Project acronym COMICS
Project Children in Comics: An Intercultural History from 1865 to Today
Researcher (PI) Maaheen AHMED
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2017-STG
Summary Owing to their visual essence and status as a popular, modern medium, comics – newspaper strips, comics magazines and graphic novels – provide valuable insight into the transformation of collective consciousness. This project advances the hypothesis that children in comics are distinctive embodiments of the complex experience of modernity, channeling and tempering modern anxieties and incarnating the freedom denied to adults. In testing this hypothesis, the project constructs the first intercultural history of children in European comics, tracing the changing conceptualizations of child protagonists in popular comics for both children and adults from the mid-19th century to the present. In doing so, it takes key points in European history as well as the history of comics into account.
Assembling a team of six multilingual researchers, the project uses an interdisciplinary methodology combining comics studies and childhood studies while also incorporating specific insights from cultural studies (history of family life, history of public life, history of the body, affect theory and scholarship on the carnivalesque). This enables the project to analyze the transposition of modern anxieties, conceptualizations of childishness, child-adult power relations, notions of liberty, visualizations of the body, family life, school and public life as well as the presence of affects such as nostalgia and happiness in comics starring children.
The project thus opens up a new field of research lying at the intersection of comics studies and childhood studies and illustrates its potential. In studying popular but often overlooked comics, the project provides crucial historical and analytical material that will shape future comics criticism and the fields associated with childhood studies. Furthermore, the project’s outreach activities will increase collective knowledge about comic strips, which form an important, increasingly visible part of cultural heritage.
Summary
Owing to their visual essence and status as a popular, modern medium, comics – newspaper strips, comics magazines and graphic novels – provide valuable insight into the transformation of collective consciousness. This project advances the hypothesis that children in comics are distinctive embodiments of the complex experience of modernity, channeling and tempering modern anxieties and incarnating the freedom denied to adults. In testing this hypothesis, the project constructs the first intercultural history of children in European comics, tracing the changing conceptualizations of child protagonists in popular comics for both children and adults from the mid-19th century to the present. In doing so, it takes key points in European history as well as the history of comics into account.
Assembling a team of six multilingual researchers, the project uses an interdisciplinary methodology combining comics studies and childhood studies while also incorporating specific insights from cultural studies (history of family life, history of public life, history of the body, affect theory and scholarship on the carnivalesque). This enables the project to analyze the transposition of modern anxieties, conceptualizations of childishness, child-adult power relations, notions of liberty, visualizations of the body, family life, school and public life as well as the presence of affects such as nostalgia and happiness in comics starring children.
The project thus opens up a new field of research lying at the intersection of comics studies and childhood studies and illustrates its potential. In studying popular but often overlooked comics, the project provides crucial historical and analytical material that will shape future comics criticism and the fields associated with childhood studies. Furthermore, the project’s outreach activities will increase collective knowledge about comic strips, which form an important, increasingly visible part of cultural heritage.
Max ERC Funding
1 452 500 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-10-01, End date: 2023-09-30
Project acronym CONTACTS
Project Traces of contact: Language contact studies and historical linguistics
Researcher (PI) Pieter Muysken
Host Institution (HI) STICHTING KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH5, ERC-2008-AdG
Summary This project aims to establish criteria by which results from language contact studies can be used to strengthen the field of historical linguistics. It does so by applying the scenario model for language contact studies to a number of concrete settings, which differ widely in their level of aggregation and dime depth: the languages of the Amazonian fringe in South America, the complex multilingual setting of the Republic of Suriname, the multilingual interaction of immigrant groups in the Netherlands, and two groups of multilingual individuals. New methods from structural phylogenetics are employed, and the same linguistic variables (TMA and evidentiality marking, argument realization) will be studied in the various projects. In the various projects, use will be made from a shared questionnaire, so that comparable data can be gathered. By applying the scenaio model at various levels of aggregation, a more principled link between language contact studies and historical linguistics can be established.
