sequences of democratization? What are the determining causal relationships in these sequences? Critical is the just finalized Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset including some 350 indicators, 34 component-indices, and five main indices of varieties of democracy from 1900 to the present for 173countries – about 15 million data points on democracy. FASDEM, if funded, will use this data capitalizing on a set of novel analytical approaches, tools, and adaptations of modeling from evolutionary biology developed by a research team in a related, project, that together can establish sequences between sets of hundreds of ordinal variables. Under the second objective, FASDEM will take a step further developing upon the latest statistical methodologies of establishing causal identification in observational data, and use these to test each step of such manifest sequences. FASDEM will make a radical departure from the crude and “correlational” paradigm in democratization studies to detail and explain failing and successful sequences of democratization for the first time.

2 000 000 €

Start date: 2017-03-01, End date: 2022-02-28

"Financial economics is at a crossroads: Academics are struggling to redefine the theory of finance and practitioners and regulators to restructure the financial industry. The current financial crisis will have significant impact on how we regulate financial markets and how we manage risk in companies and financial institutions. It will continue to inspire an intense discussion and research agenda over the next decade in academics, in industry, and among financial regulators and a central focus will be the role of frictions in financial markets. Nowhere are these issues more pertinent than in Europe right now. To take up the challenge presented by this crossroad of financial economics, my research project seeks to contribute to the knowledge of financial frictions and what to do about them. FRICTIONS will explore how financial frictions affect asset prices and the economy, and the implications of frictions for financial risk management, the optimal regulation, and the conduct of monetary policy. Whereas economists have traditionally focused on the assumption of perfect markets, a growing body of evidence is leading to a widespread recognition that markets are plagued by significant financial frictions. FRICTIONS will model key financial frictions such as leverage constraints, margin requirements, transaction costs, liquidity risk, and short sale constraints. The objective is to develop theories of the origins of these frictions, study how these frictions change over time and across markets, and, importantly, how they affect the required return on assets and the economy. The project will test these theories using data from global equity, bond, and derivative markets. In particular, the project will measure these frictions empirically and study the empirical effect of frictions on asset returns and economic dynamics. The end result is an empirically-validated model of economic behavior subject to financial frictions that yields qualitative and quantitative insights."

1 307 160 €

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

In order to explore and exploit the frequency range from 30 GHz up to THz, new types of transmission lines and semiconductor architectures are needed. Conventional microwave technologies that are commonly used below 30 GHz become either too lossy or are too expensive to manufacture, and technologies used in the optical regime are not usable either. The intermediate frequency band is therefore often referred to as the THz gap, indicating the lack of commercialize-able technologies there. Professor Kildal has invented a fundamentally new regime of transmission line, referred to as gap waveguides. The basis is newly discovered local waves appearing in the gap between two conducting surfaces, controlled by a texture in one or both of the surfaces. The gap waveguide has been verified below 20 GHz, but it will be more advantageous in the THz gap. The texture will for THz applications be of submillimeter or micrometer scale, realizable by micromachining or etching. Also, there is no need for a dielectric substrate, and there is no need for conductive contact between the two surfaces. Therefore, such gap waveguides and circuits for the THz gap can be manufactured with low cost. The vision is that the topology of this new regime of gap waveguides will facilitate integration of semiconductor devices, and may lay the foundation for new architectures of transistors and other integrated circuits, being located inside the gap encapsulated by the conductive surfaces themselves. In order to reach this vision new and efficient numerical electromagnetic methods and modeling tools need to be developed, taking advantage of the particular gap waveguide geometry, and being able to connect to or replace the charge transport models for the transistors in the doped semiconductors themselves. The gap waveguide technology can get a tremendous impact on exploring higher frequencies in radio astronomy, communications, and imaging for medical as well as security applications.

1 659 302 €

Start date: 2013-05-01, End date: 2017-04-30

This project is the first to apply an inclusive, internationally comparative, multi-methods approach to families to reveal the complex processes that result in a gendered division of work. We do this by comparing different-sex couples (DSC) to same-sex couples (SSC) focusing on the transition to parenthood and its career related consequences based on unique, population register data, census data and surveys, as well in depth interviews with couples. Three sub-projects emerge. In GENPARENT NORTH, longitudinal analyses of register data for the full population in the Nordic countries enable unique studies of the division of work and care in DSC and female SSC in a most similar-case comparison where the couples are matched on important background characteristics. In GENPARENT REGIME, the Nordic countries, the Netherlands and the US are compared in cross-sectional, quantitative analyses of female and male SSC and DSC with biological or adoptive children, their division of paid/unpaid work and the resulting career trajectories. Preliminary analyses indicate that family leave policies apply to some but not all families and this clearly structures the division of work and earnings in them. In GENPARENT VOICE, in-depth interviews with female and male SSC (planning for or having children) and adoptive DSC parents are carried out in order to explore the reasoning and expectations that precede the realized divisions of child care and paid work. In addition, the legal and social issues facing these families is highlighted. Interviews are conducted in Sweden and the Netherlands and for these countries, we have unique, longitudinal in-depth interviews with DSC expecting and having their first child. By comparing SSC to DSC and combining cross-sectional and longitudinal quantitative analyses with in-depth interviews, the GENPARENT project critically evaluate and develop theories on the gendered transition to parenthood, while expanding on and updating the welfare regime framework.

1 999 910 €

Start date: 2018-08-01, End date: 2023-07-31

This project investigates how and why environmental concerns have become so important to our conceptions of the polar regions today. Through a historical study of both the Arctic and Antarctic from 1945 to the turn of the past century, the project explores the connections between how environments are described - particularly through the natural sciences and economics - and the judgments made about how those environments should be administered. The key hypothesis of this project is that the process of describing an environment cannot be separated from the process of controlling and managing it. Changing perceptions of concepts such as development, ecological fragility, and wilderness have provided frames for describing and understanding the polar regions. Why has natural resource extraction been deemed appropriate (or even necessary) in some contexts, and wholly forbidden in others? Why did the concept of sustainable development become important during the 1980s? Can we think of scientific research programs as instruments of colonialism? And why did national parks and conservation agreements become politically useful? GRETPOL will produce a new understanding of how far from being the passive frames for human action, environments (in the polar regions but indeed also beyond) are constructed by human agency. As anthropogenic climate change reduces polar ice extent and threatens the entire globe, the question has never been timelier.

