ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

"Recent developments in image-making techniques have resulted in a drastic blurring of the threshold between the world of the image and the real world. Immersive and interactive virtual environments have enabled the production of pictures that elicit in the perceiver a strong feeling of being incorporated in a quasi-real world. In doing so such pictures conceal their mediateness (their being based on a material support), their referentiality (their pointing to an extra-iconic dimension), and their separateness (normally assured by framing devices), paradoxically challenging their status as images, as icons: they are veritable “an-icons”. This kind of pictures undermines the mainstream paradigm of Western image theories, shared by major models such as the doctrine of mimesis, the phenomenological account of image-consciousness, the analytic theories of depiction, the semiotic and iconological methods. These approaches miss the key counter-properties regarding an-icons as ""environmental"" images: their immediateness, unframedness, and presentness. Subjects relating to an-icons are no longer visual observers of images; they are experiencers living in a quasi-real environment that allows multisensory affordances and embodied agencies. AN-ICON aims to develop “an-iconology” as a new methodological approach able to address this challenging iconoscape. Such an approach needs to be articulated in a transdisciplinary and transmedial way: 1) HISTORY – a media-archaeological reconstruction will provide a taxonomy of the manifold an-iconic strategies (e.g. illusionistic painting, pre-cinematic dispositifs, 3D films, video games, head mounted displays); 2) THEORY – an experiential account (drawing on phenomenology, visual culture and media studies) will identify the an-iconic key concepts; 3) PRACTICES – a socio-cultural section will explore the multifaceted impact of an-iconic images, environments and technologies on contemporary professional domains as well as on everyday life. "

2 328 736 €

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

Dante Alighieri at the dawn of the 1300s, as well as Eustache Deschamps almost a century later, conceived poetry as music in itself. But what happens with poetry when it is involved in the complex architecture of polyphony? The aim of this project is to study for the first time the corpus of 14th- and early 15th-century poetry set to music by Ars Nova polyphonists (more than 1200 texts). This repertoire gathers different poetic and musical traditions, as shown by the multilingual anthologies copied during the last years of the Schism. The choice of this corpus is motivated by two primary goals: a) to offer a new interpretation of its meaning and function in the cultural and historical context, one that may be then applied to the rest of coeval European lyric poetry; b) to overcome current disciplinary divisions in order to generate a new methodological balance between the project’s two main fields of interest (Comparative Literature / Musicology). Most Ars Nova polyphonists were directly associated with religious institutions. In many texts, the language of courtly love expresses the values of caritas, the theological virtue that guides wise rulers and leads them to desire the common good. Thus, the poetic figure of the lover becomes a metaphor for the political man, and love poetry can be used as a device for diplomacy, as well as for personal and institutional propaganda. From this unprecedented point of view, the project will develop three research lines in response to the following questions: 1) How is the relationship between poetry and music, and how is the dialogue between the different poetic and musical traditions viewed in relation to each context of production? 2) To what extent does Ars Nova poetry take part in the ‘soft power’ strategies exercised by the entire European political class of the time? 3) Is there a connection between the multilingualism of the manuscript tradition and the perception of the Ars Nova as a European, intercultural repertoire?

2 193 375 €

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

Development economists and policymakers often face scenarios in which poor people do not make choices that would help them get out of poverty due to an “aspiration failure”: the poor perceive certain goals as unattainable and do not invest towards those goals, thus perpetuating their own state of poverty. The aim of this proposal is to improve our understanding of the relationship between aspirations and socio-economic outcomes of disadvantaged individuals, in order to answer the question: Can we design policy interventions that shift aspirations in a way that is conducive to development? In addressing the above question a fundamental role is played by social norms and by the ability of individuals to coordinate on “new” aspirations, hence the analysis of social effects is a salient feature of this proposal. The proposed research is organized in two workpackages. The first focuses on the media as a vehicle for changing aspirations, examining both commercial TV programs and “educational entertainment”. The second workpackage examines “tailored” interventions designed to address specific determinants of aspiration failures (e.g., psychological support to reduce perceived barriers; inter-racial interaction to change stereotypes; institutional reform to strengthen women’s rights and reduce the gender aspiration gap). The methodology will involve rigorous evaluation of several interventions directly designed to or indirectly affecting aspirations and social norms. Original data collected through survey work, large administrative datasets and media content analysis will be used. The results of this project will advance our knowledge on the sources of aspiration failures by poor people and on the interplay between aspirations and social norms, eventually opening the avenue for a new array of anti-poverty policies.