Summary
This project aims to establish criteria by which results from language contact studies can be used to strengthen the field of historical linguistics. It does so by applying the scenario model for language contact studies to a number of concrete settings, which differ widely in their level of aggregation and dime depth: the languages of the Amazonian fringe in South America, the complex multilingual setting of the Republic of Suriname, the multilingual interaction of immigrant groups in the Netherlands, and two groups of multilingual individuals. New methods from structural phylogenetics are employed, and the same linguistic variables (TMA and evidentiality marking, argument realization) will be studied in the various projects. In the various projects, use will be made from a shared questionnaire, so that comparable data can be gathered. By applying the scenaio model at various levels of aggregation, a more principled link between language contact studies and historical linguistics can be established.
Max ERC Funding
2 499 950 €
Duration
Start date: 2009-01-01, End date: 2013-12-31
Project acronym DigitalMemories
Project We are all Ayotzinapa: The role of Digital Media in the Shaping of Transnational Memories on Disappearance
Researcher (PI) Silvana Mandolessi
Host Institution (HI) KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2015-STG
Summary The project seeks to study the role of digital media in the shaping of transnational memories on disappearance. It investigates a novel case that is in process of shaping: the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico in September 2014. The role of the new media in getting citizens’ attention and in marking a “turning point” was crucial to the upsurge of a counter-movement against the Mexican government and qualifies the event as significant for the transnational arena.
The groundbreaking aspect of the project consists in proposing a double approach:
a) a theoretical approach in which “disappearance” is considered as a particular crime that becomes a model for analyzing digital memory. Disappearance is a technology that produces a subject with a new ontological status: the disappeared are non-beings, because they are neither alive nor dead. This ontological status transgresses the clear boundaries separating life and death, past, present and future, materiality and immateriality, personal and collective spheres. “Digital memory”, i.e. a memory mediated by digital technology, is also determined by the transgression of the boundaries of given categories
b) a multidisciplinary approach situating Mexico´s case in a long transnational history of disappearance in the Hispanic World, including Argentina and Spain. This longer history seeks to compare disappearance as a mnemonic object developed in the global sphere –in social network sites as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube– in Mexico and the social performances and artistic representations –literature, photo exhibitions, and films– developed in Spain and Argentina.
The Mexican case represents a paradigm for the redefinition of the relationship between media and memory. The main output of the project will consist in constructing a theoretical model for analyzing digital mnemonic objects in the rise of networked social movements with a transnational scope.
Summary
The project seeks to study the role of digital media in the shaping of transnational memories on disappearance. It investigates a novel case that is in process of shaping: the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico in September 2014. The role of the new media in getting citizens’ attention and in marking a “turning point” was crucial to the upsurge of a counter-movement against the Mexican government and qualifies the event as significant for the transnational arena.
The groundbreaking aspect of the project consists in proposing a double approach:
a) a theoretical approach in which “disappearance” is considered as a particular crime that becomes a model for analyzing digital memory. Disappearance is a technology that produces a subject with a new ontological status: the disappeared are non-beings, because they are neither alive nor dead. This ontological status transgresses the clear boundaries separating life and death, past, present and future, materiality and immateriality, personal and collective spheres. “Digital memory”, i.e. a memory mediated by digital technology, is also determined by the transgression of the boundaries of given categories
b) a multidisciplinary approach situating Mexico´s case in a long transnational history of disappearance in the Hispanic World, including Argentina and Spain. This longer history seeks to compare disappearance as a mnemonic object developed in the global sphere –in social network sites as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube– in Mexico and the social performances and artistic representations –literature, photo exhibitions, and films– developed in Spain and Argentina.
The Mexican case represents a paradigm for the redefinition of the relationship between media and memory. The main output of the project will consist in constructing a theoretical model for analyzing digital mnemonic objects in the rise of networked social movements with a transnational scope.