1 499 952 €

Start date: 2017-02-01, End date: 2022-01-31

Previous research has investigated the relationship between unemployment and health from a perspective of an isolated individual. HEALFAM takes a novel approach and examines how transition to unemployment triggers diffusion of ill mental and physical health within families. It investigates how becoming unemployed affects health outcomes of partners, children and elderly parents of the unemployed and whether the magnitudes of these influences differ across families and societies. Thus, instead of viewing the unemployed as functioning in isolation, HEALFAM assesses the consequences of unemployment for family members taking a multi-actor perspective and international comparative approach. Guided by the life course theoretical framework, which views health and well-being as a process rather than a state and calls for considering interrelatedness of individuals, HEALFAM employs longitudinal data that provide information about multiple members of families. In order to analyse these datasets, HEALFAM uses longitudinal dyadic data analysis techniques as well as multilevel models for longitudinal data. HEALFAM aims to open a new frontline of research on health and wellbeing from a life course perspective. It benefits from my knowledge on three interrelated social phenomena: (1) the role of labour market career and experiences of unemployment (2) family structure and intra-family resources (3) social antecedents of health and wellbeing among family members. It draws on high quality register and panel survey data as well as the expertise at the interdisciplinary research centres that I am connected to at Umeå University. Through international collaborations, it brings together experts in multiple disciplines carrying out research taking a life course perspective.

1 477 556 €

Start date: 2019-03-01, End date: 2024-02-29

The Swedish historical data base project will put together and make publicly available highly disaggregated data on roughly a yearly basis for about 2500 Swedish administrative districts over the period 1749-1952. The finished data set will consist of comprehensive and detailed information on economic activity, political characteristics, vital statistics, occupational structure, education, social and agriculture statistics and infrastructure investments (e.g., railway construction). The comprehensiveness and complete coverage of historical data at the local administrative level is what makes this project unique from an international perspective. Since Sweden has the longest continuous and reliable data series on population and vital statistics in the world,starting as early as 1749, makes it possible to construct a comprehensive panel data set over all 2,500 Swedish local administrative units covering a 200 year period. Consequently, the total number of observations for each variable can be as large as 0.5 million (N=2500×T=200). With this type of rich and disaggregated historical data it become possible to get a better understanding of economic growth, structural transformation and economic development. Also, within-country variation allows for more satisfying empirical identification strategies such as instrumental variables, regression discontinuities or difference-in-differences estimation. As a case in point, I have demonstrated the potential usefulness of the Swedish historical data by addressing the question of whether redistribution of resources towards the poor differs between types of democracy after democratization. The identification strategy is based on a regression-discontinuity design where the type of democracy partly is a function of population size. This paper is currently “revise and resubmit” 2nd round at Econometrica. After collecting the new data, we intend to studying a number of questions related to economic development and growth.

1 200 000 €

Start date: 2014-04-01, End date: 2019-03-31

While scholars have presented and promoted a series of specific theories of EU constitutionalism, no one has yet attempted to analyse their wider intellectual context and the relationship among them – what we call here ‘European constitutional imaginaries’ (ECIs). In addition, IMAGINE does not limit this general analysis to the mainstream thinkers writing for the audience located at the supranational/transnational level. It includes the perspective of thinkers writing in particular EU member states. IMAGINE seeks to uncover whether there are individuals and ideas that have made important, yet often overlooked, contributions to ECIs. Crucially, IMAGINE puts emphasis on post-communist Europe’ experience, hitherto mostly ignored in EU constitutional scholarship. As a result, IMAGINE will provide the first-ever synthesis and critical evaluation of the core theories of EU constitutionalism, theorizing their mutual relationship and the way in which they have influenced each other. The overarching objective is to provide a novel account of ECIs: one informed by their intellectual history, which comprises both Old and the post-communist Europe, and which seeks to understand the various problems that lead some people to reject EU constitutionalism and its core values, seeing them as mere utopias or oppressing ideologies. IMAGINE employs an innovative combination of research methods: empirical surveys, citation network analyses and elite in-depth interviews, together with traditional legal analysis. It will involve experts from particular member states though a number of workshops and a conference organized by the IMAGINE Team. The PI is uniquely placed to realise IMAGINE: now based as a Professor of EU law at an elite socio-legal research centre iCourts (University of Copenhagen), he has participated in EU constitutional discourse both as a scholar and practitioner in one of the member states of post-communist Europe for more than 10 years.

1 497 685 €

Start date: 2019-02-01, End date: 2024-01-31

"The study of Africa as a region ""peripheral"" to mainstream Islamic studies helps a deeper understanding of the cultural dynamics of Islam. While North African Islam has been subject to extensive research, the Muslim cultures of sub-Saharan Africa have received relatively little attention; most of it paid to West African regions. This project will contribute to both African and Islamic studies by producing for the first time a critical evaluation of textual witnesses of Islamic culture in the Horn of Africa (esp. Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somaliland) and therefore considerably contribute to the change in the state-of-the-art in both Islamic and African studies. The comparative study will be the first to assess simultaneously types and contents of texts, their transmission history, and the role they (as well as the respective authors and copyists) have played in the culture and identity formation in both the Horn of Africa and the “heartland” Islamic countries. Both Arabic texts as well as those written in local languages (using Arabic alphabet: ajami) will be considered, allowing an evaluation of linguistic and cultural influences. A reevaluation of the external Islamic sources dealing with these areas will complete the picture. Competences in philology, history, manuscript studies, linguistics and computer science will be merged in producing a Digital Research Environment for North-East African Islam. More than a corpus of centrally collected data, it will include images accompanied by searchable descriptive metadata, digital text editions, bibliography as well as an open access database for quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis of text and documentary corpora as well as their linguistic and graphic features will serve as a tool for the project and as a basis for future research. The research findings will provide a deeper understanding of Muslim thought and proselytism, and the effects Islam has had on society."

