ERC Starting Grants are awarded annually to talented young scientists with more than two but less than seven years of experience since completion of their PhD. The recipients at Radboud University will be doing research into language, money circulation and medieval songs.
HANDWAVE
Linda Drijvers (Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour)
'How Adaptive Neural Dynamics Weight and Integrate Auditory and Visual Information during Multimodal Language Processing'
This project will develop a novel framework for understanding the neurobiology of multimodal language, by uncovering the multi-timescale oscillatory mechanisms that enable the flexible integration and weighting of auditory signals, such as speech, and visual signals, such as visual speech and hand gestures.
Understanding how the brain integrates and weights these signals is crucial for understanding how natural language is processed in the brain. This knowledge is vital for diagnosing and treating language-related disorders, and for developing effective diagnostic tools and rehabilitation strategies.
Two key gaps remain unaddressed. First, historical models on the neurobiology of language have predominantly focused on unimodal speech signals, overlooking the inherently multimodal nature of language. Second, it is unknown how the complex temporal relations between auditory and visual signals allow them to be integrated into one coherent percept.
HANDWAVE addresses these gaps by testing the central hypothesis that the brain’s flexible coordination of multi-timescale oscillations enables the integration and weighting of auditory and visual signals through (interactions between) phase modulations, power modulations, and functional connectivity. Work package (WP) 1 will uncover the oscillatory mechanisms underlying the integration of speech and visual signals, and whether and how this gives rise to emergent multimodal representations in the brain. WP2 will examine the oscillatory mechanisms underlying the flexible weighting of auditory and visual signals. WP3 will provide causal evidence for the role of oscillatory mechanisms in supporting integration and weighting.
By uncovering the multi-timescale oscillatory mechanisms underlying these processes, HANDWAVE has the potential to redefine theoretical models of the neurobiology of language. Its findings will inspire clinical interventions and communication technologies that better capture the multimodal nature of language.
CONSENT
Cécile de Morrée (Radboud Institute for Culture & History)
Consent in Songs in European Narrative Tradition
De Morrée's project examines the theme of sexual consent in European narrative traditions as represented in late medieval songtexts (c.1300-1550). It investigates the new and empowering narratives that were performed to engage in conversations about consent. Since songs were part of oral culture, circulating among various social classes and voicing contemporary views on societal affairs, they offer an indispensable gateway to medieval understandings of this timeless topic.
The project will bring forth methodological innovation by making sexual consent (not: coercion or forced sex) its main lens for analysis. By introducing a consent-based approach to historical literature, CONSENT will showcase consent as a rich medieval literary theme and investigate how songtexts helped medieval people to explore positive scenarios for behaviour in sexual relationships. These aims are crucial to balance previous scholarship, that has focused on medieval narratives about rape.
CONSENT, however, posits that current societal debates prompt a different, more positive perspective, unravelling a consent-oriented part of late medieval culture. First, CONSENT will trace where consent-themed songtexts circulated. While rape-themed song seems to have flourished throughout Southern Europe, France and England, CONSENT will shift focus to Germanic traditions, hypothesizing that these lend a stronger voice to consent.
Second, CONSENT will analyse how these songtexts represented ideas about sexual consent and mutuality, by applying a novel close-reading method that studies intersections of gender, social status and narrative space. The project hypothesizes that medieval songtexts adopted recognizable narrative patterns to express sexual consent and to contradict and destabilize rape narratives.
Third, CONSENT will investigate why these songs were collected and sung, hypothesizing that consent narratives in songs promoted female agency in the domain of sexuality by fostering mutuality and equality.
MONEYINFRA
Harry Pettit (Institute for Management Research)
Money as Infrastructure: the struggle over the means of money circulation in a cash(less) world
In his project, Pettit and colleagues aim to understand how changing infrastructures of money circulation impact social relations and inequalities. It investigates what forms of extraction and exploitation, alongside resistance and survival, are opened up by different infrastructures of money circulation in the realms of labour, consumption, and debt. MONEYINFRA focuses on three contexts. The first is Beirut, Lebanon, which has seen the reemergence of a cash economy in the aftermath of a financial crisis. The second, Amsterdam in The Netherlands, which has experienced a drastic shift away from cash. Finally, Accra in Ghana, which is in the early stages of building a ‘digital payment ecosystem’.
The last decade has seen a dramatic, albeit uneven growth of ‘cashless economies’. Existing research has yet to explore how this change has transformed relations between different actors in the economy. This project does this, breaking ground by developing a new conceptual and methodological approach that traces the struggle over the means of money circulation as it moves between actors within labour, consumption, and debt relations, and across physical and digital domains.
MONEYINFRA builds on geographical and anthropological work in the social life of money and critical infrastructure studies to consider money as a key infrastructure which provides the means to forge a liveable life. It places focus on the struggle over this infrastructure between delivery companies and workers, utility providers and customers, and money lenders and borrowers. The project analyses the practices through which actors obtain, store, and move money through physical and digital infrastructures. It examines how these infrastructures open up possibilities for accumulation, control, and value extraction for some, alongside resistance and survival for others. In the process MONEYINFRA reveals the new social relations created by these infrastructures, and also breaks down common understandings about what forms of money circulation are considered legitimate.