Max ERC Funding
1 444 125 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-07-01, End date: 2021-06-30
Project acronym EVWRIT
Project Everyday Writing in Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt (I - VIII AD). A Socio-Semiotic Study of Communicative Variation
Researcher (PI) Klaas BENTEIN
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2017-STG
Summary This five-year project aims to generate a paradigm shift in the understanding of Graeco-Roman and Late Antique communication. Non-literary, ‘documentary’ texts from Ancient Egypt such as letters, petitions and contracts have provided and continue to provide a key witness for our knowledge of the administration, education, economy, etc. of Ancient Egypt. This project argues that since documentary texts represent originals, their external characteristics should also be brought into the interpretation: elements such as handwriting, linguistic register or writing material transmit indirect social messages concerning hierarchy, status, and power relations, and can therefore be considered ‘semiotic resources’. The project’s driving hypothesis is that communicative variation – variation that is functionally insignificant but socially significant (e.g. there are ~ there’s ~ it’s a lot of people) – enables the expression of social meaning. The main aim of this project is to analyse the nature of this communicative variation. To this end, a multidisciplinary team of six researchers (one PI, one post-doc, and four PhD’s) will apply recent insights form socio-semiotic and socio-linguistic theory to a corpus of Graeco-Roman and Late Antique documentary texts (I – VIII AD) by means of a three-level approach: (i) an open-access database of annotated documentary texts will be created; (ii) the ‘semiotic potential’ of the different semiotic resources that play a role in documentary writing will be analysed; (iii) the interrelationships between the different semiotic resources will be studied. The project will have a significant scientific impact: (i) it will be the first to offer a holistic perspective towards the ‘meaning’ of documentary texts; (ii) the digital tool will open up new ways to investigate Ancient texts; (iii) it will make an important contribution to current socio-semiotic and socio-linguistic research; (iv) it will provide new insights about humans as social beings.
Summary
This five-year project aims to generate a paradigm shift in the understanding of Graeco-Roman and Late Antique communication. Non-literary, ‘documentary’ texts from Ancient Egypt such as letters, petitions and contracts have provided and continue to provide a key witness for our knowledge of the administration, education, economy, etc. of Ancient Egypt. This project argues that since documentary texts represent originals, their external characteristics should also be brought into the interpretation: elements such as handwriting, linguistic register or writing material transmit indirect social messages concerning hierarchy, status, and power relations, and can therefore be considered ‘semiotic resources’. The project’s driving hypothesis is that communicative variation – variation that is functionally insignificant but socially significant (e.g. there are ~ there’s ~ it’s a lot of people) – enables the expression of social meaning. The main aim of this project is to analyse the nature of this communicative variation. To this end, a multidisciplinary team of six researchers (one PI, one post-doc, and four PhD’s) will apply recent insights form socio-semiotic and socio-linguistic theory to a corpus of Graeco-Roman and Late Antique documentary texts (I – VIII AD) by means of a three-level approach: (i) an open-access database of annotated documentary texts will be created; (ii) the ‘semiotic potential’ of the different semiotic resources that play a role in documentary writing will be analysed; (iii) the interrelationships between the different semiotic resources will be studied. The project will have a significant scientific impact: (i) it will be the first to offer a holistic perspective towards the ‘meaning’ of documentary texts; (ii) the digital tool will open up new ways to investigate Ancient texts; (iii) it will make an important contribution to current socio-semiotic and socio-linguistic research; (iv) it will provide new insights about humans as social beings.
Max ERC Funding
1 476 250 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-06-01, End date: 2023-05-31
Project acronym Film Tourism
Project Worlds of Imagination. A Comparative Study of Film Tourism in India, Brazil, Jamaica, South Korea and the United Kingdom.
Researcher (PI) Stijn Reijnders
Host Institution (HI) ERASMUS UNIVERSITEIT ROTTERDAM
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH5, ERC-2015-CoG
Summary This research project focuses on film tourism: the phenomenon of people visiting locations from popular films or TV series. Recent years have seen a dramatic, worldwide increase of this type of tourism, with far-reaching implications for the experience and organization of landscapes. While the number of empirical studies on film tourism is growing, most have been limited to isolated, Western examples. This Western focus tends to overlook the fact that the face of the media industry as well as the tourism industry has been changing rapidly on a global scale.
In order to take the next step and move this field of research to a higher level, a more comparative and cross-case approach is essential. This project aims to do so, by exploring more generic processes and relationships of power involved in the development and experience of film tourism worldwide. The principal question underlying this project is: why, under what conditions and in which ways do films and TV series give rise to new and diverse tourism flows across the globe?
This question is addressed by analysing and comparing film tourism in five geographically and culturally different contexts: South Korea, Brazil, United Kingdom, Jamaica and India. These cases will be subjected to the same lines of inquiry, focusing on 1) the visual traditions in the local media cultures; 2) the effect of local policies aimed at developing film tourism; 3) the commonalities and differences in motives and experiences of film tourists with diverse backgrounds.
