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.
Dreams of Violence: Exploring Violent Reverberations of the Russian War against Ukraine through Creative Methodologies
Members: Natalia Volvach
Period: 2026-2028
Funding: CERGU
This project explores how the Russian war against Ukraine appears and is lived in dreams. It deploys participants-led creative approaches to capture the elusiveness and fragmented nature of dreams, expanding our understanding of how war produces affect and is embodied by individuals. Rather than treating the war as waged in territories and as confined to certain physical sites, this project approaches war as a form of violence that reverberates through the body (Navaro et al., 2021). By exploring the war relationally as it transcends physical spaces and enters the intimate, affective, and liminal realms of human experience manifested in dreams, the project seeks to probe and develop new methodological and theoretical ways to study war, violence, and displacement. This way, it aims to contribute to the research on affective dimensions of warfare in Europe.
Industrial policy and Europe’s technological catch-up in electric vehicle batteries
Members: Tobias Wuttke
Period: 2026-2028
Funding: CERGU
The EU has implemented ambitious industrial policies to strengthen its electric vehicle battery industry since the mid-2010s, yet European-owned battery firms struggle to compete with leading firms from Asia. This study investigates the disconnect between the high ambitions of
industrial policy and the disappointing outcomes in terms of firm performance. It contributes to the nascent literature on the implementation challenges of EU industrial policy. It combines the insights from that literature on the political, ideological and institutional constraints bearing on EU industrial policy with concepts from the technological catch-up literature from innovation studies. Data is collected via qualitative methods – semi-structured interviews with policymakers
and industry stakeholders, alongside document analysis – to investigate three potential reasons for the disconnect between ambitions and outcomes: firms’ lacking technological efforts, insufficient policies, and/or inadequate mechanisms of public-private coordination for policy design and implementation.
Affective Borders
Members: Ben Rosher
Period: 2025-2027
Funding: CERGU
In the contemporary international order, state borders are a source of many people’s sense of security. However, as conflict, globalisation, and climate change forcibly displace ever more people, border and migration scholars argue that our current border imaginaries are unsustainable. This project engages focus groups with national citizens and refugees in the UK and Sweden in order to better understand emotional attachments to borders from different positionalities. The project draws on two subfields of international studies, critical border studies (CBS) and ontological security studies (OSS), in order to develop the role of affect in critical border studies. In doing so, the project will provide insight into alternative possibilities to current border imaginaries that are better able to accommodate diverse lives in an increasingly globalised world.
From Displacement to Integration: The Economic Integration of Forced Migrants in the Balkans (1945-2010)
Members: Luka Miladinović
Period: 2024-2026
Funding: CERGU
The research aims to explore the economic consequences of forced migrations in the Balkans, focusing on two significant waves of displacement. By analyzing the displacement of Italians from Yugoslavian territories in the aftermath of World War II and the forced migration of Serbs from Kosovo in 1999, this study seeks to provide valuable insights into the economic integration of forced migrants and the impact on labor markets in both the regions of origin and destination. Utilizing newly acquired archival material and microdata, econometric analysis will be employed to assess various outcomes, including occupational status, earnings, and employment rates. The findings will contribute to the understanding of the socioeconomic implications of compelled migrations, offer comparisons to existing literature, and provide historical and contemporary insights applicable to various disciplines within European studies.
The Impact of Shoah on European-Jewish Business Networks and Cultural Mobility
Members: Maja Hultman
Period: 2021-2026 (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.