This innovative project adopts a holistic approach to understanding the dynamics of inequality across the life-course. We analyze how education, labor market and family choices interact to structure accumulated advantage and disadvantage over the life course. Using panel data from five EU countries for over 20 years and cutting-edge statistical methods, including multichannel sequence analysis, we take a comparative approach to exploring how cross-country economic and institutional differences affect inequality outcomes and life courses. Early adulthood is a crucial period of transition where people face multiple choices - about education, jobs, partnerships and childbearing – determining future life. We focus on key turning points, examine their interrelation and explore the cumulative impact on individual and group inequalities. Focusing on transitions during early adulthood, into education, jobs and family formation, we address the following project call themes: “Labor market and family trajectories and the growth of inequality,” “Early adult transitions into tertiary education, vocational training and economic activity” and “Early life influence and outcomes.” The research team of the PI, four CIs, postdoctoral fellows and PGR students will meet regularly and provides appropriate leadership, skills, and capacity building. Academic impact will be achieved by going beyond the state-of-the-art, the research producing new empirical findings and contributing to theory building. Potential for policy impact is high. We will establish early contact with key national and EU stakeholders and engage through meetings, the media, research briefings and social media.

Far from being a recent phenomenon, our notion of depression is the late 19th century successor of something that has been studied for around two thousand years: melancholy. Contemporary problems surrounding our notion of depression call for an evaluation of these studies on melancholy. Two aspects integral to the traditional understanding of melancholy have been lost in the recent translation from melancholy to depression: 1. The embeddedness of melancholy in human nature. From Galen onwards, melancholy was thought to be caused by a substance that was in itself a normal part of our constitution, but that needed to be adequately managed. This made it possible to conceptualize melancholy as something that is both natural and in need of careful management because of its potential harmfulness. 2. The capacities associated with melancholy. Throughout its history, melancholy was associated not only with the decrease of certain capacities, but also with the enhancement of specific, other capacities. I propose to study melancholy in ancient and medieval thought between Galen and the Renaissance (roughly from the end of the 2nd until the 15th century) from the perspective of these two aspects, in order to contribute to our contemporary understanding of mild depression.

How European welfare states will develop is hard to predict. Peoples current aspirations, ideas and assumptions will be important drivers of change and persistence and of the extent to which conflict and solidarity surround change. This project uses innovative methods (deliberative democratic forums, a qualitative cross-national focus group survey) to develop understanding of peoples aspirations for the Europe their children will inhabit. The interactive and discursive methods proposed deal directly with peoples ideas, but are rarely used in comparative welfare studies. The project is essentially forward-looking. It will contribute to theoretical work on the main cleavages and solidarities driving social policy in different European welfare states and to more practical consideration of the parameters of acceptable policy change. It will supply new findings relevant to the politics and sociology of welfare and provide data for reanalysis and as a base-line in future studies. The team has led major cross-national projects and will press home findings in national and EU-level policy debate.

Since the 1990s scholars of early modern Europe have convincingly demonstrated the resilience of the European nobility’s political influence over time. Yet they continue to approach the ‘family’ as an irrational social system for the exercise of power. This project turns that assumption on its head and explores the crucial importance of the wider family for the exercise and transmission of power. Using a conceptual framework developed in business studies, I will explore the ‘corporate culture’ of the Nassau family in the period 1550-1815 and, in doing so, develop a new model for writing dynastic history. The working hypothesis of ‘The Nassaus’ is that the Nassau dynasty cultivated a corporate culture as a family, which in the most ideal circumstances: 1) created continuity and loyalty, 2) ensured the transmission of social, cultural and economic capital, and 3) facilitated the transmission of important networks. Conversely, failure to integrate all voices of the family beneficiaries in this corporate culture jeopardized the future of the dynasty. To test this hypothesis, I will explore the corporate strategies that the Nassaus developed and deployed for the transmission of power, property, titles, know-how, religion and networks, and ask why and under what circumstances these strategies contributed, or failed to contribute, to the long-term survival of the different Nassau branches. ‘The Nassaus’ is innovative in adopting the concept of corporate culture as a new model to understand princely power in the early modern period, taking a long-term transnational perspective with attention to the ‘dead ends’ rather than just presenting the family as a Dutch ‘success’, and deploying little-used source material in a new way to explore the dynasty’s failures and successes.

‘I don’t feel love for my partner anymore: can I trust this feeling, or do I feel this way because of my depression?’ ‘Does my medication allow me to be myself, or am I just drugging myself to function better?’ Questions like these are omnipresent in psychiatry. For psychiatric disorders precisely pertain to how a person feels, thinks, perceives, and/or acts. This opens up the question of which thoughts and feelings are genuine expressions of me, and which are expressions of my disorder. As treatment is directed at those very same experiences, a parallel question arises here: is my medication only suppressing my symptoms, or is it (subtly) altering me? And: how can I tell? While such questions are taken from psychiatric practice, they bear directly on philosophical issues and theories. For what does it mean to ‘be oneself’? Is there even such a thing as being ‘an authentic self’? This project aims to develop an innovative philosophical, empirically sound theory of authenticity in psychiatry by combining philosophical analysis with qualitative research on the experiences of people who suffer from Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Specifically, the project will (1) investigate MDD patients’ experiences of ‘ownness’ and ‘alienness’ with regard to their disorder and their treatment, (2) analyse philosophical theories of authenticity for dynamic, relational subjects and explore what a relational take on authenticity implies for the possibility of socially supported or ‘scaffolded’ authenticity, and (3) assess the implications of the concepts developed in (2) in the psychiatric context. Various clinical studies have established that questions of authenticity are a major concern to psychiatric patients. What is lacking, however, is a comprehensive account of the problem of authenticity in psychiatry that addresses these concerns. By providing such an account, this project aims to contribute to better mental healthcare.