1 618 125 €

Start date: 2016-11-01, End date: 2021-10-31

This project intends to study intercultural connections in contemporary Europe, engaging both native and ‘new’ Europeans. These connections are woven through the faculties of embodied subjects – memory, visuality and mobility – and concern the movement of people, ideas and images across the borders of European nation-states. These faculties are connected with that of affect, an increasingly important concept in history and the social sciences. Memory will be understood not only as oral or direct memory, but also as cultural memory, embodied in various cultural products. Our study aims to understand new forms of European identity, as these develop in an increasingly diasporic world. Europe today is not only a key site of immigration, after having been for centuries an area of emigration, but also a crucial point of arrival in a global network designed by mobile human beings. Three parts will make up the project. The first will engage with bodies, their gendered dimension, performative capacities and connection to place. It will explore the ways certain bodies are ‘emplaced’ as ‘European’, while others are marked as alien, and contrast these discourses with the counter-narratives by visual artists. The second part will extend further the reflection on the role of the visual arts in challenging an emergent ‘Fortress Europe’ but also in re-imagining the memory of European colonialism. The work of some key artists will be shown to students in Italy and the Netherlands, both recent migrants and ‘natives’, creating an ‘induced reception’. The final part of the project will look at alternative imaginations of Europe, investigating the oral memories and ‘mental maps’ created by two migrant communities in Europe: from Peru and from the Horn of Africa. Examining the heterogeneous micro-productions of mobility – whether ‘real’ or imagined/envisioned – will thus yield important lessons for the historical understanding of inclusion and exclusion in today’s Europe.

1 488 501 €

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

If you suddenly hear your song on the radio and spontaneously decide to burst into dance in your living room, you need to precisely time your movements if you do not want to find yourself on your bookshelf. Most of what we do or perceive depends on how accurately we represent the temporal properties of the environment however we cannot see or touch time. As such, time in the millisecond range is both a fundamental and elusive dimension of everyday experiences. Despite the obvious importance of time to information processing and to behavior in general, little is known yet about how the human brain process time. Existing approaches to the study of the neural mechanisms of time mainly focus on the identification of brain regions involved in temporal computations (‘where’ time is processed in the brain), whereas most computational models vary in their biological plausibility and do not always make clear testable predictions. BiT is a groundbreaking research program designed to challenge current models of time perception and to offer a new perspective in the study of the neural basis of time. The groundbreaking nature of BiT derives from the novelty of the questions asked (‘when’ and ‘how’ time is processed in the brain) and from addressing them using complementary but distinct research approaches (from human neuroimaging to brain stimulation techniques, from the investigation of the whole brain to the focus on specific brain regions). By testing a new biologically plausible hypothesis of temporal representation (via duration tuning and ‘chronotopy’) and by scrutinizing the functional properties and, for the first time, the temporal hierarchies of ‘putative’ time regions, BiT will offer a multifaceted knowledge of how the human brain represents time. This new knowledge will challenge our understanding of brain organization and function that typically lacks of a time angle and will impact our understanding of how the brain uses time information for perception and action

1 670 830 €

Start date: 2016-10-01, End date: 2021-09-30

Challenging the notion of Fortress Europe , the research investigates relations between the European Union and its southern periphery through the concept of borderlands . The concept emphasises the disaggregation of the triple function of borders demarcating state territory, authority, and national identity inherent in the Westphalian model of statehood. This process is most visible in (although not limited to) Europe, where integration has led to supranational areas of sovereignty, an internal market, a common currency, and a zone of free movement of people, each with a different territorial span. The project explores the complex and differentiated process by which the EU extends its unbundled functional and legal borders to the so-called southern Mediterranean (North Africa and parts of the Middle East), thereby transforming it into borderlands . They connect the European core with the periphery through various legal and functional border regimes, governance patterns, and the selective outsourcing of some EU border control duties. The overarching questions informing this research is whether, first, the borderland policies of the EU, described by some as a neo-medieval empire, is a functional consequence of the specific integration model pursued inside the EU, a matter of foreign policy choice or a local manifestation of a broader global phenomenon. Second, the project addresses the question of power dynamics that underwrite borderland governance, presuming a growing leverage of third country governments resulting from their co-optation as gatekeepers. Thus, while adopting an innovative approach, the project will enhance our understanding of EU-Mediterranean relations while also addressing crucial theoretical questions in international relations.

