Digital platforms like Uber and Airbnb are transforming how people work, create and share value, and sustain themselves in their everyday lives. As such, platforms are becoming increasingly ubiquitous as new institutional actors that redraw relations between civil society, the market, and the state. Yet, as many scholars have shown, such relations have historically been shaped by pervasive gender, class, and racial subordination. It is therefore crucial to ask to what extent platforms, as new sites of capital accumulation, governance, and norm-making, remediate existing inequalities and if/how they also generate new vulnerabilities or tools for empowerment. Accordingly, this research project aims to determine how digital platforms are reconfiguring the gendered, classed, and racialized organization of labor and social reproduction in post-welfare societies. To achieve this aim, three objectives have to be met: • determining how on-demand labor platforms distribute new opportunities and vulnerabilities for workers along gender, class, and racial lines; • determining how digital platforms create new solutions and challenges for the gendered, classed, and racialized problem of social reproduction in post-welfare societies; • determining which policy and legal issues arise when labor and social reproduction are increasingly organized through platforms and identifying ways to tackle these issues. These objectives will be met through a cross-national comparative study that examines how platforms operate in three quickly growing and distinct tech hubs: Amsterdam, Berlin, and New York City. To organize this transatlantic study an innovative research platform will be developed and implemented, which enables (1) participatory research, (2) international scholarly collaboration and stakeholder engagement, and (3) the dissemination and discussion of research findings. The participatory research will combine ethnography and methods from software studies.

ETHNOSCHISM traces an ambient, diffuse but influential ethnotype, that of a manly, rough-hewn North vs. a frivolous, charming South – the former framed in terms of its ‘Germanic’ ethnolinguistic roots, the latter as ‘Romance’ or Latin. It analyses the widely-ramifying discursive diffusion of this ethnotype in its continuing ‘banal’ presence as a frame for social and political relations. The subject is highly topical, raising the still-burning issue of national intra-European divisions in terms of imputed ‘national characters’ by going it back to the years of their crystallisation (1914-1929) and studying the impact of cultural representations have in the political prejudices and ideologies. ETHNOSCHISM develops a new, interdisciplinary theory of the European North-South-opposition by studying its conceptual history from a radically interdisciplinary basis, combining the latest insights in 3 related specialisms in the culture-historical Humanities: imagology, the history of knowledge production (namely in racial theorizing), the intellectual history of European nationalisms. It studies ethnotypes in a completely new and original way, using them as a common discursive factor in the cultural field of representations and the political history of international relations. The methodological toolbox includes methods and approaches from different disciplines: the transnational and interdisciplinary history of national thought, Discourse Historical Approach, Imagology. The outputs include: two articles, a commented anthology, an edited book; two academic workshops. Measures to communicate the project activities include a website on the project, a temporary exhibition, the creation of an Educational Package for secondary-school students. Research and training activities at the Dept. of European Studies (UvA) will directly benefit my career prospects, equipping me with new skills and knowledge, and placing me at the forefront of the field as an interdisciplinary researcher.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 13 calls to "Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts" by 2030. This call to take action also reached central banks: A controversial debate of whether monetary policy shall target climate change mitigation is ongoing. This addresses also the use of titling the asset purchase programs towards green assets (green quantitative easing, green QE). GREENQE contributes to this discussion, by investigating how large of a carbon emission and temperature reduction could be achieved by tilting the corporate asset portfolio of central banks around the world towards green assets. Benefits from slowing down climate change are contrasted with costs from possible impediments to the monetary transmission channels. These costs and benefits are quantified using a rich integrated assessment model with incomplete markets and aggregate risk, featuring a green and brown sector of production, asset markets and fiscal and monetary authorities. This allows to evaluate the trade-offs of greening central banks' asset purchases (climate change mitigation vs. impeding monetary transmission mechanisms) as well as to investigate whether a monetary policy focused on the business cycle horizon can be used effectively to address a slow-moving climate change process. The results of GREENQE are of interest to various stakeholders, including foremost central banks as well as governments. If green QE is found to be an effective and not-costly tool it might be used to complement green fiscal policies of national governments and supranationals like the EU commission.

There is now a substantial population of exoplanets with well-determined masses, radii, and orbital parameters in a range of host stellar systems. JWST will bring an increase in exoplanets with atmospheric spectroscopy measurements, moving the field from pure discovery to population synthesis and characterization. Many of the best-studied planetary systems are massive and located within 1AU of their central stars; it is not clear whether all of these planets migrated from farther out in their natal disks to this location or if they could have formed in situ. Both scenarios should produce distinct compositions resulting from multiple strong, time-dependent chemical gradients in their disks due to thermal sublimation and grain processing effects. These effects likely set the bulk chemical composition of the planet’s core and atmosphere, which are accreted from different material in the disk. By determining the physical conditions within 1AU, I will confirm whether they are sufficient to support in situ planet formation. I will also map the distribution of key planetary building blocks in both the solid phase (dust grains) and gas phase. This will be accomplished by interpreting disks’ flux as a function of wavelength with radiative transfer models including detailed sublimation and condensation physics, and comparing observed spectral features in both the solid and gaseous phases in molecular and atomic form to those predicted by models. This project will provide training through research in numerical methods and exoplanet characterization techniques, which are important in the long term for my career goals to lead a research group in planetary formation. Through development courses, I will improve my marketability for senior research positions and in turn transfer my infrared observing skills and US and European network connections to the host. This project increases the visibility of the host and European exoplanetary astronomy on an international scale.