In July of this year, the Independent Social Research Foundation welcomed eight new Fellows, who will be completing seven projects submitted to the eighth Mid-Career Fellowship competition.
Projects will cover a wide span of topics, including lovers rock reggae music, the twenty-first-century arms trade, the complexities of contemporary racism, and how the energy transition unfolds in Europe’s semi-peripheral economies. One motif that cuts across several of the awarded projects is how marginalised individuals and groups respond to uneven power structures, with one project working with unaccompanied migrant minors, another with Latin American grassroots activists, and a third with Civil Society Organisations mobilising ‘from below’ against genocide.
Mid-Career Fellowships are awarded to academics who are more than ten years post-PhD and who wish to complete a one-year research project that challenges received narratives, methods, or conceptual paradigms and addresses real-world problems that remain under-studied or poorly understood.
Here is an overview of the seven projects that were funded.
Energy transitions do not occur on a blank canvas. Rather, they happen within an existing socio-economic landscape shaped by historical and material trends, inequalities, and labour relations.
In many of Europe’s semi-peripheral economies, efforts to decarbonise take shape against a background of decades of deindrustrialisation and the decidedly uneven social, economic, and political effects thereof. For capital, former industrial areas make for attractive sites for renewable energy industries. But with new investment regimes come distinct labour relations as well as new axes of tension and contestation.
In this very timely project, Rune Bennike will use ethnographic and archival methods to better understand the complexities of semi-peripheral economies undergoing an energy shift. He will propose the concept of the energy ‘seesaw’ as a productive alternative to that of energy ‘transition’, seeking to capture the cycle between capital abandonment and valorisation within which green transitions occur.
While much contemporary critical theory has distanced itself from humanist principles on the grounds that modern humanism was often entangled with racist and colonialist attitudes, across Latin America, a wide range of grassroots movements are converging around profoundly humanistic commitments and values.
Drawing on over twenty years of political and intellectual collaboration with anti-imperialist networks across Latin America, Lara M. Coleman will map out the role humanism plays in contemporary anti-colonial grassroots struggle. In doing so, the project will elaborate a ‘counter-archive’ of insurgent anti-colonial humanisms that offers a life-affirming vision with which to challenge resurgent fascism.
International law assigns the duty to prevent genocide to nation states. But what happens when states fail to live up to this duty? Increasingly, non-state actors such as Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) are stepping in to trigger and shape genocide prevention duties in practice.
Combining doctrinal with socio-legal analysis, the project focuses on two case studies: Myanmar and Gaza. Looking at how CSOs have generated evidentiary records, developed new judicial frameworks, and influenced judicial proceedings in formal bodies like the International Court of Justice, Triestino Mariniello and Mariagiulia Giuffré will develop an important new theory of genocide obligations ‘from below’.
In asylum governance and migrant processing, the category of vulnerability fulfils an important purpose, sorting cases into different orders of need and priority. However, the category of vulnerability is not just regulated top-down by means of institutional and administrative processes but is also contested, resisted, and negotiated by those it is intended to regulate.
In this project, Stella Milani centres such forms of contestation by working with unaccompanied migrant minors (UAMs) in Italy’s asylum system. Often subject to disbelief and suspicion from state officials, UAMs routinely come up against adult-centred expectations of what it means to be a vulnerable child or young person. These expectations do not always fit their lived experience or sense of self and can sometimes produce uneven access to care or protection.
Using comics to explore the narratives and experiences of UAMs, the project will seek to unsettle established expectations of vulnerability and make room for alternative, youth-centred narratives.
Lovers rock is a British Caribbean form of reggae that first emerged in mid-1970s London. Often depicted as more naively sentimental and less overtly political than other forms of reggae, lovers rock remains a poorly understood musical genre and cultural form. This project offers a long overdue corrective to this depiction.
During her Fellowship, Lisa Palmer will write the first book-length study of lovers rock. She will argue that far from an apolitical and sentimental genre, lovers rock helped develop an anti-colonial collective consciousness by offering Caribbean youth a vital site in which the cultural politics of Rastafari, Blackness, gender, and sexuality could converge.
For most of recent history, the arms trade has played a pivotal role in perpetuating global tensions, worsening inequality, and facilitating interstate violence. The arms trade is where corporate power and firepower converge, and where production chains culminate in kill chains.
In this project, Anna Stavrianakis will offer the first comprehensive account of the contemporary state of the arms trade. Tracing the life-and-death cycle of arming, the project will present the arms trade as both the coercive backbone of capitalism and the unfinished business of empire and decolonization.
That racism is a structuring force in far-right movements and parties is well known. What is less well understood is why some people with migrant backgrounds end up supporting political projects that are explicitly anti-immigration and frequently racist in their rhetoric. Existing research on racism struggles to analyse this situation because they often rely on Eurocentric conceptions of racism.
This project offers a crucial corrective to this literature by exploring the phenomenon of ‘entangled racisms’. While recognising the structural dominance of European racism and its historical roots in colonialism and empire, Deniz Yonucu will explore how multiple forms of racism (such as Middle Eastern anti-Black racism or Turkish racism against Kurds) are able to intersect and interweave within the broader landscape of far-right mobilisation, leading to unexpected entanglements and alliances.
Focusing on Germany as a crucial case study, this project uses fieldwork methods to study the complex and shifting terrain of present-day racism.
Feature image by Stuart Wilson.
Bulletin posts represent the views of the author(s) and not those of the ISRF.
