ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The potential and boundaries of the human mind is determined by dynamic interactions between the environment and the individual genetic architecture. However, despite several breakthroughs, the genetic revolution has not provided a coherent account of the development of the mind and its disorders, and the missing heritability is large across human traits. One explanation of this impasse is the complexity of the gene-environment interactions. Current knowledge about the determinants of a healthy mind is largely based on studies whose modus operandi is to treat the environment as a static entity, neglecting to consider the crucial fact that environmental inputs and their genetic interactions vary dramatically between life phases. The objective of BRAINMINT is to provide this missing link by zeroing in on two major life transitions, namely adolescence and pregnancy. These phases are characterized by temporarily increased brain plasticity, offering windows for adaptation and growth, but also host the emergence of common mental disorders. I propose that a multi-level investigation with this dark side of brain plasticity as the axis mundi will add a mechanistic understanding of this link between growth and vulnerability. I will test the main hypothesis that mechanisms that boost neuroplasticity promote adaptation to a dynamic environment, but at the cost of increased risk of psychopathology if exposed to a combination of genetic and environmental triggers. To this end I will utilize cutting-edge longitudinal brain imaging, electrophysiology, rich cognitive and clinical data, immune markers, gene expression and genetics. I will leverage on massive imaging data (n>40,000) and novel tools to increase power and generalizability and improve brain- and gene-based predictions of complex traits. Aiming to help resolving one of the modern day enigmas, BRAINMINT is a pioneering and high risk/high gain effort to find mechanisms of brain plasticity that support and harm the brain.

1 446 113 €

Start date: 2019-08-01, End date: 2024-07-31

Climate change may be undermining the stock of seasonal representations that society draws on to understand and live according to the weather. The CALENDARS project studies how modern society represents seasons, and how these representations shape institutions and help people live with seasonal change. The project opens an important emerging field in climate adaptation research by examining the representations of ‘normal’ seasons underlying key institutions, assesses their quality for successful adaptation to rapid climate change, and analyses facilitators and barriers to adopting representations more flexibly to new climates. It contributes a novel perspective on how to transform our institutions – from schools to farmer cooperatives – from the foundational culture and representations up, to better fit the changing seasonal cycles we are experiencing. CALENDARS empirically explores the relationship between different institutions’ ideas of seasons and their successful adaptation through an in-depth comparative study of a set of institutions in two local communities, in Norway and New Zealand. It is steered by an overall objective to: ‘Advance knowledge and understanding of how seasonal representations shape and are shaped by institutions, and critically appraise the quality of these representations for contributing to successful adaptation to seasonal change’. Conceptually, CALENDARS looks at representations as continuously ‘co-produced’ at the boundary of nature and society, and society and institutions. It tests a novel reconceptualisation of co-production as a prism; with each of the project’s three phases looking at the complex processes by which representations emerge through different ‘lenses’ of co-production. Methodologically, the project tests the feasibility of a novel basket of bespoke methods spanning narrative interviews, calendar boundary objects and collaborative sustainability science.

1 489 426 €

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

Recent uprisings across the world have accentuated claims that food insecurity is an important trigger of political violence. Is the Arab Spring representative of a general climate-conflict pattern, where severe droughts and other climate anomalies are a key driving force? Research to date has failed to conclude on a robust relationship but several notable theoretical and methodological shortcomings limit inference. CLIMSEC will address these research gaps. It asks: How does climate variability affect dynamics of political violence? This overarching research question will be addressed through the accomplishment of four key objectives: (1) Investigate how food security impacts of climate variability affect political violence; (2) Investigate how economic impacts of climate variability affect political violence; (3) Conduct short-term forecasts of political violence in response to food and economic shocks; and (4) Develop a comprehensive, testable theoretical model of security implications of climate variability. To achieve these objectives, CLIMSEC will advance the research frontier on theoretical as well as analytical accounts. Central in this endeavor is conceptual and empirical disaggregation. Instead of assuming states and calendar years as unitary and fixed entities, the project proposes causal processes that act at multiple temporal and spatial scales, involve various types of actors, and lead to very different forms of outcomes depending on the context. The empirical component will make innovative use of new geo - referenced data and methods; focus on a broad range of insecurity outcomes, including non-violent resistance; and combine rigorous statistical models with out-of-sample simulations and qualitative case studies for theorizing and validation of key findings. Based at PRIO, the project will be led by Research Professor Halvard Buhaug, a leading scholar on climate change and security with strong publication record and project management experience.

