ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

Since early 2015, the media continuously confront us with images of refugee children drowning in the Mediterranean, surviving in appalling conditions in camps or walking across Europe. Within this group of fleeing children, a considerable number is travelling without parents, the unaccompanied refugee minors. While the media images testify to these flight experiences and their possible huge impact on unaccompanied minors’ wellbeing, there has been no systematic research to fully capture these experiences, nor their mental health impact. Equally, no evidence exists on whether the emotional impact of these flight experiences should be differentiated from the impact of the traumatic events these minors endured in their home country or from the daily stressors in the country of settlement. This project aims to fundamentally increase our knowledge of the impact of experiences during the flight in relation to past trauma and current stressors. To achieve this aim, it is essential to set up a longitudinal follow-up of a large group of unaccompanied refugee minors, whereby our study starts from different transit countries, crosses several European countries, and uses innovative methodological and mixed-methods approaches. I will hereby not only document the psychological impact these flight experiences may have, but also the way in which care and reception structures for unaccompanied minors in both transit and settlement countries can contribute to reducing this mental health impact. This proposal will fundamentally change the field of migration studies, by introducing a whole new area of study and novel methodological approaches to study these themes. Moreover, other fields, such as trauma studies, will be directly informed by the project, as also clinical, educational and social work interventions for victims of multiple trauma. Last, the findings on the impact of reception and care structures will be highly informative for policy makers and practitioners.

1 432 500 €

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

Mimesis is one of the most influential concepts in Western thought. Originally invoked to define humans as the “most imitative” creatures in classical antiquity, mimesis (imitation) has recently been at the centre of theoretical debates in the humanities, social sciences, and the neurosciences concerning the role of “mimicry,” “identification,” “contagion,” and “mirror neurons” in the formation of subjectivity. And yet, despite the growing confirmations that imitation is constitutive of human behaviour, mimesis still tends to be confined to the sphere of realistic representation. The HOM project combines approaches that are usually split in different areas of disciplinary specialization to provide a correction to this tendency. Conceived as a trilogy situated at the crossroads between literary criticism, cinema studies, and critical theory, HOM’s outcomes will result in two monographs and accompanying articles that explore the aesthetic, affective, and conceptual implications of the mimetic faculty. The first, radically reframes a major proponent of anti-mimetic aesthetics in modern literature, Oscar Wilde, by looking back to the classical foundations of theatrical mimesis that inform his corpus; the second considers the material effects of virtual simulation by looking ahead to new digital media via contemporary science-fiction films; and the third establishes an interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophical accounts of mimesis and recent discoveries in the neurosciences. Together, these new perspectives on homo mimeticus reconsider the aesthetic foundations of a major literary author, open up a new line of inquiry in film studies, and steer philosophical debates on mimesis in new interdisciplinary directions.

1 044 000 €

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

Today’s ecological crisis prompts us to rethink our attitude towards physical and natural realities that have traditionally been seen as opposed to human subjectivity and agency. What emerges from this “non-human turn” is a sense of our interdependence on things like the bacteria in our intestines or the carbon atoms supporting life on Earth. Ecological theorist Timothy Morton uses the metaphor of the “mesh” to express this idea of human/non-human interconnectedness. This project will map the formal and thematic strategies through which contemporary narrative practices engage with the non-human and envisage this interconnectedness. Storytelling is an indispensable tool for making sense of experience by establishing temporal and causal relations. But it is also biased towards the human-scale realities of action and social interaction. How can narrative overcome this bias? How does it convey phenomena that challenge our belief in the ontological and material self-sufficiency of the human? Comparing fictional narratives in print (novels and short stories) and conversational storytelling, we will systematically explore the ways in which narrative can forge connections across levels of reality, weaving together the human and the non-human into a single plot. The assumption is that narrative is a field where fictional practices are in constant dialogue with the stories told in everyday conversation—and with the culture-wide beliefs and concerns those stories reflect. Through its three sub-projects, the proposed research charts this complex dialogue while greatly advancing our understanding of how stories can be used to heighten people’s awareness of the mesh and its significance. The project builds on a combination of methods (close readings of novels, qualitative analysis of interviews), aiming to open up a new field of study at the intersection of literary scholarship and the social sciences—with narrative theory serving as a catalyst for the interdisciplinary exchange.