1 550 200 €

Start date: 2013-07-01, End date: 2018-12-31

This project is the first comprehensive study of how objectivity is construed in different legal systems, in Sweden, Scotland, USA and Italy. Objectivity is operationalised as the applied emotive-cognitive process of judicial decision-making. This definition challenges the prevailing positivist legal notion of objectivity, which implies a separation of emotion/reason as opposites. Previous research has shown this dichotomy to be problematic; reason depends on emotions and ’feeling’ the consequences of alternative action is fundamental to form rational decisions. For legal actors this means that objective decision-making relies on emotional information and that sensibilities influence allocation of culpability. Through a comparative multi method qualitative design (court observations, shadowing, interviews and text analyses) we will follow criminal cases from prosecution, lower court, to the court of appeal focusing on: 1) The emotive-cognitive construction of objective decision-making; 2) Dimensions of encoding subjective lay narratives in a legal case into objective judicial categories; 3) Emotive-cognitive components of changed decisions. By contrasting the judicial decision-making process in different legal systems (common and civil criminal law) and in varying emotional regimes (e.g. subtle Swedish regime, outspoken American regime), we will dissect differences and similarities in the construction of objectivity in countries that all share the ideal of judicial dispassion. The project is path breaking by addressing problems with relying on a positivist notion of objectivity which tends to preclude legal actors from reflecting on how they do use emotions at work, thereby obscuring when personal sensibilities interfere with professional decisions. Since judicial objectivity serves as the quintessence of rational decision-making, this project will be of applied as well as theoretical relevance in the understanding of rational action outside of the legal context.

1 499 671 €

Start date: 2018-09-01, End date: 2023-08-31

This project will break new ground in the language sciences by pursuing a linguistic inquiry into landscape. From the linguist s point of view, the geophysical environment is virtually unexplored. Yet it has vast potential for influence on the discipline. The project will play a pioneering role in situating landscape within linguistics as a fundamental domain of representational systems, opening up important links to other disciplines concerned with landscape that usually have little to do with language. It will achieve this by (1) exploring landscape categorization in a number of languages, (2) comparing such categorization, (3) developing a model for understanding categorization across languages and speakers, and (4) documenting vanishing landscape systems. The research team will study landscape categorization in six diverse language settings. Each setting is a case study carried out by a team member with expert knowledge and prior field experience of the setting. Each setting offers opportunities of studying closely related languages as well as individuals speaking the same language, making comparison possible not only among maximally diverse languages but also at finer levels of linguistic granularity. An exploratory psycholinguistic subproject will probe the relationship between language and cognition in the landscape domain. The project will blaze a trail in applying GIS to linguistic data, in testing advanced experimental techniques in the field, and in documenting domain-specific data from a global language sample. Cross-cultural variation in landscape ontology is a matter of great practical importance understanding the meaning and reference of landscape terms and place names is crucial to major fields of human cooperation, from navigation to international law.

1 499 931 €

Start date: 2011-03-01, End date: 2016-02-29

This project focuses contextual factors explaining differences in young adults life chances in a longitudinal perspective. By life chances we mean the structural contexts influencing choices and behavior with consequences for education, labor market situation, health, and criminality. Such life chances are strongly and systematically influenced by social class, gender, and ethnicity. The dominant ways to study these differences are to focus socialization effects in the family and differences in human capital more generally. These approaches have been highly successful, but there is still a considerable part of it left unexplained by these models. Part of the reason for this is that they have taken contextual factors insufficiently into account. We propose a synthetic approach to the study of life chances that integrates the traditional models with a fuller focus on contextual factors neigborhoods and social networks in particular. The aims are to arrive at better specified models that will more accurately predict differences in outcomes, and to reach beyond prediction and to identify generative mechanisms causing the observed associations between explanans and explandum. The goal is to reach what Max Weber calls interpretative explanations, and in doing so we need to specify the sociologically relevant settings in which people find themselves. This social mechanism based approach to life chances necessitates methodological pluralism, in which quantitative and qualitative methodological techniques are combined. The project will analyze both large-scale random samples in order to generalize findings and do qualitative analyses of strategically selected small-n case studies in order to identify social mechanisms and understand the ways in which they operate in practice.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2011-07-01, End date: 2016-06-30

Since the mid-nineteen century life expectancy in developed countries has doubled, increasing from levels around 40 years to above 80 years. This research project is motivated by the need to further explore how societies have achieved the current levels of longevity, in terms of life expectancy and modal age at death. To achieve this, age-patterns and time-trends in cause of death contribution to longevity are assessed. This historical analysis is carried out in fifty developed and developing countries/areas. It is expected that the cause of death contribution to the advancement of longevity is country/region specific. However, the hypothesis to be tested is that there are common cause-specific time-trends across countries which can be described by a model of cause of death contribution to longevity. Several purposes for such a model can be listed: it will allow us to study expected future mortality directions in developed nations that are currently still facing high levels of some particular causes of death, e.g. the Netherlands and United States. It could also help investigating the retrocession in mortality observed in some transitional countries/areas, particularly in Eastern Europe. Finally, the accelerated epidemiological transition in developing countries is compared to the slower trend in the developed world at earlier times, model results versus observed cause-contribution. The interest in the latter comparison is to foresee the increase in the prevalence of chronic disease in low-income countries predicted by the WHO and the World Bank. Furthermore, one in every three countries in the world has adequate cause-specific mortality data. The proposed model could facilitate estimating the current cause of death status in developing countries. This project addresses a significant question concerning the mechanisms (age and cause of death) that direct reductions in mortality.

300 380 €

Start date: 2010-05-01, End date: 2015-04-30

Micro- and nanoelectromechanical system (MEMS and NEMS) components are vital for many industrial and consumer products such as airbag systems in cars and motion controls in mobile phones, and many of these MEMS and NEMS enabled applications have a large impact on European industry and society. However, the potential of MEMS and NEMS is being critically hampered by their dependence on integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing technologies. Most micro- and nano-manufacturing methods have been developed by the IC industry and are characterized by highly standardized manufacturing processes that are adapted for extremely large production volumes of more than 10.000 wafers per month. In contrast, the vast majority of MEMS and NEMS applications only demands production volumes of less than 100 wafers per month in combination with different non-standardized manufacturing and integration processes for each product. If a much wider variety of diverse and even low-volume MEMS and NEMS products shall be exploited, the semiconductor manufacturing paradigm has to be broken. In this project, we therefore will focus on frontier research on new paradigms for flexible and cost-efficient manufacturing and integration of MEMS and NEMS within three related research areas: (1) Wafer-Level Heterogeneous Integration for MEMS and NEMS, where we explore new and improved wafer-level heterogeneous integration technologies for MEMS and NEMS devices; (2) Integration of Materials into MEMS Using High-Speed Wire Bonding Tools, where we explore new ways of integrating various types of wire materials into MEMS devices; (3) Free-Form 3D Printing of Mono-Crystalline Silicon Micro- and Nanostructures, where we explore entirely novel ways of implementing mono-crystalline silicon MEMS and NEMS structures that can be arbitrarily shaped.