1 996 945 €

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

The creation of personal, episodic memory from a previous experience is a remarkably complex process, which substantially differs from the processes leading to non-personal knowledge and memory about the world, so-called semantic memory. The act of remembering an episodic event is as much an act of creation as an act of reproduction. Modality-specific memory items are assembled through a re-construction process that allows us to re-experience the episode in rich details. Recent research has shown that recall of episodes and imagination of the future depends on a common core brain network. Early damage to this network will dramatically affect the development of personal memories, effectively preventing the creation of a vivid personal past, while leaving general cognitive development relatively intact. Still, no attempts have been made to study how development and subsequent aging of constructive memory, the arguably most relevant form of memory for daily life-function, is determined by structural and functional properties of the brain. I propose to study how characteristics of the brain determine the development of the ability to form episodic memories in childhood, and how the same factors contribute to the decline in episodic memory function experienced by most healthy elderly. The aim of the current proposal is to understand how maturation and aging of the brain networks for reconstructive memory impacts the ability to form and re-experience ones past. To address this aim, we will study children (4-10 years), adolescents (11-19 years), young adults (20-30 years) and elderly (60-80 years), 100 participants in each group, with repeated cognitive testing and brain scanning with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The children will be examined annually, yielding four examinations, while the other participants will be examined bi-annually, yielding to examinations within the project period.

1 499 088 €

Start date: 2012-02-01, End date: 2017-01-31

CREATIVE IPR aims to study the rise of intellectual property rights in the creative industries, from the international treaties of the late nineteenth century to the present day, with a focus on Europe in the global world. CREATIVE IPR examines the consequences of this development for the creators. What did intellectual property rights mean to a musician, or to a fashion designer in twentieth century Europe? Who captured economic value or failed to do so? In order to answer these questions, CREATIVE IPR proposes an original bottom-up approach, examining from the ground the macro and the micro aspects of the rise of intellectual property rights in the creative industries. CREATIVE IPR pursues the questions in three arenas. The first arena is the formation and impact of national and international institutions and organizations for intellectual property. The second and third arenas are the role of authors’ rights societies in the music industries, and the management of creativity in the fashion industries. For each arena, cross-cutting themes are pursued: authorship and creativity, firms, technological change, legal frameworks, and the role of the commons – the public domain. In recent years, intellectual property rights have, due to technological and economic change, attracted significant scholarly interest. Yet attention has not been paid to their impact on creators in a historical perspective. By analyzing the micro histories of the creators who negotiated the growing legal regime in the light of a transnational context CREATIVE IPR will fill a significant knowledge gap, help refine our ideas about the impact of intellectual property rights on creators, and open paths for future research. Ultimately it will help us understand how societies can foster rich and diverse creative industries.

1 926 210 €

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

A massive corpus of unedited archaeological sources collected over the last two decades from the deserts of Egypt, by far the richest available for the fourth century, sheds a radically new light on Christianity in Egypt. Building on this new dataset, DEChriM reassesses phenomena and developments that are defining for Egypt's Christianisation, such as the chronology and dynamics of the evangelisation, the role played in this process by imperial legislation and institutions, the balance between rural and urban Christian communities, the social and cultural profile of the conveyors of Christianity, strategies for negotiating Christian identity, etc. Grounded in the archaeological record, DEChriM addresses also key issues relating to material culture through, among others, producing a catalogue of fourth-century Christian archaeological material (monuments and artefacts), providing absolute dates and occupation sequences for the most significant monuments, systematising chrono-typologically fourth-century Christian architecture, producing a long overdue catalogue of the ceramic production of the fourth century in Egypt or drafting. As suggested already by the pre-treatment of the corpus, the picture of fourth-century Egyptian Christianity emerging from this mass of data shifts the paradigm with which operates the historiography of late antique Egypt. Whilst deconstructing the prevailing metanarratives on fourth-century Christian Egypt, the project aims for hypercontextualised regional micro-narratives valid for some regions of Egypt, but potentially relevant for or extrapolable to other provinces of the Late Roman Empire. An inter- and trans-disciplinary collective endeavour calling upon a variety of disciplines, methods and techniques, DEChriM constitutes the first in-depth regional study in fourth-century Christian archaeology.