This project is ground-breaking in at least three ways: 1) its international and comparative approach delivers a fundamental contribution to a growing but fragmented field of investigation; 2) it will deliver a theorization of the role and importance of imagination in everyday life, based on an elaboration of the concept lieux d’imagination; 3) methodologically, the project is located on the cutting edges of the humanities and social sciences and applies new methods.
Summary
This research project focuses on film tourism: the phenomenon of people visiting locations from popular films or TV series. Recent years have seen a dramatic, worldwide increase of this type of tourism, with far-reaching implications for the experience and organization of landscapes. While the number of empirical studies on film tourism is growing, most have been limited to isolated, Western examples. This Western focus tends to overlook the fact that the face of the media industry as well as the tourism industry has been changing rapidly on a global scale.
In order to take the next step and move this field of research to a higher level, a more comparative and cross-case approach is essential. This project aims to do so, by exploring more generic processes and relationships of power involved in the development and experience of film tourism worldwide. The principal question underlying this project is: why, under what conditions and in which ways do films and TV series give rise to new and diverse tourism flows across the globe?
This question is addressed by analysing and comparing film tourism in five geographically and culturally different contexts: South Korea, Brazil, United Kingdom, Jamaica and India. These cases will be subjected to the same lines of inquiry, focusing on 1) the visual traditions in the local media cultures; 2) the effect of local policies aimed at developing film tourism; 3) the commonalities and differences in motives and experiences of film tourists with diverse backgrounds.
This project is ground-breaking in at least three ways: 1) its international and comparative approach delivers a fundamental contribution to a growing but fragmented field of investigation; 2) it will deliver a theorization of the role and importance of imagination in everyday life, based on an elaboration of the concept lieux d’imagination; 3) methodologically, the project is located on the cutting edges of the humanities and social sciences and applies new methods.
Max ERC Funding
1 908 986 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31
Project acronym FutureHealth
Project Global future health: a multi-sited ethnography of an adaptive intervention
Researcher (PI) Emily YATES-DOERR
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH5, ERC-2017-STG
Summary The proposed research project is a multi-sited ethnography of an emergent global health intervention to improve nutrition in the first 1000 days of life. The intervention links growth during this 1000-day window to chronic and mental illness, human capital, food security, and ecosystem sustainability, positing early life nutrition as the key to meeting the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. The intervention draws numerous disciplines and geographic regions together in a holistic pursuit of a sustainable and healthy collective future. It then unfolds in different settings in diverse and localized ways. The research team will work with first 1000 days experts as well as study deployment sites in the Netherlands, Guatemala, and the Philippines. The innovative anthropological techniques of contrasting and co-laboring will allow us to both analyze the intervention and contribute to its further fine-tuning. Health experts currently recognize that there are social complexities within and differences between the sites involved, but tend to treat these as obstacles to overcome. The innovative force of our research is to consider the adaptive transformations of the intervention as a source of inspiration rather than a hindrance. Where experts currently prioritize the question of how to translate expert knowledge into interventions in the field, we will ask how lessons from the field might be translated back into expert knowledge and, where relevant, made available elsewhere. In the process we will enrich the anthropological repertoire, moving it beyond a choice between criticism or endorsement, turning living with/in difference into both a social ideal and a research style.
Summary
The proposed research project is a multi-sited ethnography of an emergent global health intervention to improve nutrition in the first 1000 days of life. The intervention links growth during this 1000-day window to chronic and mental illness, human capital, food security, and ecosystem sustainability, positing early life nutrition as the key to meeting the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. The intervention draws numerous disciplines and geographic regions together in a holistic pursuit of a sustainable and healthy collective future. It then unfolds in different settings in diverse and localized ways. The research team will work with first 1000 days experts as well as study deployment sites in the Netherlands, Guatemala, and the Philippines. The innovative anthropological techniques of contrasting and co-laboring will allow us to both analyze the intervention and contribute to its further fine-tuning. Health experts currently recognize that there are social complexities within and differences between the sites involved, but tend to treat these as obstacles to overcome. The innovative force of our research is to consider the adaptive transformations of the intervention as a source of inspiration rather than a hindrance. Where experts currently prioritize the question of how to translate expert knowledge into interventions in the field, we will ask how lessons from the field might be translated back into expert knowledge and, where relevant, made available elsewhere. In the process we will enrich the anthropological repertoire, moving it beyond a choice between criticism or endorsement, turning living with/in difference into both a social ideal and a research style.