1 495 982 €

Start date: 2011-11-01, End date: 2017-10-31

This project will study political economics issues, that is, how public policies are influenced by political considerations. The emphasis is on the mass media's role in shaping government policies. A smaller part will also analyze how different political institutions and economic outcomes influence policy and the impact of extreme weather events. The project will mainly be empirical, using statistical methods with a focus on identifying causal effects, rather than correlations. The study of media effects will analyze the political impact of having a press actively covering politics. This is an important issue, largely unanswered because the presence of an active press is endogenous to things like corruption and voter information. We will address this question in the special case of media coverage of US Congressional elections. To identify the effect of news, we will use the fact that the amount of coverage is driven to a large extent by the coincidental match between media markets and congressional districts. We intend to analyze the effect of active press coverage on, (i) voter information, (ii) politicians actions, and (iii) federal funds per capita. The project will also investigate how political institutions and economic outcomes influences the health impacts (such as mortality among old and infants) of weather extremes. Historical weather data at a very detailed geographical level will be combined with socio-economic data in a panel (longitudinal) form. This is joint work with meteorologists who will construct historical weather data at fine grids across the globe. The part dealing with structural political economics aims to develop a framework for investigating the effects of institutions on economic policy. In existing work, there is a disconnect between the theoretical modelling and empirical applications. The aim is to close this gap.

799 945 €

Start date: 2008-09-01, End date: 2014-08-31

This project will develop macroeconomic models with household heterogeneity and partially demand-determined output to study how the economy is affected by monetary and fiscal policy, and to investigate the importance of housing in macroeconomic fluctuations and the transmission and efficacy of policy. The objective is to provide a modelling framework that simultaneously is consistent with both empirical micro evidence on household consumption and savings behaviour, and macro evidence on the response of the aggregate economy to a variety of economic shocks. The ultimate goal is to help make these models the new standard for the study of fluctuations and policy evaluation in macro. Inequality and incomplete markets will be a central theme. The first objective of the project is to establish the importance of incomplete financial markets for the response of the economy to changes in monetary policy. The framework will then be used to evaluate the size of the fiscal multiplier and quantitatively evaluate the stimulative effect of extensions to unemployment benefits. The second theme of the project will focus on housing and mortgage debt as an amplification and propagation mechanism. The recent Great Recession–preceded by an unparalleled boom and bust in house prices – has brought to light the importance of housing for the economy. The project will develop a rich benchmark model of housing and the aggregate economy for policy evaluation. First, the project will investigate how heterogeneity in housing and debt affects the transmission of monetary policy. Next, a cross-country analysis will be performed to quantify the importance of different arrangements in the mortgage market for the response of the economy to shocks. Finally, I will introduce imperfect information above the driving forces of the economy to study booms and busts in the housing market and real economic activity, with the goal of evaluating macroprudential policies geared at the housing market.

1 299 165 €

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

The objective of Manifestations of Solitude: Withdrawal and Engagement in the long seventeenth-century is to demonstrate how the creation of zones of unworldliness within the world structures re-ligious practice. We will examine withdrawal in its historical settings and uncover the facetted na-ture of this phenomenon in the seventeenth-century religious culture, thus offering insights and tools for a better understanding of the representation of religious experience in European culture. Working across cultural and confessional boundaries, the project explores appropriations of the appeal that the Christian be in the world but not of the world: in texts, architecture, images and mu-sic, and it examines the ways in which these media are employed to prompt and sustain with¬drawal from the world. The project focuses on ten institutional social units (e.g. the abbey, the Konventikel, the household), which manifest solitude in different ways. It examines such units through ten exem-plary places (e.g. Herrnhut, Saint-Cyr) and their cultural and reli¬gious life, drawing on materials such as architectural plans, interior decoration, treatises on theology and aesthetics, letters, diaries, epitaphs, emblems, portraits, devotional images, sermons and musical pieces. The backbone of the project is an innovative strategy for interdisciplinary analysis which traces the generation of a symbolically charged space around religious withdrawals. With this analytical tool we will examine how symbols of ‘world’, ‘solitude’ and the demarcation between them are materialized in forms ranging from material culture (architecture, furnishing), via artistic, perfor-mative expressions (devotional images, musical pieces) to literary topoi and metaphors and the in-fluence on such forms of contemporary aesthetic sensibilities. The project examines the cultivation of the religious self: shaping a sym¬bolically charged space – and shaped in turn by this space.

1 250 000 €

Start date: 2013-02-01, End date: 2017-03-31

Humans have the capacity to change the biosphere from local to global scales while at the same time fundamentally depending on a functioning biosphere for their well-being. Moreover human societies are increasingly affected by global change and adapting to it in multiple ways. These interdependencies give rise to non-linear, cross-scale dynamics that pose significant challenges for analysis and governance of social-ecological systems (SES). In view of the need for societal transformations towards sustainability is the identification of mechanisms of change in SES an urgent and cutting-edge research frontier. This project aims to develop new methodologies and middle-range theories of the dynamics of SES. It will take the nature of SES as complex adaptive systems into account by developing a mechanism-based understanding of change in SES as it arises from micro-level interactions within complex networks of actors and ecosystems. Particular emphasis will be put on emergent and top-down cross-scale interactions. To this end we will develop dynamic multi-level models using agent-based and mathematical modeling approaches. Model development will be based on a typology of cross-scale interactions, theories from the natural and social sciences and empirical evidence from marine and terrestrial SES. We will combine stylized with empirically-based models and cross-case comparison to develop a typology of social-ecological configurations of the long-term persistence of SES and their capacity to change. Knowledge integration across disciplines and the development of integrative frameworks and approaches will be supported by procedures to bridge different ontological and epistemological foundations. The project will advance sustainability science by providing new methods for modeling multi-level SES and cross-scale interactions, and approaches to identify and include critical social-ecological interactions, particularly human adaptive responses, into models of SES.

