The ExId project offers a comprehensive analysis of the European far-right online landscape. Combining cutting-edge computational methods with in-depth qualitative analysis, the team will identify the many online far-right communities present in and across 7 European countries, map their relationships, and expose how these communities, through language and visual imagery, make some socio-political issues salient and construct particular collective identities (both in-groups such as “whites”, “Western civilization” or “Europe”, and out-groups such as “Muslims”, “feminists”, or “multiculturalists”). The team will offer a dynamic analysis of both the evolution of the European far-right online landscape, and its linguistic and visual content, exploring phenomena such as the impact of real-world events on websites’ content or circulation of linguistic/visual tropes across groups. Building on the specific, yet overlapping strengths of its collaborators in Exeter, Dublin, and Copenhagen, the project draws on diverse methodologies to offer a multidisciplinary analysis of the composite and rapidly moving European far-right movement. Through close collaboration between the three participating centres (each with a proven track-record of research on online extremist communications), this project will result in a range of academic publications, two new databases, and engagement with European policymakers and state officials. ExId will thus significantly enhance our understanding of four of the challenges identified in NORFACE’s call: shifting identities and representation, the evolving politics of threat, the democratisation of information, and the changing authority of institutions.

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.

The past persists in material objects, perhaps most profoundly in the bodies of the long-dead and the artefacts associated with them. Such bodies, like those of Richard III and Cervantes, are erupting into view in contemporary Europe with increasing frequency. Whilst offering opportunities for education and the promotion of heritage, such encounters with the dead can also pose unsettling questions about cultural identity, the collective past, and the shape of time. Why do the long-dead become flashpoints of identity for the living? Harnessing the disciplines of literature and archaeology, DEEPDEAD will examine historic and prehistoric encounters with human remains and related artefacts in England and Central Europe in order to shed light on their cultural and social power. Through a series of case studies juxtaposing distinct eras, cultures, and modes of recording the encounter, the project will reveal what is constant and what is locally and historically specific in our ways of interacting with the long-dead. Our research will explore the relationship between long-dead bodies and myths of national or community origin, and the ways in which they have been used to reinforce or challenge historical narratives. The project will thus lead to a better understanding of why these forms of matter provoke such a range of responses, and how stakeholders including archaeologists, curators, policy-makers, and the public might better anticipate and understand the reactions they elicit.

The tenth century is an overlooked moment in European history. It has played an important role as a starting point for the national narratives of modern countries including England and Germany, but is often characterised as a dark age, a century of iron in which the structures of the Carolingian Empire (751-888) collapsed and the map of medieval Europe took shape in the rubble. By rejecting these stories of nations or chaos as starting points for our project, we seek to understand the tenth century on its own terms. Uses of the Past is an ideal theme for this endeavour because the absence of clear administrative or legal structures in our period meant that action in the present often drew authority and legitimacy from claims about the past. The ways that contemporaries chose to use (or not to use) the past - especially the Carolingian past - can be highly instructive to the historian. Focusing on legal, liturgical and historical attitudes to the past will therefore help us recapture the imagined landscapes of tenth-century Europe and to explore it not as a chapter in pre-ordained national narratives but as a case study in transition - an example of how people in the past dealt with crisis and rapid change in the political order. The project will produce academic articles and monographs, but will also attempt to open up the period to a broader audience by providing online resources (including images and translated texts) for teachers and general readers. To accomplish these goals, we will collaborate with schoolteachers and with museums and archives in Germany, Austria, Spain and the UK. As well as these virtual outputs, we will organise a public exhibition of related manuscripts in Catalonia.