ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The International Space Station (ISS) is arguably the oldest extra-terrestrial society in low earth orbit. To date this radical new form of human habitation and society has not been the object of systematic and comparative ethnographic inquiry. This project aims to correct this and proposes a comparative and multi-sited ethnography of the ISS among the contributors to its modular architecture: The Russian Federation, The United States of America, The European Union and Japan. The ISS offers invaluable insights into fundamental questions at the heart of the social sciences. The most obvious is the effect of micro gravity on our understandings of material culture and sociality. To date material culture has only been theorised in terms of Earth’s gravity. This project affords the opportunity to critically re-examine our terrestrially based theories. Related to this are the distinctive political aesthetics in this setting and its innovative dimensions of ‘worlding’ (Heidegger) and the materialities entailed therein. These relate to wider notions: the nature of transcendence in both anthropological, material and metaphysical terms as well as broader issues concerning territoriality and the expansion of the human and habitability and general understandings of materiality. Methodologically the project focuses on the quotidian and material dimensions of the ISS and its bodily and material techniques, re-examining traditional empirical assumptions within the innovative conditions of the new polymedia environments in which the ISS is situated. More importantly the project situates the respective Mission Controls and their wider communities as co-terminous with the ISS site, examining it as highly complex nexus of inhabitation encompassing both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial realms in a novel configuration and thereby provide the first ever integrative and comparative study of this unprecedented form of human society and the material conditions of its emergent ‘worlding’.

2 475 251 €

Start date: 2019-10-01, End date: 2025-03-31

The development of scientific models suffers from two related problems: ever-growing number of experimental results and scientists’ cognitive limitations (including cognitive biases). This multidisciplinary project (psychology, computer modelling, computer science and cognitive neuroscience) addresses these problems by developing a novel methodology for generating scientific models automatically. The methodology is general and can be applied to any science where experimental data are available. The method treats models as computer programs and evolves a population of models using genetic programming. The extent to which the models fit the empirical data is used as a fitness function. The best models–potentially modified by cross-over and mutation–are selected for the next generation. Pilot simulations have established the validity of the methodology with simple experiments. To demonstrate that the methodology is sound, can be used with complex datasets and can be generalised across sciences, four related strands of research are planned. First, ‘Building New Tools’ develops the methodology and creates techniques to understand and compare the evolved models. Second, ‘Explaining Human Data’ uses the methodology to explain a wide range of data on human cognition. This will be done in two steps: (a) data without learning (working memory and attention); and (b) data with learning (categorisation, implicit learning and explicit learning). Third, ‘Explaining Animal Data’ develops models to account for various aspects of animal behaviour, focusing on conditioning and categorisation. Finally, ‘Explaining Neuroscience Data’ extends the methodology to account for data combining information about cognitive and brain processes. This project explores virgin territory and thus opens up a new field of research. It combines insights from experimental psychology, cognitive modelling, cognitive neuroscience and computer science, disciplines in which the PI has strong track record.

2 182 339 €

Start date: 2019-11-01, End date: 2024-10-31

Poetry was the most affordable art form in the Roman world: all it required were words, and someone with a talent to arrange them in a meaningful, aesthetically convincing way. Yet, the study of Latin poetry has traditionally almost exclusively focused on a small, judiciously transmitted canon of texts – a segment of Rome’s artistic production that favours the poetry that was produced, enjoyed, and controlled, by a political, social, and financial urban elite, reinforcing their claim to cultural superiority. Focusing on a body of over 4,000 Latin verse inscriptions that have survived from the third century B. C. to Late Antiquity and cover the Roman empire in its entirety, representing ancient Rome’s middle and lower social strata in particular, MAPPOLA is an unprecedented effort to democratise our understanding of Roman poetry. A fundamentally multidisciplinary project that will make use of recent methodological advances in linguistic, historical, and archaeological scholarship, MAPPOLA’s prime aim is fundamentally to reassess the verse inscriptions as evidence for poetry as a ubiquitous, inclusive cultural practice of the people of ancient Rome beyond the palaces of its urban aristocracy. It will provide answers to the following questions: How is the empire’s considerable regional and ethnic diversity reflected in the engagement with inscribed verse? How and where did poetic landscapes emerge, and what inspired them? What was the cultural and social significance of inscribed Latin verse? How did subcultures and poetic subversion take shape? How did inscribed poetry transcend and transgress artificially imposed boundaries and abstractions? Over five years, organised into five integrated Work Packages and firmly rooted in the PI’s long-term vision, MAPPOLA will open a new area of empirical and quantitative research, alongside traditional qualititative approaches, into Latin poetry and its European legacy.

2 000 529 €

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

In recent decades, European countries have witnessed increasing immigration streams and ethnic heterogeneity of their populations. Facilitating immigrant integration and social cohesion has become a major societal issue. The project moves beyond previous research by first investigating how employment, housing and family trajectories evolve and interact in the lives of descendants of post-WWII immigrants and post-1990 immigrants in the UK, France, Germany and Sweden, and how factors related to a societal context, an early life context and critical transitions shape their life histories. Second, the study will project their future life trajectories using innovative simulation techniques, considering the main life domains and diversity between and within immigrant groups. Although recent studies report substantial diversity in employment, in housing and in family patterns among descendants of post-war immigrants and recent immigrants in Europe, the causes of this heterogeneity remain far from clear. Furthermore, it is not known whether observed differences between immigrants and natives are short-term outcomes in a long-term process of cultural and economic integration or rather reflections of different pathways and outcomes for immigrants and their descendants. The project will exploit large-scale longitudinal data from four countries and apply advanced longitudinal methods, including multichannel sequence analysis and multilevel event history analysis. Microsimulation will be applied to project life histories for immigrants and their descendants. The project will significantly deepen our understanding of the relationships between the three life domains, and the causes of less and more successful life trajectories among immigrants and their descendants. This project will show whether the current heterogeneity between and within immigrant and minority groups vanishes over time or rather persists, suggesting an increasing diversity of European societies.

2 446 524 €

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