1 969 599 €

Start date: 2017-02-01, End date: 2022-01-31

This project aims at pushing the limits of optical sensing on a microchip by orders of magnitude, thereby allowing for ultra-high sensitivity in optical detection and enabling first-time-ever demonstrations of several optical sensing principles on a microchip. My idea is based upon our distributed-feedback lasers in rare-earth-ion-doped aluminum oxide waveguides on a silicon chip with ultra-narrow linewidths of 1 kHz, corresponding to Q-factors exceeding 10^11, intra-cavity laser intensities of several watts over a waveguide cross-section of 2 micrometer, and light interaction lengths reaching 20 km. Optical read-out of the laser frequency and linewidth is achieved by frequency down-conversion via detection of the GHz beat signal of two such lasers positioned in the same waveguide or in parallel waveguides on the same microchip. The sensitivity of optical detection is related to the laser linewidth, interaction length, and transverse mode overlap with the measurand; its potential of optically exciting ions or molecules and its optical trapping force are related to the laser intensity. By applying novel concepts, we will decrease the laser linewidth to 1 Hz (Q-factor > 10^14), thereby also significantly increasing the intra-cavity intensity and light interaction length, simplify the read-out by reducing the line-width separation between two lasers to the MHz regime, and increase the mode interaction with the environment by either increasing its evanescent field or perpendicularly intersecting a nanofluidic channel with the optical waveguide, thereby allowing for unprecedented sensitivity of optical detection on a microchip. We will exploit this dual-wavelength distributed-feedback laser sensor for the first-ever demonstrations of intra-laser-cavity (ILC) optical trapping and detection of nano-sized biological objects in an optofluidic chip, ILC trace-gas detection on a microchip, ILC Raman spectrometry on a microchip, and ILC spectroscopy of single rare-earth ions.

2 499 958 €

Start date: 2014-11-01, End date: 2019-10-31

The OSIRIS proposal will address the crucial and ultimately strategic area for the future emerging nanoelectronics, i.e. how structures and devices actually will be fabricated as physical dimensions approaches a few nanometer minimum feature size. The project title is Open silicon based research platform for emerging devices and indicates that many of the future emerging devices will be based on a silicon fabrication base platform but may not be fully based on silicon as the active semiconductor material. Over the past 10 years this research team has established a versatile fabrication technology platform in excellent condition to open up a variety of new technologies to explore nanometer minimum feature size in realizable electrical repeatable devices structures. The proposed project has five different focus areas outlined. It covers a broad range of critical research issues that can be foreseen as groundbreaking topics for the period beyond 2015. the different topics addressed are; 1) Three dimensional FET nanostructures based on SiNW and GeNW with advanced configuration. 2) New applications of SiNW with build-in strain for fast silicon-base optoelectronic devices. 3) Low frequency noise in advanced nanoelectronic structures 4) THz devices for IR-detection 5) Bio-sensor nanoelectronics for extreme bio-molecule sensitivity and real time detection of DNA. These areas are carefully chosen to assemble the right mix with predictable research success and with a few areas that can be called high gain/high risk. In particular we want to mention that focus area 2 and 4 have a great potential impact when successful but also at a certain higher risk for a more difficult implementation in future devices. There is in no cases any risk that the research will not generate high quality scientific results.

1 999 500 €

Start date: 2009-06-01, End date: 2014-05-31

This project will use an institutional approach to answer the question why some democracies perform better than others. Democratic systems can be institutionalized in innumerous ways given variation in for example party system, electoral system, type of public administration, judicial control and type of legal system, degree of lobbyism, degree of decentralization, rules for the public budget, possibilities to use referendums, the power of the executive and so on. This huge variation in the institutional configuration of existing democracies will be used for developing a theory for explaining the difference in democracies ability to perform. The motive for this project is the following: Democracy as an overall model for how societies should be governed must be seen as a remarkable success. Over the last centuries, several waves of democracy have swept over the globe, bringing representative democracy to places where it seemed inconceivable fifty, or even twenty-five years ago. There are certainly many reasons to be enthusiastic about this historically remarkable development. However, this enthusiasm is dampened by three things. One is that empirical research shows that there is only a very weak, or none, or sometimes even negative, correlation between established measures of human well-being and measures of the level of democracy. For example, communist-authoritarian China now outperforms liberal democratic India on almost all measures of population health. The second reason is that a number of democracies turn out to have severe difficulties managing their public finances in a sustainable way. The third problem is that democracy seems not to be cure against pervasive corruption. In fact, many authoritarian countries turn out to be less corrupt than many democratic ones. Empirical research shows that these problems have severe consequences for citizens’ perception of the legitimacy of their political system.

2 499 475 €

Start date: 2014-05-01, End date: 2019-04-30

Who writes the rules for the governance of the world economy? The Professions in International Political Economies (PIPES) project is concerned with how professional actors compete in public and private arenas to provide solutions to policy problems. This project provides an original framework to understand how actors in professions shape global economic governance in a manner that commonly ignores public-private distinctions. Rather than conforming to public-private or national-international distinctions, actors create networks through their professional skills. From this context, networks of actors form strategies that link their profession to others to dominate how particular policy problems should be understood. Actors in professions form coalitions and alliances to protect their power and prestige, as well as to create consensus on how to treat policy problems and what represents world’s best practice. Since actors never really have control over how ideas are interpreted they must strategize in an ongoing fight for control over how certain problems should be understood. PIPES is concerned with mapping how professions fight over how to solve policy problems across a range of issue-areas in the world economy where there is a change in economic practices and markets. These are divided into four areas of governance: finance; health; capacity building; and the environment. Among others, topics to be studied include risk management technologies in finance, low fertility problems in the OECD, and the development of carbon ratings markets. The PIPES research team employs a mixed methods approach that combines qualitative structured and focused comparisons from primary evidence (interviews and primary documents) and participant observation, as well as quantitative analysis through network and content analysis of professional associational contexts. PIPES will also use Case Study Integrity Fora to facilitate knowledge exchange between scholars and practitioners.

