ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

This project is a comparative anthropology of conscience, ethics and human rights. Numerous international human rights documents formally declare their commitment to protect freedom of conscience. But, what is conscience and how do we know it when we see it? How do we distinguish it from self-interest or fanaticism? And what happens when the concept, often associated with a distinct Christian or liberal history, travels across cultural boundaries? The project will examine the cultural conditions under which claims to conscience are made possible, and the types of claims that are most persuasive when doing so. The project addresses these issues through the comparative analysis of three case studies: British pacifists, Sri Lankan activists, and Soviet dissidents. These case studies have been carefully chosen to provide globally significant, but contrasting examples of contests over the implications of claims to conscience. If claims of conscience are often associated with a specifically liberal and Christian tradition, mid-twentieth century Britain can be said to stand at the centre of that tradition. Sri Lanka represents a particularly fraught post-colonial South Asian counterpoint, wracked by nationalist violence, and influenced by ethical traditions associated with forms of Hinduism and Buddhism. Soviet Russia represents a further contrast, a totalitarian regime, where atheism was the dominant ethical language. Finally, the project will return specifically to international human rights institutions, examining the history of the category of conscience in the UN human rights system. This project will be ground breaking, employing novel methods and analytical insights, in order to producing the first comparative analysis of the cultural and political salience of claims of conscience. In doing so, the research aims to transform our understandings of the limits and potentials of attempts to protect freedom of conscience.

1 457 869 €

Start date: 2015-08-01, End date: 2020-07-31

Can benefit-sharing address the equity deficit within the green economy? This project aims to investigate benefit-sharing as an under-theorised and little-implemented regulatory approach to the equity concerns (disregard for the special circumstances of developing countries and of indigenous peoples and local communities) in transitioning to the green economy. Although benefit-sharing is increasingly deployed in a variety of international environmental agreements and also in human rights and corporate accountability instruments, no comprehensive account exists of its conceptual and practical relevance to equitably address global environmental challenges. This project will be the first systematic evaluation of the conceptualisations and operationalisations of benefit-sharing as a tool for equitable change through the allocation among different stakeholders of economic and also socio-cultural and environmental advantages arising from natural resource use. The project will combine a comparative study of international law with empirical legal research, and include an inter-disciplinary study integrating political sociology in a legal enquiry on the role of “biocultural community protocols” that articulate and implement benefit-sharing at the intersection of international, transnational, national and indigenous communities’ customary law (global environmental law). The project aims to: 1. develop a comprehensive understanding of benefit-sharing in international law; 2. clarify whether and how benefit-sharing supports equity and the protection of human rights across key sectors of international environmental regulation (biodiversity, climate change, oceans, food and agriculture) that are seen as inter-related in the transition to the green economy; 3. understand the development of benefit-sharing in the context of global environmental law; and 4. clarify the role of transnational legal advisors (NGOs and bilateral cooperation partners) in the green economy.

1 481 708 €

Start date: 2013-11-01, End date: 2018-10-31

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the political economy of punishment, yet almost no attention has been given to the factors that translate socio-political arrangements into penal practices or the specific nature of imprisonment in different political-economic systems. Based on research in England & Wales and one Nordic nation, the project goals are to expose the dynamics of the penal state and the nature of penality in countries that are considered ‘exclusionary’ and ‘inclusionary’ respectively in their socio-economic and penal practices. These goals will be achieved through four comparative sub-projects: first, a study of penal policymaking and the ‘penal field’ (the players and processes that shape penal policy and practice); second, an exploration of the texture of imprisonment for women and sex offenders, groups presumed to experience inclusionary and exclusionary penal practices in distinctive ways; third, a study of how these prisoners experience entry into and exit from the system; fourth, a study of the ‘deep end’ imprisonment in both countries. A central aim is to interrogate widespread assumptions about the relative mildness/severity of penal practices in inclusionary and exclusionary nations. The research will employ an emerging framework that conceptualises the prison experience through notions of ‘depth’, ‘weight’, ‘tightness’ and ‘breadth’. It will foreground the roles of shame and guilt in shaping prisoners’ orientations, concepts that feature in theories of offending and reintegration, but are absent from the sociology of imprisonment. Through the concept of ‘penal consciousness’, the project will also explore the interaction between the punitive intentions of the state and prisoners’ perceptions of the purposes and legitimacy of their punishment. The research will be groundbreaking in several ways, reshaping the field of comparative penology, and linking macro issues of the penal state with the lived realities of the prison landings.

