ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The transition to a low-carbon society is vital and requires major changes in everyday life for European households, including new prosumer roles linking renewable energy production and household consumption by use of smart technologies. This implies major alterations in the materiality as well as the social organisation of everyday life. To guide this low-carbon transition, new theory development on the role of technological systems in everyday life is needed. Practice theories represent a strong approach in this; however, they have developed in opposition to understanding actors and structures as mutually interlinked. This means that major drivers, as well as consequences, for sustainable transition are being overlooked. This project will contribute with important new theory development to understand and promote a low-carbon transition as well as to ensure that this transition does not indirectly become a driver of gender and social inequality. Three theoretical lines within theories of practice will be developed: 1. The importance of gender and social structures when studying household practices, including how these social structures influence formation of practices and how, in turn, social structures are formed by the development of practices. 2. The role of the ethical consumer in developing new practices, including how learning processes, media discourses and institutionalised knowledge influence formation of practices. 3. The inclusion of non-humans as carriers and performers of practices, rather than seeing the material arrangements only as the context for practices, especially when dealing with automated and internet connected technologies. Quantitative and qualitative empirical research guided by these theoretical approaches will contribute with work on how future low-carbon living can be achieved and the theoretical developments will form an essential foundation for policy development towards a mandatory low-carbon transition.

2 116 000 €

Start date: 2018-11-01, End date: 2023-10-31

"How do individuals insure themselves against economic shocks, as consumers and savers on their own, and as voters, through the political process? The recent financial and economic crisis has seen people lose their jobs and their housing equity, partly as a result of insufficient economic buffers in good times. What does this mean for social insurance? We need to understand the connection between household finances and political attitudes to social insurance and redistribution, both in good times and in bad. I argue that in order to understand the political economy of redistribution and social insruance, we need to allow for imperfect asset markets in the form of liquidity (or credit) constraints and for asset holdings, including housing equity. The goal of the project is to investigate theoretically and empirically on Danish data (i) how differences in liquidity constraints affect political attitudes and preferences; (ii) where such differences come from and what that means for understanding links between personal traits and personality, socio-economics and political attitudes and behaviour; (iii) how these insights can be used to understand political attitudes towards the new wave of neo-paternalistic policies (including so-called ‘nudging’) inspired by behavioural economic research; and (iv) whether differences in liquidity constraints can help us understand changes in political attitudes and preferences over the long-run. The central empirical part of the project is to link uniquely detailed individual level high quality data from Danish administrative registers - including current and historical data on all tax-declared income sources, bank deposits, assets and liabilities, as well as detailed demographics, educational and occupational data - to a running, large-scale panel survey of a large random sample of adult Danes, and to extend this survey both in time and in scope, specifically with questions on political attitudes and political preferences."

1 499 740 €

Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2017-12-31

"There are noticeable asymmetries in availability of high-quality natural language processing (NLP). We can adequately summarize English newspapers and translate them into Korean, but we cannot translate Korean newspaper articles into English, and summarizing micro-blogs is much more difficult than summarizing newspaper articles. This is a fundamental problem for modern societies, their development and democracy, as well as perhaps the most important research problem in NLP right now. Most NLP technologies rely on highly accurate syntactic parsing. Reliable parsing models can be induced from large collections of manually annotated data, but such collections are typically limited to sampled newswire in major languages. Highly accurate parsing is therefore not available for other languages and other domains. The NLP community is well aware of this problem, but unsupervised techniques that do not rely on manually annotated data cannot be used for real-world applications, where highly accurate parsing is needed, and sample bias correction methods that automatically correct the bias in newswire when parsing, say, micro-blogs, do not yet lead to robust improvements across the board. The objective of this project is to develop new learning methods for parsing natural language for which no unbiased labeled data exists. In order to do so, we need to fundamentally rethink the unsupervised parsing problem, including how we evaluate unsupervised parsers, but we also need to supplement unsupervised learning techniques with robust methods for automatically correcting sample selection biases in related data. Such methods will be applicable to both cross-domain and cross-language syntactic parsing and will pave the way toward robust and scalable NLP. The societal impact of robust and scalable NLP is unforeseeable and comparable to how efficient information retrieval techniques have revolutionized modern societies."

1 126 183 €

Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2017-12-31

Who writes the rules for the governance of the world economy? The Professions in International Political Economies (PIPES) project is concerned with how professional actors compete in public and private arenas to provide solutions to policy problems. This project provides an original framework to understand how actors in professions shape global economic governance in a manner that commonly ignores public-private distinctions. Rather than conforming to public-private or national-international distinctions, actors create networks through their professional skills. From this context, networks of actors form strategies that link their profession to others to dominate how particular policy problems should be understood. Actors in professions form coalitions and alliances to protect their power and prestige, as well as to create consensus on how to treat policy problems and what represents world’s best practice. Since actors never really have control over how ideas are interpreted they must strategize in an ongoing fight for control over how certain problems should be understood. PIPES is concerned with mapping how professions fight over how to solve policy problems across a range of issue-areas in the world economy where there is a change in economic practices and markets. These are divided into four areas of governance: finance; health; capacity building; and the environment. Among others, topics to be studied include risk management technologies in finance, low fertility problems in the OECD, and the development of carbon ratings markets. The PIPES research team employs a mixed methods approach that combines qualitative structured and focused comparisons from primary evidence (interviews and primary documents) and participant observation, as well as quantitative analysis through network and content analysis of professional associational contexts. PIPES will also use Case Study Integrity Fora to facilitate knowledge exchange between scholars and practitioners.

1 200 000 €

Start date: 2011-01-01, End date: 2014-12-31