1 200 000 €

Start date: 2011-01-01, End date: 2014-12-31

The burdens of dealing with administrative rules and red tape in government are a fact of life around the world, ranging from small hassles to heavy burdens in the form of stigmatizing processes of proving eligibility and facing potential sanctions. In light of the immense importance of such burdens for millions of people and for the effectiveness of benefit programs, we know surprisingly little about the conditions that give rise to experiences of burden. POAB combines and extends extant theory and uses a unique combination of experimental methods and data to explain how, why, and for whom administrative rules are experienced as burdensome. POAB studies comprehensive rules regarding unemployment and social benefits and will provide novel register, physiological, and survey measures of welfare benefit recipients’ experiences of burden. I develop and test three theories to explain differences in experiences of burden: 1) How resource scarcity causes cognitive load and hence reduces the ability to cope with rules; 2) How self-efficacy increases the ability to cope with rules; and 3) How perceptions of being undeserving cause stigma and stress. POAB analyses the causal impact of rules on burden. To this end, I use a unique combination of complementary experimental methods in political science: 1) Cross-national lab experiments with physiological measurement and manipulations of rules, scarcity, efficacy and deservingness perceptions; 2) Cross-national survey experiments to assess different aspects of rules in different contexts; 3) Quasi- and field experiments to assess the impact of rules on register measures of burdens in a real-world context. POAB offers a fundamentally new interdisciplinary approach by bridging the gap between research on administrative burdens and psychological perspectives. The project’s output will provide profound knowledge of citizens’ experiences of burden and the inequalities in such experiences among recipients of major welfare benefits.

1 499 611 €

Start date: 2019-02-01, End date: 2024-01-31

This research asks how pharmaceuticals prescribe the healthy subject. It examines the cultural meanings and expectations attached to four prescription drugs, and compares the policies and practices around their use in two countries, Sweden and the UK. Empirically, it studies prescription medicines on the outer edges of adulthood: the HPV vaccine; hormone treatments for early puberty; alpha-blockers against Benign Prostrate Hyperplasia; and pharmaceutical developments against Alzheimer s disease. This view from the edges of the mature subject will bring into focus the practices and pleasures, responsibilities and rewards the adult subject position contains (or at least promises), the gendered positionalities it entails and culturally specific expectations articulated by medical prescriptions. The project conceptualizes of pharmaceuticals as flexible technologies, as actors which influence our identities but which also work within and are constrained by institutional policies, social values, medical practices and the material world. The study will open new research horizons on two levels: The groundbreaking methodological approach, with hands-on, collaborative analytical work in PhD courses and analysis workshops between the participants and sites, will ensure an interdisciplinary approach by truly in actual research practice combining approaches from Science Technology and Society, Gender Studies and Posthumanist Studies. In addition, while firmly grounded in concepts of performative subjecthood, identity, the Self and materialities, this project will force a re-reading of the empirical material through ideas from early medical sociology texts, work which viewed health, illness and treatments as embedded in and performed by communities rather than as possessions and responsibilities of the individual patient. This collaborative re-reading will challenge theoretical ideas about the medicalization of the healthy subject and critical pharmaceutical studie

1 121 760 €

Start date: 2011-08-01, End date: 2016-07-31

Households are exposed to a wide array of monetary and non-monetary risks: employment risk, financial risk, interest rate risk, and health and mortality risk, to name a few. Society and policymakers can certainly help households manage risk, but to be effective, they need to understand the ways households cope with risk and how vulnerable they are to market and policy changes. For instance, how do households react to bank defaults and market failures? How personal do these experiences have to be for households to change behavior? And how permanent are the changes in behavior? The goal of the proposed research program is to understand how personal and market experiences affect financial decisions made by households, such as savings behavior, portfolio allocation, borrowing decisions, mortgage choices, and pension savings. RDRECON combines theory and evidence with an empirical research strategy that is comprised of both natural and field experiments. The theoretical component models how households make decisions. The empirical component uses both econometric and experimental methodologies to study actual household behavior across a range of economic and financial margins, as well as the influence of personal and market experiences on a household’s financial choices. RDRECON’s strength and path-breaking innovation is its combination of administrative register data and controlled field experiments to form treatment and control groups of interest which allow empirical identification of theoretical predictions. This approach puts theory to work and overcomes the limits of identification in natural experiments. To this end, RDRECON will further our understanding of how households respond to personal and market experiences, and provide helpful insights for policy makers.

1 461 881 €

Start date: 2015-05-01, End date: 2020-04-30

This project examines the effects of political institutions on the ability of political parties and interest organizations to resolve distributional conflicts that prevent governments from adopting policies that would increase overall welfare. The three specific objectives of the project are: (1) To develop a new theoretical analysis of the problem of reform capacity, generating testable propositions about the conditional effects of political institutions on the ability of governments to adopt policies that would, at least in principle, make everyone better off (especially when such policies are associated with distributional conflicts among political parties and interest groups). (2) To collect pooled time series data on policy reforms in selected policy areas, and to analyze these data with statistical methods, in order to test the theoretical propositions. (3) To analyze qualitative evidence on decision-making processes in the same set of policy areas, in order to increase the understanding of the causal mechanisms by which institutions influence the reform capacity of governments, and to suggest new hypotheses for future research. The main contribution of the project is that it will develop a new account of the relationship between institutions and reform capacity, offering an alternative to the dominant theoretical approach to institutions in contemporary political science: the veto player approach. According to veto player models, institutionalized power sharing (that is, having many veto players) limits the set of policy changes that are feasible at any given point in time, rendering governments less decisive than they would be if power were concentrated in a smaller number of political parties and institutions. This project, in contrast, is based on the idea that power sharing may enable governments to do things they would not otherwise be able to do.