1 964 948 €

Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31

Participation – defined in this project as the social practice of engaging in personal and social change – links private and public life, biography and history, and forms a mechanism for social action. Twenty years after the ratification of the United Nations Convention for the Rights of the Child (1989) the international community is no closer to identifying what constitutes a ‘good enough’ model for understanding and supporting the development of children’s participation in public life. The project asks game changing questions about the emergence of children’s orientation towards social action through qualitative, longitudinal and cross-national research. Building on biographical interviews with children, relational and geographical mapping techniques, selective participant-observation with children, and children social research workshops in three cities (London, Athens, Mumbai), the project examines the meaning of personal and social change in middle childhood (6-11 year olds), the circuits of social action that children tap into in an attempt to make changes real, the extent to which privilege, marginalization and economic crisis shape children’s practices of participation, and the ways in which encounters with difference (gender, ethnicity, race, religion) challenge children’s orientation towards social action. By sampling children from a diverse cross-section of each city the project will collect and follow a total of 100 children over a five-year period. The project will provide a rich data sources for making within and between country comparisons and in doing so enable the development a theoretical paradigm for understanding children’s participation that is derived from the bottom-up, that is generated in diverse settings, including non-Western, and that takes advantage of the current rupture to established socio-economic realities to ask questions about the future of social action.

1 469 296 €

Start date: 2014-03-01, End date: 2019-02-28

Cells must integrate output from multiple genetic circuits in order to correctly control cellular processes. Despite much work characterizing regulation in these circuits, how circuits interact to control global cellular programs remains unclear. This is particularly true given that recent research at the single cell level has revealed that genetic circuits often generate variable or stochastic regulation dynamics. In this proposal we will use a multi-disciplinary approach, combining modelling and time-lapse microscopy, to investigate how cells can robustly integrate signals from multiple dynamic genetic circuits. In particular we will answer the following questions: 1) What types of dynamic signal encoding strategies are available for the cell? 2) What are the benefits of dynamic gene activation, whether stochastic or oscillatory, to the cell? 3) How do cells couple and integrate output from diverse gene modules despite the noise and variability observed in gene circuit dynamics? We will study these questions using 2 key model systems. In Aim 1, we will examine stochastic pulse regulation dynamics and coupling between alternative sigma factors in B. subtilis. Our preliminary data has revealed that multiple B. subtilis sigma factors stochastically pulse under stress. We will look for evidence of any coupling or interactions between these stochastic pulse circuits. This system will serve as a model for how a cell uses stochastic pulsing to control diverse cellular processes. In Aim 2, we will examine coupling between a deterministic oscillator, the circadian clock, and multiple other key pathways in Cyanobacteria. We will examine how the cell can dynamically couple multiple cellular processes using an oscillating signal. This work will provide an excellent base for Aim 3, in which we will use synthetic biology approaches to develop ‘bottom up’ tests of generation of novel dynamic coupling strategies.

1 499 571 €

Start date: 2014-02-01, End date: 2019-01-31

Sociotechnical transitions are important to address environmental problems. The present literature focuses on green options that break through and replace existing sociotechnical regimes. The project turns the analytical focus upside down, seeing the destabilisation and decline of existing regimes as the key to transitions. Regimes refer to the rules (knowledge base, belief system, mission, strategic orientation) shared by incumbent actors in an industry. Destabilisation results from increasing external pressures (economic, normative, regulatory) and eroding commitment of actors to regime rules. Research questions are: 1 To what degree have regimes in transport, energy and agriculture destabilised in the last 30 years, as a result of environmental pressures? 2 What kind of process is regime destabilisation and how should it be conceptualised for environmental problems? Which mechanisms are important and how do they interact? The project develops a theoretical perspective, combining insights from neo-institutional theory, STS, evolutionary economics. A phase-based pattern and three propositions are advanced. To investigate destabilisation, the project uses case studies as research strategy, which is appropriate for tracing complex processes such as changing beliefs and identities, fuzzy network boundaries, and many interacting (external) factors. Two PhD projects do four longitudinal case studies about destabilisation. Cases are selected with regard to the phase-based pattern and propositions. One case (decline of domestic coal) went though all phases. Another case (destabilisation of pig farming) has progressed far into the last phase. Coal in electricity and the car regime are less far in the phase-pattern, and probably less destabilised. The PI integrates findings from PhD projects, providing general answers to research questions. He also elaborates the inter-disciplinary perspective, and addresses the possibilities for sustainability transitions.