1 353 920 €

Start date: 2011-10-01, End date: 2017-03-31

The present research project focuses on an unjustly neglected corpus of late-medieval sources, the administrative and fiscal accounts (‘computi’) of the castellanies – basic administrative units – of the county of Savoy. I propose a holistic model of analysis that can fully capitalise on the unusual wealth of detail of the Savoyard source material, in order to illuminate some key topics in late-medieval institutional and socio-economic history, from the development of state institutions through administrative and fiscal reform – with particular attention to the transition from personal to institutional accountability – to the question of socio-economic growth, decline, and recovery during the turbulent period of the late-thirteenth to the late-fourteenth century. More broadly, my research into these topics aims to contribute to our understanding of the late-medieval origins of European modernity. The advances of pragmatic literacy, record-keeping, and auditing practices will be analysed with the aid of anthropological and social scientific theories of practice. By comparing the Savoyard ‘computi’ with their sources of inspiration, from the Anglo-Norman pipe rolls to the Catalan fiscal records, the project aims to highlight the creative adaptation of imported administrative models, and thus to contribute to our knowledge of institutional transfers in European history. The project will develop an inclusive frame of analysis in which the ‘computi’ will be read against the evidence from enfeoffment charters, castellany surveys (‘extente’), and the records of direct taxation (‘subsidia’). The serial data will be analysed by building a database; the findings of quantitative analysis will be verified by case studies of the individuals and families (many from the middle social strata) that surface in the fiscal records.

671 875 €

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

The objective of this project is to quantify the role of consumers’ behaviour on the design and assessment of policies aimed at enhancing energy efficiency and conservation and at promoting climate change mitigation. The project brings together different disciplines –namely energy policy, environmental and ecological economics, behavioral public finance, experimental economics, and technology policy- in an integrated fashion. COBHAM is designed to go beyond the standard analysis of energy and climate policies in the presence of environmental externalities, by accounting for the heterogeneity in consumers’ preferences, the role of social interactions, and the presence of behavioral tendencies and biases. The project seeks to: i) carry out innovative research in the theoretical understanding of the interplay between behavioral tendencies and environmental externalities; ii) generate new empirical data and research on individual preferences by means of original surveys and controlled experiments; iii) enhance integrated assessment models (IAMs) of economy, energy and climate with an advanced representation of consumers’ behavior. In doing so, the project will be able to provide a richer characterization of energy demand and of greenhouse gas emission scenarios, to better estimate consumers’ responsiveness to energy and climate policies, and to provide input to the design of new policy instruments aimed at influencing energy and environmental sustainable behavior. COBHAM is of high public policy relevance given Europe’s legislation on energy efficiency and CO2 emissions, and can provide important insights also outside the sphere of energy and climate policymaking.

1 451 840 €

Start date: 2014-08-01, End date: 2019-07-31

The latter part of the twentieth century was a period of rapid democratisation on a global scale. The attention of comparative politics scholars followed the progression of so-called Third Wave democracies, and gradually progressed from the study of the causes of and the transitions to democracy to the problems of democratic consolidation, and then to more recent issues relating to the quality of democracy. A further, frontier step may now be added to such research path by focusing on a subject that has remained largely under-researched, if at all, namely the political, social and economic consequences that emerged in countries where real democratic change took place. The question of what democracy has been able to deliver will become ever more relevant to the future prospects of recent democratisation processes and of democracy at large. In the study of the consequences of democratisation, the advent of democracy is thus no longer observed as an endpoint, or a dependent variable to be explained, but as a starting point, or an independent variable that allegedly contributes to the explanation of a wide range of political, economic and social effects. The question of the corollaries of democratisation also has crucial policy implications. The goals of the proposed research are: a) the definition of a theoretical framework that articulates, integrates and interrelates the different existing hypotheses and arguments on the consequences of democratization processes b) the empirical investigation, through a combination and integration of quantitative and qualitative methods, of the validity of three specific such hypotheses, namely: i. democratisation favours the consolidation of the state (as a political effect) ii. democratisation favours economic liberalization (as an economic effect) iii. democratisation improves social welfare (as a social effect) c) the analysis of the specific forms that the effects of democratization assume in different world regions

322 284 €

Start date: 2010-11-01, End date: 2015-10-31