1 156 684 €

Start date: 2012-05-01, End date: 2016-04-30

How do we come to experience ourselves as single physical entities? Under normal healthy conditions, we humans always experience a single body as our own physical self, and this bodily self is undivided and perceived as a single whole. But what cognitive processes and brain mechanisms mediate this unity of the bodily self? This fundamental question has long been beyond the reach of experimental studies because of the lack of behavioral paradigms that allow controlled manipulation of basic components of the self-unity. To address this issue, we here propose the use of novel full-body illusion paradigms to “fragment”, “duplicate” or “split” the sense of bodily self during well-controlled behavioral and neuroimaging experiments. By studying the behavioral and neural principles that determine specific illusory changes in perceived self-unity, we can elucidate much about the neurocognitive mechanisms that support the sense of having a single unitary bodily self under normal conditions. Our pioneering behavioral paradigms utilize the newest virtual reality technologies, and these are combined with multimodal neuroimaging using the most advanced analysis methods, such as multivariate pattern recognition. The aims of the project are to unravel (i) how we come to experience a single bodily self as opposed to multiple ones; (ii) how we perceive a coherent bodily self instead of fragmented parts; and (iii) how information from different sensory modalities – including vestibular and interoceptive signals – are integrated to achieve this coherent sense of a singular bodily self. The new basic knowledge generated by this project will be important for future clinical neuroscience research into major psychiatric and neurological disorders with disturbances in self-unity, such as schizophrenia, dissociative disorders and stroke with body neglect, by providing novel ideas for hypotheses about the involved neurocognitive pathophysiology.

2 583 560 €

Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31

There is no doubt that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has led to a breakthrough in our ability to measure how the complexities of the mind are rooted in biology. However, deactivation of certain brain areas during cognitive control and increased activation of prefrontal areas in aging are two examples of consistently found patterns of fMRI activation that have had a large impact on the study of the human mind, but that prompt major questions of interpretation. The physiological basis of the fMRI signal reflects interplay between hemodynamics and metabolic demands that vary across the brain, as well as between different tasks and individuals, and cannot be resolved by fMRI alone. To be able to use non-invasive imaging to distinguish a normally aging brain from one that is in the pre-clinical stages of disease, it is important to understand the neurobiological basis of these functional brain changes. Positron emission tomography (PET) is a molecular imaging method that is able to monitor brain glucose metabolism, which stems primarily from synaptic activity and is invariant to changes in blood flow. Studies that have made use of the complementary information gained from fMRI and PET to investigate human brain function have had to rely on sequential scans, and correlation of the signals from both modalities between individuals. The investigation of within-person switches between different mental states with complementary modalities is only made possible by the recent development of a hybrid PET-MR system, which, for the first time, allows simultaneous assessment of fMRI signal, blood flow and PET glucose metabolism during cognitive task performance. The proposal is structured in three work packages that include PET-fMRI scans in 30 healthy younger and 40 older adults. The analyses are designed to disentangle the hemodynamic and metabolic contributions to fMRI deactivations and prefrontal over-activation in aging during cognitive task performance.

1 499 544 €

Start date: 2017-06-01, End date: 2022-05-31

The blood-brain barrier is a sophisticated biological barrier comprising several different cell types, structured in a well-defined order with the task to strictly control the passage of molecules - such as drugs against neurodegenerative diseases - from the blood into the brain. To reduce the ethical and economic costs of drug development, which in EU today uses ~10 million experimental animals every year, we must develop in vitro models of the blood-brain barrier with high in vivo correlation, as these are completely missing today. SONGBIRD aims to achieve this with the scientific approach to - Develop advanced microfabrication methods to handle biologically derived materials - Structure the materials into heterogeneous 3D multi-layer suspended cell culture scaffolds - Incorporate blood-brain barrier cells with precise control on location and order - Integrated the 3D scaffolds into a microfluidic network as a miniaturised screening platform The vision is to develop and validate versatile microfabrication methods to mechanically structure and physically handle soft biological materials to unlock the use of next generation animal-free barrier-on-chip models that can be used to speed up drug development, serve as screening platforms for nanotoxicology and help medical researchers to gain mechanistic insight in drug delivery. During SONGBIRD, I will focus on the blood-brain barrier due to its urgent relevance for drug development for the ageing population but the final processing tool-box will be suitable for realising in vitro models of any biological barrier in the future. SONGBIRD is proposed to run for 60 months and will include researchers with expertise in microsystem engineering (PI), hydrogel synthesis and drug delivery. The expected output is a validated 3D barrier-on-chip model as well as a microfabrication toolbox for biological materials enabling transformation from 2D to 3D cell cultures in several other life science research areas.

1 500 000 €

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

This proposal envisages a research program in the field of systems and signals that will lead to innovative and agile mathematical modeling as well as model-based signal processing and control tools for applications in biology and medicine. The project's goal is to bridge the gap between systems biology, on one hand, and medical signal processing and control engineering, on the other. Mathematical models of systems biology will be used to devise algorithms for biological data processing and computerized medical interventions. Experimental biological and clinical data will be utilized to estimate and characterize the parameters of mathematical models derived for biological phenomena and mechanisms. An extensive collaboration network of medical researchers from Sweden and abroad will provide the project team with necessary experimental data as well as with access to medical competence. The envisaged tools are expected to be applicable more generally but their efficacy will be demonstrated in two main application areas. These areas are endocrinology and neurology for which the use of formal control engineering and signal processing methods is currently deemed to be most promising. The proposed program will result in novel systems and signals tools for medical research and health care enabling multi-input multi-output modeling and analysis of endocrine regulations and providing model-based algorithms for individualized drug dose titration.

2 379 000 €

Start date: 2010-04-01, End date: 2015-03-31

Research problem: The 3rd and 2nd millennium was a period that saw major social and cultural transformations in Europe, from migrations and the introduction of metal (the Bronze Age) to new cultural identities and languages. As these two millennia were formative for Europe’s later history, these are hotly debated issues. However, they can now be resolved, at least in part, by the application of new science-based methodologies and the development of new interpretative frameworks. Aims and methodologies: The project does so by adopting an interdisciplinary methodological approach that combines science and culture. Isotope tracing in combination with recent advances in ancient DNA is employed to test human origins and movements during the two millennia, as well as the origin of wool and textiles. Lead isotope is adopted to trace the origin of copper. Based on this the project will document and explain the forging of new identities and new types of interaction during the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC in temperate northern Europe, but with implications for western Eurasia. Progress and originality: Accomplishment of front-line research results by combining archaeology with new developments in the natural sciences to produce new knowledge about the mobility of people, animals, things, ideas and technologies. This will allow a critical comparison of different types of evidence on mobility from DNA to strontium isotope analyses, and will lead to improved knowledge about the ways in which European regional cultures and identities were formed in the Bronze Age through interaction. Finally, the project will potentially change our understanding and thinking about human mobility as a key factor in cultural and social change.