Max ERC Funding
1 499 977 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-06-01, End date: 2023-05-31
Project acronym LUDEME
Project The Digital Ludeme Project: Modelling the Evolution of Traditional Games
Researcher (PI) Cameron BROWNE
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT MAASTRICHT
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH5, ERC-2017-COG
Summary The development of games goes hand in hand with the development of human culture. Games offer a rich window of insight into our cultural past, but early examples were rarely documented and our understanding of them is incomplete. While there has been considerable historical research into games and their use as tools of cultural analysis, much is based on the interpretation of partial evidence with little mathematical analysis. This project will use modern computational techniques to help fill these gaps in our knowledge empirically.
I will represent games as structured sets of ludemes (units of game-related information), which will allow the full range of traditional strategy games to be modelled in a single software system for the first time. This system will not only model and play games, but will evaluate reconstructions for quality and authenticity, and automatically improve them where possible. This will lay the foundations for a new field of study called digital archaeoludology, which will involve addressing technical challenges that could yield significant benefits in their own right, particularly in artificial intelligence.
The ludemic model reveals innate mathematical relationships between games, allowing phylogenetic analysis. This provides a mechanism for creating a family tree/network of traditional games, which could reveal missing links and allow ancestral state reconstruction to shed light on the gaps in our partial knowledge. Locating ludemes culturally provides a mechanism for creating interactive maps that chart the transmission of mathematical ideas across cultures through play. This project seeks to bridge the gap between historical and computational studies of games, to provide greater insight into our understanding of them as cultural artefacts, and to pioneer new tools and techniques for their continued analysis. The aim is to restore and preserve our intangible cultural heritage (of game playing) through the tangible evidence available.
Summary
The development of games goes hand in hand with the development of human culture. Games offer a rich window of insight into our cultural past, but early examples were rarely documented and our understanding of them is incomplete. While there has been considerable historical research into games and their use as tools of cultural analysis, much is based on the interpretation of partial evidence with little mathematical analysis. This project will use modern computational techniques to help fill these gaps in our knowledge empirically.
I will represent games as structured sets of ludemes (units of game-related information), which will allow the full range of traditional strategy games to be modelled in a single software system for the first time. This system will not only model and play games, but will evaluate reconstructions for quality and authenticity, and automatically improve them where possible. This will lay the foundations for a new field of study called digital archaeoludology, which will involve addressing technical challenges that could yield significant benefits in their own right, particularly in artificial intelligence.
The ludemic model reveals innate mathematical relationships between games, allowing phylogenetic analysis. This provides a mechanism for creating a family tree/network of traditional games, which could reveal missing links and allow ancestral state reconstruction to shed light on the gaps in our partial knowledge. Locating ludemes culturally provides a mechanism for creating interactive maps that chart the transmission of mathematical ideas across cultures through play. This project seeks to bridge the gap between historical and computational studies of games, to provide greater insight into our understanding of them as cultural artefacts, and to pioneer new tools and techniques for their continued analysis. The aim is to restore and preserve our intangible cultural heritage (of game playing) through the tangible evidence available.