1 718 980 €

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

The projects concerned with the heterogeneity of egalitarian structures, processes and value. This heterogeneity is approached through a) a library-based global comparative study and through b) field ethnographic studies, also comparatively oriented, in sites of egalitarian/inegalitarian crisis within Europe and elsewhere. The library and field studies are to be closely integrated, each influencing the development and directions of the other. The decentering inherent in the orientation heterogeneity involves an emphasis on the forms and practices of egalitarianism as cultural phenomena emergent within and having their complexities of effect through the socio-cultural dimensions of their realities. The key proposition of the project is that it is egalitarian practices and processes as cultural values that is of considerable importance for understanding their force, contradictions, limitations. Thus in this approach dualism that is widely conceived as being politically and philosophically problematic in egalitarianism as a whole is approached as a cultural phenomenon potentially specific to Euro-American forms. The emphasis on the heterogeneity of egalitarianism combined with the development of a comparative method appropriate to the heterogeneity of egalitarian processes, constitutes the distinction and the several contributions of the project to a fuller understanding of egalitarian processes, their constraints, limitations and potential. The method to be developed is to be open both to the varieties in the conceptions and imagination of egalitarian processes and the various historical, socio-political, and geo-ecological circumstances under which egalitarian practices emerge. Through the comparison perennial questions – the role of the state, religion, forms of economic distribution, the matter of scale – concerning forms and structures with egalitarian effect will be exposed to further consideration.

2 092 176 €

Start date: 2014-06-01, End date: 2019-05-31

The project provides a comprehensive and groundbreaking approach to the analysis of the moral mind and inequality acceptance. The first part of the project will provide a novel study of how the moral ideals of personal responsibility and individual freedom, which are fundamental values in most liberal societies, shape inequality acceptance. It will also provide the first experimental study of how people draw the moral circle, which is at the heart of the most pressing policy challenges facing the world today and strongly related to the question of global fairness. The second part will study how social institutions shape inequality acceptance and how it develops in childhood and adolescence, by providing two unique international studies of inequality acceptance in 60 countries across the world. These studies will provide novel insights on the distributive behavior of nationally representative samples of adults and children and on the cultural transmission of moral preferences in society. The project is rooted in behavioral and experimental economics, but will also draw on insights from other social sciences and philosophy. It will develop novel experimental paradigms to study the moral mind and the nature of inequality acceptance, including incentivized experiments on nationally representative populations, and combine structural and non-parametric empirical analysis with theory development. Taken together, the project represents a unique study of inequality acceptance in the social sciences that will address an important knowledge gap in the literature on inequality.

2 500 000 €

Start date: 2018-10-01, End date: 2023-09-30

Through smart technology, we are overwhelmed with new information. Does this unlimited access to knowledge make us smarter? One of the key challenges for modern societies is to understand how the brain assembles our rich inventory of knowledge. Here, I will test the hypothesis that newly acquired knowledge is represented in the hippocampal formation in neural concept spaces, which are based on the coding principles and representational structures of the neural machinery involved in spatial navigation. The key idea is that the brain’s navigation system provides the building blocks of a neural metric for knowledge. In this groundbreaking cognitive neuroscience framework, I will bridge and integrate principles from Nobel Prize awarded neurophysiology and concepts from cognitive science and philosophy. Partly building on my ERC-StG project in which I discovered the core neural mechanisms underlying reconfiguration, integration and scaling of memory networks, the aim of my proposal is two-fold: 1. I seek to decipher neural concept spaces and unravel the neural codes of a cognitive geometry for knowledge and its deformations. 2. I will provide a proof-of-principle framework for next-generation neurocognitive technology and neural user models for cognitive enhancement to edit memories and engineer knowledge. Novel ‘Wikipedia’ learning tasks will be combined with state-of-the-art pattern analyses of space-resolved fMRI and time-resolved MEG to map and quantify representational structures. I will further develop AI-inspired analyses and closed loop brain-computer interfaces to perturb and edit neural concept space. The integrative mission of my program, from cells to systems-level involvement in cognition and to technology, opens up the exciting possibility to lay the ground for redefining cognitive neuroscience of knowledge by unravelling the fundamental neural principles of a cognitive topography and to make critical translations to empower smart brains in a smart society.

