More than two decades of intense radical religion research since 9/11 has brought attention to radicalisation, violence, and radical beliefs, and a strong emphasis on Islam in the contemporary era. Yet, radical religion is as burning an issue for societies today as ever, and individuals persist in staying committed. Strong, individual commitment shapes any form of radical religion, but it is rarely studied empirically, let alone historically. RADHEART ambitiously proposes to analyse how strong individual commitment is expressed and cultivated in ancient forms of Judaism and Christianity. Strong, religious commitment is approached as radical habits of the heart, i.e. emic models of the self’s felt experience of strong commitment. With an innovative theoretical framework that combines the aesthetics of religion and experience-oriented anthropology, RADHEART focuses on how an emotionally intense, strong religious commitment is expressed in and cultivated by ancient media. RADHEART offers high-gain insights by 1) comparing radical habits of the heart across the two ancient religions that were most seminal for later formations, 2) reframing the study of radical ancient religion by tackling the pervasive vocabulary of interior organs and the body in ancient poetry and narratives about strong commitment, and 3) instead of focusing on beliefs, terms, and conceptual reflections, RADHEART scrutinises the roles of the embodied self and emotionality in radical religion. Research has focused on the collective character of ancient religions, disregarding the crucial role of individual strong commitment and it has seen ancient emotions as lacking in affectivity. RADHEART breaks with these trends and enquires into strong, individual religious commitment in two media forms: poetry and narrative. RADHEART asks how they express and model strong commitment and how they affect their audiences across the axes of textuality, mediality, and practice.

WarEffects aims to advance a systematic, nuanced, and rigorous understanding of how civil wars affect women’s social and political empowerment at the local level. Recent quantitative research suggests that civil wars promote women’s political representation, but these accounts reflect country-level aggregate measures and often focus on a minority of political ‘elite’ women. Thus, they do not inform us how subnational and individual-level variation in civil war experiences affect the majority of ‘non-elite’ women at the local level. To address this challenge, I propose a novel theoretical framework that simultaneously explores the effects of civil wars on i) multiple dimensions of women’s empowerment in the household and family, the community, and local politics. Moreover, I introduce ii) nuanced definitions for different types of exposure to civil wars, iii) the difference between changes in gender roles and gender attitudes, and iv) the moderating effect of context conditions. Building on the variation of each of these four dimensions allows me to generate a large set of hypotheses to advance a systematic and nuanced understanding of when, why, and how civil wars promote women’s empowerment, and when they do not. To empirically explore these hypotheses, I will combine novel quantitative survey experiments and qualitative research in Colombia, DR Congo, and Sri Lanka. While each country case has experienced several decades of civil war, there is significant within-case and between-case variation in social context, conflict dimensions, patterns of violence, and conflict status, rendering them ideal for exploring the local effects of civil war violence on women’s empowerment. Drawing on this comparative design will allow me to make statements about common patterns, divergences, and conditional effects. Altogether, this wealth of findings will establish a new conceptual and empirical research platform on the impact of civil wars on gender relations.

Cold spells, heatwaves and droughts have severe socio-economic impacts and are related to a peculiar phenomenon known as ‘atmospheric blocking’. Accurate and timely prediction of blocking frequency and strength is therefore of enormous importance. However, despite decades of research, climate models still exhibit substantial errors in blocking, leading to large uncertainties in seasonal-to-decadal predictions and future projections of blocking trends. At the root of this is the lack of a fundamental theory for blocking and an appropriate metric to identify blocks. A recent theoretical breakthrough offers an exciting path forward by drawing an analogy between blocking in the atmosphere to traffic jams on a highway. The traffic jam – blocking theory, which is based on the conservation properties of large-amplitude nonlinear waves, has led to a conceptual simplification of why blocks occur. Leveraging the promise shown by this new theory, ATM BLOCKING will provide the first-ever assessment of the key dynamical drivers of blocking errors and trends in the state-of-the-art global climate models. The success of ATM BLOCKING will offer a new theoretical basis for evaluating the performance of climate models in simulating blocks, with an unprecedented ability to pinpoint the responsible atmospheric processes across timescales. Down the road, these results will help policy makers and stakeholders to prepare for risks associated with climate change and weather extremes. The project proposes to address the problem using a combination of theory, numerical modeling and statistical analysis at University of Bergen, Norway in close collaboration with the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research under the supervision of leading experts in climate dynamics, climate modeling and weather extremes. In addition, the researcher’s own expertise in the theory of blocking will ensure the success of the project while facilitating two-way knowledge transfer between the researcher and the host.

DISCRETION aims to unlock the black box of discretionary decision-making in child protection cases by a comparative-empirical study of how discretionary decisions are made and justified in the best interests of the child. There are huge research gaps in this important area of the welfare state, with a great deal of uncertainty concerning how, when and why discretionary decisions about the child´s best interests are different between decision-makers within and between child protection systems. The main objectives for this project are to reveal the mechanisms for exercising discretion, and improve the understanding of the principle of the child´s best interests. These objectives will be reached by systematically examining the role of institutional, organisational and individual factors including regulations of best interest principles; professions involved; type of courts; type of child protection system; demographic factors and individual values; and the populations’ view on children and paternalism. DISCRETION employs an innovative methodological approach, with multilevel and cross-country studies. DISCRETION will, by conducting the largest cross-national study on decision-making in child protection to date, lift our understanding of international differences in child protection to a new level. By conducting randomized survey experiments with both decision-makers in the system and the general population, DISCRETION generates unique data on the causal mechanisms explaining differences in discretionary decisions. The outcomes of DISCRETION are important because societies are at a crossroad when it comes to how children are treated and how their rights are respected, which creates tensions in the traditional relationship between the family and the state. DISCRETION will move beyond the field of child protection and provide important insights into the exercise of discretion in all areas where the public interest as well as national interest must be interpreted.