2 488 264 €

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

TOPSPIN will focus on spin Hall nano-oscillators (SHNOs), which are nano-sized, ultra-tunable, and CMOS compatible spin wave based microwave oscillators. TOPSPIN will push the boundaries of SHNO lithography, frequency, speed, and power consumption by combining topological insulators, having record high spin Hall efficiencies, with materials having ultra-high spin wave frequencies. TOPSPIN will reduce the required current densities 1-2 orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art, making SHNO operating currents approach 1 uA, and increase the SHNO operating frequencies an order of magnitude to as high as 300 GHz. TOPSPIN will use mutually synchronized SHNOs to achieve orders of magnitude higher signal coherence and achieve novel functionality such as pattern matching and neuromorphic computing. TOPSPIN will demonstrate mutual synchronization of up to 1,000 SHNOs in chains, and as many as 1,000,000 SHNOs in very large-scale two-dimensional arrays. Using dipolar coupling between SHNOs fabricated on top of each other, three-dimensional mutual synchronization will also be demonstrated. As the signal coherence increases linearly with the number of mutually synchronized SHNOs the oscillator quality factor will improve by many orders of magnitude. TOPSPIN will also develop such arrays using magnetic tunnel junction stacks thus combining ultra-high coherence with the highest possible microwave output power. TOPSPIN will demonstrate ultrafast pattern matching and neuromorphic computing using its SHNO networks. It will functionalize SHNOs to exhibit ultra-fast individual voltage controlled tuning and non-volatile tuning of both the SHNO frequency and the inter-SHNO coupling. TOPSPIN will characterize its SHNOs using novel methods and techniques such as multichannel electrical measurements, time- and phase-resolved Brillouin Light Scattering microscopy, time-resolved Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy, and ultrafast pump-probe Transmission Electron Microscopy.

2 500 000 €

Start date: 2019-09-01, End date: 2024-08-31

This project combines the best sociology and economics has to offer to establish a new understanding of intergenerational transmissions. We know that socioeconomic outcomes are correlated across generations, but we have only little understanding of the mechanisms and intergenerational transmissions which generate these correlations. In this project, we propose to combine formal models of intergenerational transmissions in economics with substantive insights from sociology to develop new and improved models of intergenerational transmissions. Furthermore, we combine longitudinal data with state-of-the-art econometric methods to analyze intergenerational transmissions of cultural endowments and educational expectations, the role of the extended family in intergenerational transmissions, and finally the utility of educational decision making. The project has the potential to significantly improve our understanding of the causes and consequences of intergenerational transmissions and, in doing so, to contribute new knowledge to inform policies to promote social mobility.

1 358 389 €

Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2018-06-30

The overall objective of VARME is to determine the long-term effects of the news media on citizens’ beliefs about societal problems. Theoretically and empirically, the program challenges the prevailing Short-term Media Effects Paradigm that characterizes most research on media effects. In doing so, the program uncovers a variety of important long-term media effects largely ignored in previous research. These include how beliefs about societal problems are initially formed (RQ1), how beliefs are maintained and reinforced (RQ2), as well as under what conditions they change both temporarily and more permanently (RQ3). The ambitious objective of VARME is achieved by three complementary projects. These projects are all possible thanks to an internationally unique infrastructure for data collection at the University of Gothenburg. Project 1 uncovers the long-term processes of media effects over a period of several years. Using an extensive longitudinal mixed-methods design, this study provides unique knowledge on how citizens’ beliefs about society are maintained, reinforced and potentially changed by the news media in the long run. Project 2 clarifies how citizens’ beliefs initially form in response to news coverage. By setting up a novel event-based study, this project enables a close “live” analysis of belief formation as real-world events take place and media coverage unfolds over time. Project 3 focuses on causality and mechanisms behind long-term media effects. Working together with professional journalists, this project is based on a series of realistic experiments on how citizens’ news choices and news exposure influence the maintenance, reinforcement and changes of beliefs over time. Apart from documenting the varieties of long-term effects on citizens’ beliefs about a wide range of societal problems, VARME makes significant contributions to several established theories of media effects.

1 495 595 €

Start date: 2019-03-01, End date: 2024-02-29

Epidemiological reports from around the world suggest that more people than ever before are living with (especially chronic) diseases. As a consequence, sustained efforts to reduce morbidity and mortality rates have been joined by systematised efforts to improve the lives – the quality of life – of those living with disease in ways that are measurable and auditable. VITAL will focus on the making of ‘quality of life’. While social studies of medicine have of late been marked by a ‘bio-turn’, it is apparent that within contemporary medicine, life is envisaged as much more than cellular and molecular activity; it is also a social activity and a personal experience. Not only is life sustained, it is also lived. In recent decades, morbid living – living with disease – has come to be the object of novel forms of knowledge, expertise, measurement and management while also generating new medical practices and attendant ways of relating to oneself. VITAL suggests a shift in attention from the ways in which the social sciences have previously studied morbid living and related issues of quality of life. Rather than continue longstanding efforts to understand how people cope with disease or to refine definitions and instruments for measuring the quality of life of the sick, in VITAL we will empirically study the co-production of ‘quality of life’ within healthcare through four ethnographically-grounded studies of how ‘quality of life’ is assembled, mobilised, negotiated and practiced in concrete medical settings. The four studies will focus on how knowledge about living with disease is assembled and mobilised, on the one hand, and how morbid living is negotiated and practiced on the other. The key outcomes of VITAL will be theoretical advancement of understandings of vitality in the 21st century beyond molecular biology and methodological innovation to facilitate empirical study of co-production processes that involve social science knowledge and practice.

1 499 770 €

Start date: 2015-06-01, End date: 2020-05-31