2 000 000 €

Start date: 2017-05-01, End date: 2022-04-30

A defining feature of the global economy is the gradual fragmentation of production across firms and borders, a phenomenon that has been termed outsourcing or global value chains. State-of-the-art empirical economic analysis on value chains has mostly been limited to the study of aggregate data because there is limited data on actual firm-to-firm linkages in the global economy. Even less is currently known about which products are typically outsourced, and which workers are affected. This project will change that. I will bring together four unique firm-to-firm datasets on local and global value chains that will push the research frontier forward in two main directions: - Previous research has shown that economic integration encourages growth. Due to data limitations, however, we know little about the origins of growth, and to what extent the emergence of value chains can explain the growth response. New theory is needed, where firm-to-firm connections are endogenously formed in response to economic integration. I will confront theory with data and directly test whether integration facilitates new buyer-supplier relationships and growth. - Previous research has found that economic integration has large negative effects on wages for low-skill workers. But again, due to data limitations, it is unclear to what extent value chains are responsible for this. Simply put, the impact of outsourcing on wages will depend on which workers are displaced by outsourcing. Until now, researchers have not been able to observe which workers, along with their occupations and skills, that are employed in both the supplying and outsourcing firm. For the first time, this information will be available, allowing for a rich analysis of labor market effects for different skill groups. GLOBALPROD will inform policymakers about how wages for different types of skills change in response to globalization, but also how economic integration can promote efficiency and competitiveness.

1 476 948 €

Start date: 2017-01-01, End date: 2021-12-31

What shall we live off in the future? Where will our food come from, and what will form the basis for our economies? A so-called “blue revolution”, where fish become farmed rather than caught, is increasingly presented as an answer to the above questions. This transformation of the economy exemplifies ongoing efforts to produce new forms of capital out of the ordering and reordering of life. These processes are intimately related to the expanding life sciences, the bioeconomy and what is sometimes called new forms of biocapital. But how do such large transformations take place in actual practice, and by which means? This project argues that if we are to understand such major transformations we need to study “little tools”, that is, material-semiotic entities that carefully modify and work upon bodies, markets and science. Emerging bioeconomies are expected not only to produce economic value but also to enact values in other ways that contribute to what this project refers to as “the good economy”. Such values include enabling sustainable fisheries, secure animal welfare or sustainable growth. The main hypothesis of the current project is that the enactment of the good economy can be studied by valuation practices performed by material-semiotic little tools. The project will explore this hypothesis at multiple sites for biocapitalization: science, the market, policy and funding institutions. This project will focus on how these interact and encounter one another. The aim is twofold: first, to provide new empirical insights about how biocapitalization processes are enacted in practice and at strategic sites, using cross-disciplinary methods from actor-network theory, the humanities and economic sociology; second to contribute analytically and methodologically to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) by drawing on resources from economic sociology and the humanities in order to provide an analytical framework for comprehending biocapitalization practices.

1 495 079 €

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

In the last decade, machine vision has become part of the everyday life of ordinary people. Smartphones have advanced image manipulation capabilities, social media use image recognition algorithms to sort and filter visual content, and games, narratives and art increasingly represent and use machine vision techniques such as facial recognition algorithms, eye-tracking and virtual reality. The ubiquity of machine vision in ordinary peoples’ lives marks a qualitative shift where once theoretical questions are now immediately relevant to the lived experience of ordinary people. MACHINE VISION will develop a theory of how everyday machine vision affects the way ordinary people understand themselves and their world through 1) analyses of digital art, games and narratives that use machine vision as theme or interface, and 2) ethnographic studies of users of consumer-grade machine vision apps in social media and personal communication. Three main research questions address 1) new kinds of agency and subjectivity; 2) visual data as malleable; 3) values and biases. MACHINE VISION fills a research gap on the cultural, aesthetic and ethical effects of machine vision. Current research on machine vision is skewed, with extensive computer science research and rapid development and adaptation of new technologies. Cultural research primarily focuses on systemic issues (e.g. surveillance) and professional use (e.g. scientific imaging). Aesthetic theories (e.g. in cinema theory) are valuable but mostly address 20th century technologies. Analyses of current technologies are fragmented and lack a cohesive theory or model. MACHINE VISION challenges existing research and develops new empirical analyses and a cohesive theory of everyday machine vision. This project is a needed leap in visual aesthetic research. MACHINE VISION will also impact technical R&D on machine vision, enabling the design of technologies that are ethical, just and democratic.