Max ERC Funding
1 997 244 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-04-01, End date: 2023-03-31
Project acronym MEDIATE
Project Middlebrow Enlightenment: Disseminating Ideas, Authors, and Texts in 18th-century Europe
Researcher (PI) Alicia Montoya
Host Institution (HI) STICHTING KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH5, ERC-2015-CoG
Summary Intellectual history has long focused on a small number of authors and conceptual frameworks in studying societal change during the Enlightenment. Historians of the book have similarly restricted their vision, tending to privilege radical, subversive or forbidden texts. Yet ever since Daniel Mornet launched the history of the book approach a century ago, historians have recognized that it was authors who were not radical or subversive who produced the best-selling texts of the 18th century. This project will push Enlightenment studies in a new direction by moving beyond the present, narrow corpus of texts and models that dominate the field, and propose a new conceptual framework that takes as its starting-point the heuristic concept of middlebrow culture. Developing a state-of-the-art database, it will, firstly, identify not the ‘high’ Enlightenment texts studied by the history of ideas, and not the ‘low’, forbidden texts of book history, but the real best-sellers of the 18th century. These were the texts that, to readers on the ground, represented the most visible face of the Enlightenment, but have hitherto never really been studied. Secondly, it will elaborate a typology of this corpus describing its generic traits, intended readers, relation to major political-religious debates, and how readers in different parts of Europe appropriated these texts through translations, reworkings and other uses. Finally, it examines how historiography came to define the Enlightenment as the work of an intellectual elite, downplaying the impact of middlebrow texts and readers. The project thus brings an ambitious, bottom-up approach to intellectual history, using book history data and innovative digital tools to argue that the Enlightenment was fashioned not only by the progressive intellectuals we know today, but just as importantly, also by a large mass of forgotten, middlebrow best-sellers that need to be adequately studied if we are to truly understand how we ‘became modern’
Summary
Intellectual history has long focused on a small number of authors and conceptual frameworks in studying societal change during the Enlightenment. Historians of the book have similarly restricted their vision, tending to privilege radical, subversive or forbidden texts. Yet ever since Daniel Mornet launched the history of the book approach a century ago, historians have recognized that it was authors who were not radical or subversive who produced the best-selling texts of the 18th century. This project will push Enlightenment studies in a new direction by moving beyond the present, narrow corpus of texts and models that dominate the field, and propose a new conceptual framework that takes as its starting-point the heuristic concept of middlebrow culture. Developing a state-of-the-art database, it will, firstly, identify not the ‘high’ Enlightenment texts studied by the history of ideas, and not the ‘low’, forbidden texts of book history, but the real best-sellers of the 18th century. These were the texts that, to readers on the ground, represented the most visible face of the Enlightenment, but have hitherto never really been studied. Secondly, it will elaborate a typology of this corpus describing its generic traits, intended readers, relation to major political-religious debates, and how readers in different parts of Europe appropriated these texts through translations, reworkings and other uses. Finally, it examines how historiography came to define the Enlightenment as the work of an intellectual elite, downplaying the impact of middlebrow texts and readers. The project thus brings an ambitious, bottom-up approach to intellectual history, using book history data and innovative digital tools to argue that the Enlightenment was fashioned not only by the progressive intellectuals we know today, but just as importantly, also by a large mass of forgotten, middlebrow best-sellers that need to be adequately studied if we are to truly understand how we ‘became modern’
Max ERC Funding
1 998 125 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31
Project acronym MoralisingMisfortune
Project Moralising Misfortune: A comparative anthropology of commercial insurance
Researcher (PI) Erik Bähre
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH5, ERC-2015-CoG
Summary This is a study of the morality of commercial life insurance. What moral issues are raised when commercial companies define responsibilities for misfortune and the appropriateness of entitlements? What are the concerns about the financialization of life and intimacy?
First, this study examines the morality of bureaucratic classifications produced by the insurance industry. Classifications reveal particular perspectives on the world and are at the heart of defining the risks covered by life insurance policies, as well as defining exclusionary clauses and who is allowed to take which policies; in addition, they are central to the exploration of consumer markets. What are the moral implications of classification and its associated bureaucratic procedures?
Second, the study explores the questions life insurance raises about the value of life. Life insurance literally prices death. How much is a life worth? What lives can be compensated and who can receive compensation? Moral obligations and the allocation of blame may depend on whether financial support is given by commercial companies, kinship, or voluntary associations. This project examines the morality of the integration of life insurance into wider financial systems.
The objective of the research is to gain insight into:
1. Public discourses on the role of commercial life insurance in everyday life;
2. The ways in which life insurance gives rise to particular notions of responsibility and compensation.
3. The ways in which the morality of commercial life insurance is intertwined with explaining misfortune, and with organizing care through kinship and voluntary associations.
The study will be carried out in five countries: France and the Netherlands – two of the world’s wealthiest countries, with a long history of life insurance; India and Brazil – two of the world’s fastest expanding economies, with a growing insurance market; and the USA – where innovations create new moral concerns.
Summary
This is a study of the morality of commercial life insurance. What moral issues are raised when commercial companies define responsibilities for misfortune and the appropriateness of entitlements? What are the concerns about the financialization of life and intimacy?
