Postdoctoral Projects
The Centre for European Research (CERGU) is a network-based European research environment at the University of Gothenburg, which means that researchers are connected to CERGU, but employed at their own home departments. Postdoctoral researchers, who are financed by CERGU, are active within the CERGU network and at their home departments.
The Impact of Shoah on European-Jewish Business Networks and Cultural Mobility
Members: Maja Hultman
Period: 2021-2024 (part-time)
Funding: CERGU
Project Description: Retracing the transnational movements of two Swedish-Jewish business families, and their subsequent migration of cultural ideas between diasporas and across national borders, the project The Impact of the Shoah on European-Jewish Business Networks and Cultural Mobility examines the function, disappearance and/or change of Jewish cultural centres in Europe, influencing Swedish-Jewish life, from the 1910s to the 1970s. It studies the period before, during, and after the Shoah , and thus examines the impact of Christendomʹs antisemitism –annihilating six million Jewish souls and European-Jewish cultural centres in the 1940s – on Jewish belonging to Europe. With an interdisciplinary approach – using business history, cultural studies, comparative studies, and gender studies – the project shows how firstly, European Jews used transnational structures to collaborate on cultural developments, and secondly, discriminating jurisdiction against an ethnic minority within one European nation potentially informs the ethnic group’s cultural practices in other parts of Europe.
Towards a Harmonized European Deportation Regime? The Role of EU Technocrats
Members: Annika Lindberg
Period: 2021-2023
Funding: CERGU
Project description: The removal of third country nationals lacking legal authorization to remain has become a key priority for the European Union’s migration governance. While most prior research on deportation has focused on nation-states’ return practices, the EU’s coordination efforts to harmonize return processes and render them more efficient remain understudied. Addressing this gap, this project investigates the role of European technocratic experts working for various transnational projects in crafting a European deportation regime. It uses an original, practice-oriented approach to study European governance and draws on qualitative and ethnographic methods to map this networked project economy and illuminate its role in shaping deportation policies and practice. The project will contribute to deportation studies, research on transnational governance and bureaucratic power, and the sociology of knowledge, and produce novel insights into the ‘backdoor’ dynamics of the European politics of migration.