1 999 547 €

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

The history of late medieval and early modern Europe was deeply affected by epidemics of plague that repeatedly broke out until 1750 AD and caused devastation and death with severe social, political and economic consequences. For decades, historians and scientists have been interested in the ancient pestilences and disputed their origin and epidemiology. One century ago, Yersinia pestis was identified as the causative agent of the current-day pandemic. Only some months ago the MedPlag team conclusively established (Haensch et al. 2010) that this bacterium was responsible for the Black Death (1346-1353 AD) and that two distinct variants of Y. pestis were simultaneously circulating through Europe during this pandemic. These results raise questions concerning the historic Y. pestis strains, their geographical origin, and whether they might have re-circulated in Europe over four centuries or were constantly reintroduced from elsewhere. Other open questions concern the routes of transmission of the medieval plagues and the role played by trade and pilgrimages in their dissemination, the mechanisms of transmission and the implication of wild and anthropochorous fauna, and the interplay between climatic conditions and plague dynamics. In addition, whether the reason for the disappearance of plague from Europe 250 years ago was due to improved hygiene or to genetic or environmental change remains unknown. Finally, while historians and scientists have speculated on the microbe responsible for the Justinian plague (541-542 AD) molecular evidence is still lacking. In this proposal, I outline the methodology by which I will answer these major questions with an inter-domain investigation involving ancient DNA, climatology, ecology, and history. The results of this work will not only settle century-old controversies by giving us valuable information about the past, but also furnish a paradigm for understanding the modality of serious epidemics in Europe; past, present, and future

2 497 315 €

Start date: 2013-06-01, End date: 2018-11-30

Human brains and cognitive functioning are in a constant flux of change throughout life. The question is: can you decide to what extent your brain and cognition will change, and how? This has enormous implications - it is a question of by which mechanisms humans can adapt to their changing environments with changing minds. And it is a question of how to handle the frequent cognitive problems experienced by especially elderly adults. Research has yielded astonishingly different perspectives on cognitive and brain changes through life. On the one hand, studies point to brain development and aging being under genetic control. On the other hand, there are associations between intellectual and physical experiences and cognitive function across the lifespan, and recent studies show that brain and cognition are improved by targeted cognitive interventions. However, the time course, stability, generalizability and restrictions to training effects on brain and cognition are largely unknown. The aim of this proposal is to uncover mechanisms governing neurocognitive plasticity - its potential, restrictions and time course - in young and old age, and reconcile the apparent contradiction between genetic control and environmental impact. I will study the effects of memory training with repeated Magnetic Resonance Imaging and cognitive tests in a new experimental time-series cross-over design with 200 young (20-30 yrs of age) and 200 elderly (70-80 yrs of age) adults. Neurocognitive changes in controls not training are compared to those in participants undergoing alternate repeated periods of memory training and rest (A-B-A-B) for one year, with a three-year follow up. This will allow me to identify 1) distinct modulators of plastic changes in terms of age, neural integrity, and genotype, 2) the time course of plastic changes in brain and cognition, their stability across short and long time, and 3) the extent of transfer of memory training effects to other cognitive functions.

1 493 737 €

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

"One of the most perplexing phenomena of the human mind is the conviction of perceiving a ""voice"" in the absence of an external auditory source. This is called an auditory hallucination (AH), and is the most characteristic symptom of the most severe mental disorder, schizophrenia. Understanding the phenomenology, cognitive, and neurobiological underpinnings of AHs will not only provide new insights for explaining schizophrenia, but will also provide new insights into the ""complexities of the mind"". In my previous research, I have uncovered the neurocognitive markers of the initiation of an AH, focusing on what causes the onset of a hallucinatory episode. The current proposal further narrows the focus, asking a single question; why do AHs spontaneously come-and-go over time, or stated otherwise, why are they not permanently present once initiated? If we believe that the onset of an episode has neurocognitive markers, which all evidence supports, then we must also acknowledge that the offset must have corresponding markers. This question has to my knowledge never been addressed, although it is vital for the understanding of the underlying mechanisms, and for new treatment strategies. I will track the fluctuations of AH episodes in real-time with iPhone app technology, going beyond interview questionnaires. I will track how cognition modulates the onset and offset with an experimental dichotic listening paradigm, going beyond standard tests. I will track what happens in the brain the few seconds before the onset and, in particular the offset of an episode, using component-based fMRI analysis, going beyond ""blobology"". I will track with MR spectroscopy the interaction of excitatory and inhibitory transmitters that are hypothesized to mediate episode onsets and offsets, respectively, going beyond systems imaging. Thus, I will track AH episodes from the clinical to the receptor level, working vertically through a “levels of explanation” model, from higher to lower levels"

