Prof Dr Sarah Eaton, Professor of Transregional China Studies at the Department of Asian and African Studies at the Faculty of Asian, Social and African Sciences, and her research team will receive funding of almost two million euros for their TECHtonics project. PD Dr Magdalena Waligórska from the Department of European Ethnology at the Faculty of Humanities will also receive funding of almost two million euros for her project Plundered Lives.
"I am extremely pleased that Sarah Eaton and Magdalena Waligórska have prevailed as internationally outstanding researchers in the highly competitive selection process of the European Research Council," says Prof Dr Christoph Schneider, Vice President for Research at Humboldt-Universität (HU). "The approved projects promise new findings in terms of both content and methodology with an important research impact and international visibility in the respective field of research. This is a great success for the Department of European Ethnology of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Department of Asian and African Studies of the Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences and Education and for our university as a whole, which we owe not only to the excellence of the applicants but also to the experienced support provided by the Research Service Centre."
The European Research Council (ERC) is an institution that funds basic research. The Consolidator Grant format is aimed at excellent researchers and supports projects that develop innovative research approaches or address new research questions. The funding is awarded for a period of up to five years and comprises a maximum of two million euros.
TECHtonics
For the TECHtonics project, Sarah Eaton is analysing the three "emerging powers" China, India and Kenya and their activities in the field of global technical standard-setting in a theoretically innovative and empirically rich way. The project will contribute to theory building in the disciplines of International Relations and International Political Economy and specifically in the research field of the dynamics of power transitions between established and rising powers.
One aim of the project is to develop a theoretical framework for the study of how and why some developing countries succeed in gaining power in the field of global standardisation against all odds. A second aim is to develop a new concept ("governance rupture") to examine the multiple forms of contestation in international technical standardisation. As the issues of institutionalised inequality and complex governance challenges are relevant not only to technical standard setting but also to other global policy fields, the results will advance theorising on power, politics and contestation in the global governance literature.
PLUNDERED LIVES - Intimate Dispossession: The Afterlives of Plundered Jewish Personal Possessions in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
The project aims to write the history of the great looting of small things - everyday household objects and personal possessions, including clothing, that were plundered on a large scale by local non-Jews during and after the Holocaust. While historical research has focused on the top-down and centralised takeover of Jewish financial assets, real estate, businesses or works of art by the Nazi state, we know nothing about the afterlife of everyday objects that were not identifiable as Jewish, which changed hands during the Holocaust and continued to be used for decades in the small communities of East Central Europe.
The main aims of the project are to document different ways in which Jewish personal possessions were appropriated by non-Jewish indigenous populations in East-Central European shtetls (Yiddish: small towns; meaning small places in Eastern Europe before the Second World War with a Yiddish-speaking Jewish population) and to examine how they were remodelled, adapted and misused by their new owners. This project breaks with the top-down view of dispossession in the Holocaust and focuses on eight micro-studies of communities in three different administrative units of German-occupied East Central Europe.