This project critically explores the role of music in the construction of human exceptionalism. In modern industrial society, we draw a sharp distinction between ‘humans’ and ‘animals,’ even though evolutionary theory explains that humans are also animals. The starting premise of this project is that the distinction between the human and animal is a cultural construction that partly takes shape through music. I therefore analyse the performative social function of music in shaping our discourse about human-animal distinctions. My case studies are twentieth-century popular artworks that revolve around the boundary between human and non-human life, namely: Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967) and The Little Mermaid (1989); George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949); and the environmental record Songs of the Humpback Whale (1970). My hypothesis is that these artworks employ a Eurocentric notion of ‘music’ to mark the boundaries between nature and culture, body and mind, and communication and art, and as such they delineate what counts as ‘human.’ This project expands existing debates about human exceptionalism in other disciplines. While these debates concentrate on the performative function of language and visual arts, I forge an analytical framework to interrogate how music is used to construct human-animal distinctions.

This project investigated the role of culture, ethnicity and religion in court cases concerning children. Such cases include conflicts between parents in divorce cases, juvenile criminal cases, child protection cases or cases concerning migration or residence permits. For the study, court rulings from various areas of law were examined, and interviews were held with judges, lawyers, employees of child protection agencies and other organisations involved. Parents were also interviewed about their experiences with court cases concerning their children. Finally, file research was done on child protection cases at the courts of Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam.

Much modern Muslim thought, particularly around legal issues, is characterised by an emulation of past perfection, and a dissatisfaction with an imperfect present. Muslim communities and movements (be they radicaland violent or liberal and progressive) usually frame their programmes for change as attempts to preserve, revive and recapture the belief and practice of the past Muslim community. From terrorism which claims to be Islamic (most recently the emergence of Islamic State and the Charlie Hebdo attacks) to the European Sharīʿa law debates, the need for a greater understanding of the pivotal role of historical precedent in the construction of contemporary Muslim thinking is clear. It is this need the Understanding Sharīʿa Project aims to address. The participants, all internationally recognised experts in the study of Islamic law, will create a research base and draw on an international networks of expertise. They will also engage in activities whereby this knowledge can be disseminated to a wider, non-academic audience (including both those within and outside of the Muslim community). Understanding the importance of the perceptions of the past, and the authority drawn from precedent for current Muslim thought and practice is too often misunderstood within the academic community (viewing it sometimes as blind imitation of the past), but more crucially amongst policy makers and the general public. This project aims to make a contribution to raising the level of public debate around these issues by emphasising the creative and future-orientation of modern Muslim understandings of the past. The project is a collaboration of four institution: Universities of Exeter, Leiden, Gottingen and Bergen, and in each institution an established academic (Gleave, Buskens, Schneider and Vikor) will work with a a postdoctoral researcher; they project will meet for both academic and public events every six-months, working with both academics and practitioners.

Protestant Legacies in Nordic Law: Uses of the Past in the Construction of the Secularity of Law (ProNoLa) is relevant to the HERA call by researching the conscious and unconscious uses of the Lutheran and broader Protestant past for the construction and institutionally embedding of norms and values in Nordic secular law. The overarching goal of ProNoLa is to examine relations between Lutheran majority traditions, broader Protestant theology, and the development of secular law in the Nordic region in the course of the last 500 years. Highlighting the numerous ruptures, twists and turns in the relationship between law and secularity, the project aims to provide a more complex, nuanced and critical genealogy of the negotiations of law and religion in the Nordic and German realms. The expected outcome of the research is thus a reformulated grand history about interlinkages between Lutheran and broader Protestant theology within majority and minority churches and the secularity of the law; not only in the historic period until the Enlightenment era, but during subsequent periods into the current re-confessionalisation and internationalization of relations between religions, state and law. ProNoLa is implemented by organizing research symposia with subsequent publications and dissemination concerning four overlapping but distinct historical periods involving transformation processes and turns; taking its point of departure in Lutheran reformation and reaching into a 21st Century religiously pluralist future. Finally, in the fifth turn, Norden meets Europe the re-telling of the grand history is presented and disseminated to a wider academic and non-academic public.