907 114 €

Start date: 2008-09-01, End date: 2012-11-30

Development of any organism starts with a totipotent cell (zygote). Through series of cell divisions and differentiation processes this cell will eventually give rise to the whole organism containing hundreds of specialised cell. While the cells at the onset of development have the capacity to generate all cell types (ie are toti-or pluripotent), this developmental capacity is progressively lost as the cells undertake cell fate decisions. At the molecular level, the memory of these events is laid down in a complex layer of epigenetic modifications at both the DNA and the chromatin level. Unidirectional character of the developmental progress dictates that the key acquired epigenetic modifications are stable and inherited through subsequent cell divisions. This paradigm is, however, challenged during cellular reprogramming that requires de-differentiation (nuclear transfer, induced pluripotent stem cells, wound healing and regeneration in lower organisms) or a change in cell fate (transdifferentiation). Despite intense efforts of numerous research teams, the molecular mechanisms of these processes remain enigmatic. In order to understand cellular reprogramming at the molecular level, this proposal takes advantage of epigenetic reprogramming processes that occur naturally during mouse development. By using mouse fertilised zygote and mouse developing primordial germ cells we will investigate novel molecular components implicated in the genome-wide erasure of DNA methylation. Additionally, by using a unique combination of the developmental models with the state of the art ultra-sensitive LC/MS and genomics approaches we propose to investigate the dynamics and the interplay between DNA and RNA modifications during these key periods of embryonic development characterised by genome-wide epigenetic changes . Our work will thus provide new fundamental insights into a complex dynamics and interactions between epigenetic modifications that underlie epigenetic reprogramming

2 000 000 €

Start date: 2015-08-01, End date: 2020-07-31

The emerging field of synthetic biology promises to engineer the living world. This is potentially extremely contentious, so scholars from the social sciences and humanities have been incorporated into synthetic biology research programmes from the outset. The ENLIFE project’s distinctive contribution will be to study both the engineering of biology and the role of social scientists within this. Its two objectives are: to investigate the movement of ideas, practices and promises from engineering into the life sciences, and to examine the ways in which social scientists and other groups are being mobilised as part of this endeavour. We will carry out novel social scientific research into the engineering of living things, by collecting a rich body of empirical data. This will involve semi-structured qualitative interviews, participant observation at conferences, and ethnographic research in synthetic biology laboratories that are attempting to make biology easier to engineer. We will simultaneously address the interdisciplinary entanglements that arise in all these contexts, which involve scientists, engineers, social scientists, philosophers, lawyers and sometimes even artists and designers. We will also run four experimental interdisciplinary workshops, where we will explore the possibility of producing new knowledge together, across disciplinary divides. The project aims to provide a critical, empirically grounded analysis of a field that promises to drive the next industrial revolution and is currently the target of high levels of investment across the globe. It will also provide insights into the engineering imagination, how it is applied to living things, and how it is challenged and expanded in interdisciplinary interactions. The study of these interactions will build on our understanding of the role of the social sciences in interdisciplinary collaborations, and contribute to pressing debates about the future of Science and Technology Studies.

1 559 389 €

Start date: 2014-09-01, End date: 2019-02-28

National governments operate under the growing constraints of European integration that limit the choices they can offer citizens and the policy instruments they can use. Yet, despite the centrality of political choice to the functioning of electoral democracy, we know very little about the consequences of constrained political choices for citizens’ engagement in democratic processes. Across Europe, an increasing number of citizens are supporting extreme parties or declining to take part in democratic elections. This project offers the first systematic examination of how the range and substance of political choices offered to citizens in the EU shape democratic perceptions and electoral behaviour. Understanding how citizens perceive and react to the growing constraints on domestic politics is crucial to a diagnosis of European democracy and for an evidence-based debate on reform of EU institutions. Building on the Principal Investigator’s award-winning research on electoral democracy and extensive experience of designing and analysing cross-national surveys and experiments, this project is a pioneering study of the consequences of constrained democracy. It uniquely combines a large-N cross-national analysis of citizens’ responses to mainstream party convergence and case studies of the ‘emergency politics’ of the Eurozone crisis with micro-level experimental work. This project aims to transform the study of citizens’ democratic attitudes and behaviour by focusing on the importance of political choice. By developing and testing a theoretical model of heterogeneous citizen responses to the constrained political choice, the project provides insights into why citizens turn against mainstream parties or exit democratic processes altogether. This further allows EUDEMOS to develop proposals for how institutions can be designed to facilitate citizens’ participation in and satisfaction with democratic processes in a multi-level European Union.

1 508 822 €

Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2021-01-31