ENART is an integrated research and training programme for innovative knowledge transfer and career development. It will be implemented at the Department of Society and Global Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark (Beneficiary, host of the Incoming Phase), the Department of History of Art at the University of Michigan, USA (Partner Organisation hosting the Outgoing Phase), and SALT, research and exhibition centre in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey (host of the intersectoral Secondment). The interdisciplinary constellation of these organisations and the supervision they provide complements the researcher’s own art-historical formation and endorses her research project in transregional Islamic Art History around which ENART’s comprehensive dissemination and public-engagement activities are built: The research project is entitled “Engagement Art: Regional Islamic and Global Pragmatist Aesthetics”. “Engagement art” is a new concept that this project introduces in order to define a hitherto overlooked approach to art. This approach conceives of art as a practice and medium which is continuous with everyday life. This project asks what ideas informed engagement art and what practical and historical circumstances interfered with its development and actual enactment. To answer these questions the project traces the development of engagement art from its conception in Istanbul in 1909 to its implementation at the Art-Craft Department in Ankara in 1932. Thereby the research centres on the modes of confluence of regional Islamic and global pragmatist aesthetics. Apart from introducing a new concept to Islamic Art History, the project seeks to develop a new method for the study of non-canonical art and strengthen ties between the history of art made in and outside of Europe, as well as between Art History and its subdiscipline Islamic Art History. The aim of the project is to contribute to the development of an art historiography worthy of a diverse and inclusive society.

When speculation becomes the dominant modality of contemporary capitalism, what happens to speculative fiction? What kind of worldbuilding does speculative finance do, and, once we acknowledge its narrative features, how might we use the tools of speculative fiction to intervene in this process? Can speculative fiction help us recognise the ways in which speculative finance takes effect and, from that vantage point, reveal the contradictions of financial speculation and the possibilities that lie hidden within the present? Through close analyses of novels and films, SF-SF explores the degree to which speculative finance and speculative fiction operate according to similar narrative and imaginative strategies, and how they remain distinct. Its purpose is twofold: firstly, it explores how the logic of financialisation relies on fictions whose representations materialise the worlds it envisions. Secondly, it explores a better understanding of how speculative fiction can make legible finance’s fictions and reveal its underlying contradictions. By employing critical literary analysis and symptomatology as methods, SF-SF will thus result in a better understanding of how speculative finance seeks to narrow and constrain the possibilities for the future, and how speculative fiction challenges speculative finance’s ongoing attempt to configure all aspects of political and social life in economic terms.

RightFutures inquires into the ways future-oriented activities shape the political experiences of youths (18-35 yo) who identify with the self-defined ‘Real Right’ in Italy and Chile. RightFutures research question (RQ) asks: “how and why do Youths who identify with the self-defined ‘Real Right’ in Italy and Chile engage with multiple futural orientations through political performances, events, activities, and materialities?”. RightFutures investigates the RQ through three specific objectives, focusing on security and defence, the (dictatorial) past, and the nation. It uses the method of comparative ethnography (data will be collected through participant observation, extended interviews, participatory mapping, and secondary sources). RightFutures will focus on Youths who identify with groups that have inherited the countries’ dictatorial legacies, acknowledging that the existence and practices of these groups become pivotal points used to renew the dictatorial past’s rightfulness. These groups thus preserve, perpetuate, and renew the dictatorial past’s contemporary relevance and permanency within democratic structures. Its innovative contributions are: i) investigating the ‘Real Right’ using a novel analytical focus through a futural temporal perspective; ii) proposing a novel ethnographic comparison between Italy and Chile to explore the global relevance of this topic; and iii) producing novel understandings of the ‘Real Right’ in Italy and Chile.

Disasters differ markedly in their speed and pattern of manifestation, which in turn greatly affects how researchers as well as authorities interpret and respond to them. While theoretical innovations made by disaster researchers over the last century have almost exclusively been developed for the study of large rapid-onset disasters, disaster assessments reveal that elusive and slow-onset disasters affect more people on aggregate. I recently carried out a preliminary study suggesting that slow-onset disasters have primarily been addressed as something ‘other’ than conventional disasters, and have fallen outside of the scope of most disaster studies. We therefore lack theoretical frameworks capable of describing the policy dynamics of slow-onset disasters, largely because existing studies focus on individual slow-onset hazards (e.g. climate change, pandemics or droughts). In this project, I will address this gap by studying the ways in which two types of slow-onset disasters vary through a political response and health policy lens. By contrasting the political response trajectories of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and Ebola I will investigate how incremental slow-onset disasters (such as AMR) differ from cyclical ones (such as Ebola) with implications for policy response. The project will be hosted at Roskilde University (RUC), Denmark. Empirically, the project employs a health sector focus where the global- and EU-level political response to AMR is juxtaposed with the Ebola response using process tracing analysis. This provides both novel insight on how an incremental slow-onset disaster (AMR) differs from a cyclical one (Ebola), as well as new knowledge on the dynamics of AMR and pandemic policymaking. The overarching puzzle and ambition of the action is therefore to understand how different slowonset disasters vary and which implications this variation has for precautionary planning and policy.