First, this study examines the morality of bureaucratic classifications produced by the insurance industry. Classifications reveal particular perspectives on the world and are at the heart of defining the risks covered by life insurance policies, as well as defining exclusionary clauses and who is allowed to take which policies; in addition, they are central to the exploration of consumer markets. What are the moral implications of classification and its associated bureaucratic procedures?
Second, the study explores the questions life insurance raises about the value of life. Life insurance literally prices death. How much is a life worth? What lives can be compensated and who can receive compensation? Moral obligations and the allocation of blame may depend on whether financial support is given by commercial companies, kinship, or voluntary associations. This project examines the morality of the integration of life insurance into wider financial systems.
The objective of the research is to gain insight into:
1. Public discourses on the role of commercial life insurance in everyday life;
2. The ways in which life insurance gives rise to particular notions of responsibility and compensation.
3. The ways in which the morality of commercial life insurance is intertwined with explaining misfortune, and with organizing care through kinship and voluntary associations.
The study will be carried out in five countries: France and the Netherlands – two of the world’s wealthiest countries, with a long history of life insurance; India and Brazil – two of the world’s fastest expanding economies, with a growing insurance market; and the USA – where innovations create new moral concerns.
Max ERC Funding
1 807 334 €
Duration
Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31
Project acronym PaDC
Project Property and Democratic Citizenship: The Impact of Moral Assumptions, Policy Regulations, and Market Mechanisms on Experiences of Eviction
Researcher (PI) Marianne MAECKELBERGH
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH5, ERC-2017-COG
Summary This research explores the impact of property regimes on experiences of citizenship across five democratic countries: Greece, The Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Property rights are a foundational element of democracy, but the right to private property exists in tension with values of equality and a right to shelter. An investigation of property is urgent given the recent normalisation of economic models that have resulted in millions of evictions every year. Through an ethnographic study of eviction this research provides a comparative analysis of the benefits and limitations of contemporary property regimes for democratic citizenship. A property regime is defined as the combination of moral discourses about real landed property with the regulatory policies and market mechanisms that shape the use, sale and purchase of property. The selected countries represent a diverse set of property regimes, but all five are experiencing a housing and eviction crisis that has created new geographies of disadvantage, exacerbated inequalities of race, gender, age and income, and led to social unrest. Building on the PI's previous research into citizen-driven democratic innovation, this research critically examines the concept of property through a novel methodology dubbed 'conflictive context construction' that employs a qualitative approach centred on moments of conflict resulting from the use, sale or purchase of specific properties to answer: how do property regimes shape people's experience of citizenship and what can this tell us about the role of property in contemporary models of democratic governance? The high gain of this research lies in the opportunity to rethink the role of property within democracy based on extensive empirical data about how moral assumptions combine with particular ways of regulating and marketing property to exacerbate, alleviate or create inequalities within contemporary experiences of democratic citizenship.
Summary
This research explores the impact of property regimes on experiences of citizenship across five democratic countries: Greece, The Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Property rights are a foundational element of democracy, but the right to private property exists in tension with values of equality and a right to shelter. An investigation of property is urgent given the recent normalisation of economic models that have resulted in millions of evictions every year. Through an ethnographic study of eviction this research provides a comparative analysis of the benefits and limitations of contemporary property regimes for democratic citizenship. A property regime is defined as the combination of moral discourses about real landed property with the regulatory policies and market mechanisms that shape the use, sale and purchase of property. The selected countries represent a diverse set of property regimes, but all five are experiencing a housing and eviction crisis that has created new geographies of disadvantage, exacerbated inequalities of race, gender, age and income, and led to social unrest. Building on the PI's previous research into citizen-driven democratic innovation, this research critically examines the concept of property through a novel methodology dubbed 'conflictive context construction' that employs a qualitative approach centred on moments of conflict resulting from the use, sale or purchase of specific properties to answer: how do property regimes shape people's experience of citizenship and what can this tell us about the role of property in contemporary models of democratic governance? The high gain of this research lies in the opportunity to rethink the role of property within democracy based on extensive empirical data about how moral assumptions combine with particular ways of regulating and marketing property to exacerbate, alleviate or create inequalities within contemporary experiences of democratic citizenship.
Max ERC Funding
1 970 688 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-09-01, End date: 2023-08-31
