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.
From Sputnik to Chernobyl, from optimism to fear: socialists and communists facing science (1957-1986)
Members: Ettore Costa
Period: 2018-2020
Funding: CERGU
Project description: This project analyses how the attitude of Western European socialists and communists towards science and technology evolved from the late 1950s to the 1980s, from optimism for the Sputnik to scepticism and fear around Chernobyl. The period corresponded to the transformation of the Old Left, from enthusiasm for social transformation and state-centred social engineering to the end of utopian ambitions and crisis. The hypothesis is that the paradigm shift on science was an underrated factor in affecting their policies and undermining their optimism. This comparative analysis of the socialist parties of Britain and Western Germany as well as the socialist and communist parties of France and Italy, assesses the role of science (specifically nuclear power and space technology) in their policies, language and vision of the future, in addition to the influence of new social movements.
Non-Compliance and Collective Action in the European Union
Members: Markus Johansson
Period: 2018-2020
Funding: CERGU
Project description: International cooperation requires policy compliance to be sustainable, and non-compliance is therefore a serious challenge in the European Union (EU). While much research has been devoted to explain non-compliance in the EU, less attention has been given to the effects of non-compliance. Founded in collective action theory, a central prediction is that the chances of generating cooperative agreements between nation states is affected by expectations about policy compliance. The project poses questions on whether expectations about policy compliance affect the current and future will to collective action, and what factors that affect the perceived risk of non-compliance. Empirically, the focus is on negotiation processes between representatives of EU member states, relying on a telephone survey with representatives to the EU Council, and comparative case studies of policy issues in the fields of human and animal antibiotics use, migration and foreign policy.