The WARINA project will analyse some fictional, autobiographical, and diaristic texts that represent characters who are unable to act, or who can only act for the worse, that is, perform what in this project will be called “negative action”. The project poses a special focus on how “inaction” and “negative action” activate different stereotypes about social categories such as race, gender, and social class. Its driving belief is that the study of fiction and life writing (autobiographies and diaries) will provide new insights into politically charged representations of inaction or negative action, results that will be achieved by the application of an interdisciplinary theoretical grid, combining literary theory, the social sciences, and cultural psychology. The concepts of inaction/negative action have not been studied as general topics in literature: they tend to be connected to specific authorial poetics, or to great cultural narratives. What is missing is a study of the specific ways in which rhetorical strategies represent and thus create images of inaction and negative action. This study will be conducted in close dialogue with social sciencists and social psychologists' research on agency. In particular, research objects will focus on 1) the use of cognitive metaphors to define what “action” and “inaction” are, and the implementation of metaphors of place that connect a certain place with inaction; 2) the study of emotions from a constructivist point of view, that is, with the aim of understanding how the same emotion can be represented either as being conducive to action, or to inaction, even in the same text; 3) the close observation of the ways in which characters or authors build their life narratives by selecting salient events, relationships, and media products. The corpus’s texts stem from the first half of the Twentieth century, a period whose culture informs some of the terms related the agency that are still in use today.

This project in global diplomatic and colonial history aims to explain how Southeast Asian Sultans’ ideas and perspectives influenced colonial relations in c. 1750-1920. The project’s comparative method focuses on three courts in maritime Southeast Asia (Sulu, Johor, and Mataram) that offer compelling parallels and divergences in their interaction with European colonial powers. The project analyses specific key terms and phrases in manuscripts written and collected at the courts, that reflect on crucial aspects of rulers’ political priorities, ideas and motivations. Building on the applicant’s prior research experience, the research innovatively then uses recent advancements in archival digitization and automatic handwritten text recognition technology, which is applied to trace variations and translations of the key terms and phrases in colonial archival records, primarily the rulers’ correspondence and treaties with colonial powers. By automatically identifying and comparing how Southeast Asian terminology reverberated in the archives and knowledge production of the British, Dutch and Spanish colonial empires in Southeast Asia, the project uncovers the potential influences of local ideas on processes and practices of diplomatic interaction, treaty-making and, thus, on the vocabulary and legal frameworks of European colonial empires. In doing so, the project challenges established paradigms that prioritize European colonial frameworks as the sources of political organization in colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia. It contributes to growing strands of global history that reveal the influence of non-European actors, practices and knowledge within global frameworks. This encourages more polyvocal and less Eurocentric perspectives in public debate and history writing to clarify the long-term consequences of colonialism and its impact on international relations and current socio-political fabrics, identities and conflicts in and beyond Southeast Asia.

The project ‘NIPROFEED’ delves into the vital interplay between primary producers, nitrogen fixation, and particle dynamics in aquatic ecosystems. Primary producers play a crucial role in capturing roughly one third of excess carbon dioxide and converting it into organic particles, central to the ocean's biological pump. This process, however, contributes to oxygen depletion as sinking particles lead to organic matter respiration and subsequent deoxygenation of bottom waters. Diazotrophs, specialised microbes capable of nitrogen fixation, provide a significant portion of nitrogen input into oceans, supporting primary production. NIPROFEED introduces the hypothesis that diazotrophs supplying nitrogen to primary producers can amplify particle formation, initiating a positive feedback loop that impacts carbon export and oxygen levels. To explore this feedback loop, NIPROFEED will employ cutting-edge techniques, including high-throughput sequencing, single-cell rate measurements and biogeochemical modelling. This will unravel the composition and functional role of free-living and particle-bound diazotrophs, shedding light on their contribution to nitrogen/carbon fixation. By implementing these parameters into an integrated model the intricate relationship between nitrogen fixation and primary productivity will be investigated. Addressing this hypothesis, NIPROFEED aspires not only contribute significantly to scientific advancements in the field of marine science but also aligns with EU sustainability goals by shedding light on climate change impacts on our ocean.