2 413 371 €

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

As the opioid epidemic escalates, we must ask: why are opioids so addictive? Non-human animal research links addiction with the powerful relief opioids can offer to animals in distress. In humans, epidemiological and clinical studies converge upon social stressors and a poor social support network as key risk factors for addiction. Despite this, it is currently unknown how pre-drug distress might alter opioid drug effects. Tremendous resources are dedicated to charting how people feel after taking a drug, sidestepping the potentially profound influence of how people feel before they take the drug. Here, I will turn the current approach on its head. Using acute social distress induction before morphine administration in healthy humans, I will create a human model to determine the psychological, physiological and brain underpinnings of how social stressors increase opioids’ abuse liability. First, I will test the hypothesis that pre-drug distress enhances drug wanting (self-administration) but not drug liking (self-report) compared to drug effects in a control condition. Second, I will use opioid blockade to confirm or falsify the hypothesis that opioid drugs ‘hijack’ brain mechanisms underpinning social support. Third, I will determine to what extent opioid drug effects are dopamine-dependent by blocking dopamine before morphine administration. I will also apply computational modelling and functional imaging to elucidate the underlying brain mechanisms. Thus, the proposal offers a powerful new methodology for resolving hotly debated questions on the independent contributions of opioids and dopamine for reward and abuse liability. In sum, the project aims to achieve a breakthrough in our understanding of how a pre-drug social distress state can alter opioid drug mechanisms. The mechanistic understanding arising from this project could have profound implications for science, as well as for clinical care and new policies designed to contain the opioid epidemic.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2019-07-01, End date: 2024-06-30

This project aims to transform our understanding of the logical paradoxes, their solution and significance for mathematics, philosophy and semantics. It seeks to show that some of the key inferences in the paradoxes should not uncritically be blocked, as is customary, but rather be tamed and put to valuable mathematical, philosophical and semantic use. By adopting a richer logical framework than usual, the paradoxes can be transformed from threats to valuable sources of insight. When discovered at the turn of the previous century, the paradoxes caused a foundational crisis in mathematics. Many logicians and philosophers now believe the crisis has been resolved. This project denies that an acceptable resolution has been found and aims to do better. A strong push remains towards paradox. This push arises from the widespread use of (and need for) higher-order logics (HOL), which allow quantification into the positions of predicates or plural noun phrases. Phase I seeks to reveal greater similarities between HOL and set theory than generally appreciated. Phase II explores four arguments that HOL collapses to first-order logic, i.e. that every higher-order entity defines a corresponding first-order entity. These arguments are generally ignored as they threaten to reintroduce the paradoxes. But we show that a properly circumscribed form of collapse is a valuable source of mathematical and semantic insight. Phase III examines controlled forms of collapse using notions of modality and groundedness. This enables us to motivate ZF set theory and valuable semantic theories, explain the nature of cognition about sets and properties, and show that mathematics cannot be fully extensionalized. Phase IV applies these insights to solve the paradoxes and criticize influential uses of HOL.

