ERC Starting Grants for three UG researchers

Three UG researches, all working at the Faculty of Arts, have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant: Yuliya Hilevych , Geoff Hobbis and Sean Desjardins . The European Research Council's (ERC) Starting Grants consist of €1.5 million each, for a period of five years. The grants are meant for outstanding researchers with the aim of stimulating cutting-edge research in Europe.

Yuliya Hilevych

Coping with decline: Comparative social-historical analysis of depopulation and community welfare in Europe, 1950-2022  (DEPOP)

Until now, Europe’s population has been growing. However, after 2023, it is projected to decline continuously. The underbelly of this decline has been regional depopulation – that is decline in population and decline in welfare since the 1950s. Yet, we still know little about how these two historical declines have been linked, and how communities have coped with them.

My team and I will address this lacuna by producing the social history of depopulation in Europe, the first of its kind. DEPOP will shed a new light on the histories of ‘stayers’ in rural and urban communities, and on their welfare in health and care sectors by paying close attention to the role of gender, class, age, ability, and ethnicity/race. We will focus on the North-West-East comparison: Finland –the Netherlands – Ukraine.

By doing so, DEPOP will illuminate regional depopulation as a potent example of a slow burn crisis – occurring over extended periods of time. Our historical findings will help to better understand how and why some communities have been more resilient to the slow burn crisis of depopulation.

Geoff Hobbis

Digitizing Other Economies

Is economic diversity possible in the digital age? If so, to what extent and what does it look like? In his ERC project (‘DOE’), Geoffrey Hobbis will explore these questions based on cross-cultural comparative research among longstanding 'other' economies—hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, horticulturalists and non-industrial agriculturalists. Members of these economies increasingly rely on digital technologies, in particular smartphones, in their lives. Some think that these new technologies will facilitate assimilation into industrial-capitalism. After all, most digital technologies are designed according to, and for, industrial-capitalist interests, needs and values. DOE challenges this simplistic, deterministic perspective. Instead, it sets out to showcase the diversity of economic adaptations in the digital age.

Sean Desjardins

TRACES

Foxe Basin (Tracking Long-term Resilience in Arctic Sociocultural-Ecological Systems) is a five-year, interdisciplinary project aiming to better understand the differences between Western-scientific understandings of sustainability/conservation, and time-honored Inuit traditional knowledge about environmental health and human/nonhuman animal relationships.  This will be accomplished through research on (1) modern Inuit subsistence hunting (of, for example, seals, walruses and caribou), (2) the archaeology of past harvesting (from ca. AD 1300 to present), (3) Inuit traditional knowledge about hunting and broader relationships with animals, and (4) circumpolar governmental policy on the regulation of a wide-range of animal-related activities, such as hunting, sewing and carving.  Based at the Arctic Centre, Groningen Institute of Archaeology, the TRACES team will carry out the research alongside Inuit knowledge- and rights-holders in the biogeographically-dynamic Foxe Basin region of Nunavut, Inuit Nunangat (the traditional lands, waters and ices of what is now Canada).

Read more about Desjardins' research.

About ERC

The ERC wants to encourage promising young researchers in Europe to set up a research team and start an independent research project to facilitate possible cutting-edge research. An ERC grant allows the researchers to start their research project confidently.