1 130 000 €

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

The future consolidation or erosion of western democracies depends on the political perceptions, experiences and participation of ordinary citizens. Even when they disagree on the implications of their findings, previous studies stress that both attitudinal and behavioural forms of democratic linkages – political trust, political support, loyalty, formal and informal participation – have come under considerable pressure in recent decades. The QUALIDEM project offers a qualitative (re)appraisal of citizens’ (dis-)affection towards politics by relying on the core argument of the policy feedback literature: attitudes and behaviours are outcomes of past policy. It aims to explain the evolutions of democratic linkages as being shaped by public policy, and specifically by the turn to neoliberalism and supranationalisation. It aims to systematically analyse the domestic and socially differentiated effects of both of these major macro transformations to citizens’ representations and experiences of politics, as an addition to the existing emphasis on individual determinants and the existing contextual explanations of disengagement and disaffection towards politics. On the theoretical level, this project therefore aims to build bridges between scholars of public policy and students of mass politics. On the empirical level, QUALIDEM relies on the reanalysis of qualitative data – interviews and focus groups – from a diachronic and comparative perspective focusing on four Western European countries (Belgium, France, Germany and the UK) with the US serving as a counterpoint. It will renew the methodological approach to the question of ordinary citizens’ disengagement and disaffection by providing a detailed and empirically-grounded understanding of the mechanisms of production and change in democratic linkages. It will develop an innovative methodological infrastructure for the storage of and access to twenty years of qualitative European comparative surveys.

1 491 659 €

Start date: 2017-04-01, End date: 2022-03-31

When I am looking at my coffee machine that makes funny noises, this is an instance of multisensory perception – I perceive this event by means of both vision and audition. But very often we only receive sensory stimulation from a multisensory event by means of one sense modality. If I hear the noisy coffee machine in the next room (without seeing it), then how do I represent the visual aspects of this multisensory event? The aim of this research project is to bring together empirical findings about multimodal perception and empirical findings about (visual, auditory, tactile) mental imagery and argue that on occasions like the one described in the last paragraph, we have multimodal mental imagery: perceptual processing in one sense modality (here: vision) that is triggered by sensory stimulation in another sense modality (here: audition). Multimodal mental imagery is rife. The vast majority of what we perceive are multisensory events: events that can be perceived in more than one sense modality – like the noisy coffee machine. And most of the time we are only acquainted with these multisensory events via a subset of the sense modalities involved – all the other aspects of these events are represented by means of multisensory mental imagery. This means that multisensory mental imagery is a crucial element of almost all instances of everyday perception, which has wider implications to philosophy of perception and beyond, to epistemological questions about whether we can trust our senses. Focusing on multimodal mental imagery can help us to understand a number of puzzling perceptual phenomena, like sensory substitution and synaesthesia. Further, manipulating mental imagery has recently become an important clinical procedure in various branches of psychiatry as well as in counteracting implicit bias – using multimodal mental imagery rather than voluntarily and consciously conjured up mental imagery can lead to real progress in these experimental paradigms.

1 966 530 €

Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31

The teaching profession is central to a number of major issues concerning the possible futures of educational systems. The functioning of the profession suffers from low attractiveness, fragmentation, and teacher shortages. This proposal constitutes the first systematic comparative project in Europe aimed at understanding the role of the institutional dimensions affecting teachers’ careers and the teaching profession as a whole. It has four objectives: [1] to explain the nature of teacher policy over the last thirty years in different educational systems (Belgium, France and England); [2] to understand the changing status of the teaching profession and its impact on the diversification of the teaching workforce; [3] to analyse the processes by which teachers are allocated into increasingly diverse working and professional conditions; and [4] to model and predict teacher attrition and migration within a common but differentiated multilevel framework. This project will adopt a post-comparative mixed-method design organized around four work packages on teacher policy, supply, labour markets and mobility. It will combine five methods: policy analysis of teachers’ recruitment and careers; secondary data analyses of relevant national and international datasets on teacher supply and the profession’s attractiveness; a qualitative, in-depth study of three national labour-market spaces; multilevel multi-group analyses of original datasets on teacher mobility, and semi-structured interviews with non-entrants and early leavers. This project will produce new theoretical knowledge about labour markets for teachers and contribute to the reconceptualization of the nature of institutional change affecting educational systems in a society characterized by the progressive decline of nation states, increased interdependence between societal fields and the fragmentation of individual life spheres.

1 498 125 €

Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31