940 655 €

Start date: 2010-01-01, End date: 2013-12-31

Large areas of agricultural terracing have been abandoned and are being destroyed in Europe. TerrACE will develop a transferrable methodology of archaeological protocols for understanding the creation, maintenance and use of terraces over the longue durée, thereby informing strategies for the sustainable management of these environmental-fragility hotspots. Terraces and lynchets are hallmarks of complex Prehistoric to Post-Medieval societies and were critical for the sustainability of many European societies (including the Greeks & Romans). However, we typically know less about them than any other archaeological site type, although they were one of the first transformations of natural into cultural landscapes, which in many cases persisted to the 20th century. Key archaeological questions are: how old are terrace systems, how were they used, did they reduce soil erosion and are they carbon sinks? The answers to these questions have high relevance in Europe today as terraces can combine high yields with decreased erosion and fire risk, whilst increasing social resilience and food security in the face of environmental change. TerrACE will be a step-change in our archaeological approach by integrating a raft of new and innovative scientific techniques through an exemplary study of the creation, operation and abandonment of terraced landscapes on a N-S climatic transect of well-known/excavated terraces across Europe. TerrACE has 5 objectives; 1) improving terrace-landscape mapping, 2) multiple dating typical terrace systems, 3) determining history of use and management, 4) understanding the role of terraces in carbon storage, and 5) outreach to promote terraces as part of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Landscapes (UNESCO GIAHS). TerrACE is only now feasible due to the development of techniques including LiDAR, direct sediment dating, palaeoenvironmental proxies, soil carbon modelling and the innovatory use of ancient DNA on terrace palaeosols.

2 662 929 €

Start date: 2018-12-01, End date: 2023-11-30

In recent years, China’s and Vietnam’s militarized and subsidized fishing fleets have begun to shift their radical marine harvesting techniques, and accompanying trade, from the South China Sea to Africa and Oceania. Scholarly analysis has largely assumed that fishers are instruments of their states’ geopolitical agendas, responding to regulations and incentives. This both obscures the actual motivations and modalities of fishers’ expansion of their fishing grounds and downplays the transoceanic networks connecting different fishers beyond state territories and localized fishing grounds in past and present. Charting this spike in maritime trespass, TransOcean will analyze and theorize how individuals and groups of fishers move in and out of legal and illegal, state and non-state categories of fisher, poacher, trader and smuggler, and how the emergent mobilities of Asian fishers interact and collide with those of Pacific and African fishers. Deploying the innovative concept of relational and shifting multiple mobilities and employing thalassographic analysis, TransOcean develops a novel theoretical and methodological framework of fishers as mobile maritime actors who exploit their multiple occupations, incomes and networks to pursue transoceanic expansion. TransOcean studies, for the first time, diverse groups of interconnected fishers outside of territorially bounded fisheries and area studies, by analyzing mobilities beyond sea-borne migration or diasporic settlement. Though multi-scalar and globally oriented TransOcean remains firmly rooted in fine-grained ethnography, with a focus on Vietnamese and Chinese and African and Pacific fishers in specific on-shore nodal points, connected by the growing Sino-Vietnamese demand for illicit seafood. Thus, TransOcean breaks new methodological and theoretical ground for tackling intractable marine problems of significant scientific and policy value.

1 499 989 €

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

Heterogeneity and diversity are a pervasive aspect of modern societies. Differences in individuals’ preferences, needs, skills, and information are key to explain variation in individuals’ behavior and to anticipate individuals’ responses to policy changes. There is no consensus, however, about how to take these differences into account when evaluating policies. Project VALURED will reexamine this ethical challenge by characterizing the mapping between value judgments—i.e. principles of distributive justice—and redistribution policies. This mapping is tremendously important for welfare analysis and policy design. First, it associates the most desirable policy to each set of value judgments, providing an “ethical menu” to policy design. Second, it gives an ethical identity of each policy proposal, that is, it identifies the value judgments a policymaker endorses when proposing a specific policy. The main objectives of VALURED are to: 1) identify transparent and compelling value judgments that accommodate heterogeneity and diversity; 2) show the implications of these value judgments for the evaluation and design of redistribution policies; 3) characterize welfare criteria that respect individuals’ preferences and account for individuals’ differences in needs, skills, and information; 4) provide new insights for the design of income, capital, and inheritance taxation; 5) develop simple formulas that express optimal policies as a function of observable heterogeneity and ethical parameters. Project VALURED combines welfare economics with public economics. The first part deals with income taxation and addresses the ethical challenges related to individuals’ heterogeneity in preferences, needs, and skills. The second part focuses on capital taxation and addresses individuals’ differences in risk preferences and information. The third part analyses the design of inheritance taxation and addresses the social concerns for intergenerational and intragenerational equity.

1 033 771 €

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