Following the outbreak of the 2011 Syrian war, the migrant crisis has served as a litmus test for European integration. In the following years, Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have triggered mobility, food, and energy crises in Europe and beyond. However, new opportunities have also arisen, such as growing cooperation among EU member states, the EU-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement, and the Christchurch Call.NECOTE - New Challenges and Opportunities in a Transforming Europe provides a unique learning opportunity to students of Victoria University of Wellington and wider society in the country’s capital and political centre. Led by a European politics expert, NECOTE covers key themes, including: the EU’s history; challenges of European integration and migration; climate action; promotion of democracy in the rules-based world order; and EU-New Zealand relations. The project comprises:1.An undergraduate and a graduate course that will attract students beyond political science, law, and economics2.3 guest lectures by diplomats from the Delegation of the EU to New Zealand and the French Embassy3.6 guest lectures by EU studies scholars from New Zealand and Europe4.Study visits to the Delegation of the EU to New Zealand5.Research papers co-written with students6.A website to disseminate the module’s activities 7.A pedagogy roundtable on the teaching, learning, and research of sensitive topics pertaining to EU affairs, which will result in a special issue8.6 public talks on EU-New Zealand relations by diplomats and scholars 9.2 media articlesNECOTE advances EU studies by: (1) creating the first Jean Monnet module at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand’s top research university; (2) bringing scholars, students, diplomats, and wider society together; and (3) improving students’ career prospects by honing their critical thinking and networking skills, and enhancing their comprehension of EU-New Zealand relations.

EU – CIEMBLY addresses the need for the introduction of new forms of citizens’ participation and deliberation in EU political life and, particularly, an EU Citizens’ Assembly whose design and implementation fully addresses issues of intersectionality, inclusiveness, and equality. While there has been an admirable appetite to improve the landscape of participatory and deliberative democratic mechanisms at the EU level, this has not always been accompanied by adequate considerations of how to build these mechanisms to ensure avoidance of intersectional discrimination and the exclusion of vulnerable groups of citizens. In fact, the concept of ‘intersectionality’ within EU law has presented difficulties even without bringing into the picture the context of citizens’ democratic participation. The time is ripe to create a new participatory tool with intersectionality at the forefront. This project will provide the analytical framework and the prototype through which such a tool can be created in the form of a Citizens’ Assembly that can be established at the EU level and with features allowing for the transfer of a (modified) prototype to the national and local levels of EU Member States. To do this, the project moves from theorising to evaluating and finally piloting such a tool and concludes with recommendations. In this way, EU-CIEMBLY seeks to be the first project that uses an academic and theoretical understanding of issues of intersectionality, equality, and power relations in the design of an innovative and inclusive EU Citizens’ Assembly.

The Trafficking Transformations Project will use an innovative, multidisciplinary, object-centred framework to investigate the physical and contextual changes that illicit criminogenic collectables undergo during the trafficking process in three transnational criminal markets: antiquities, rare wildlife, and fossils. It will explore the socio-economic effects of the trafficked objects on participants in international criminal networks. It will transform organised crime research by shifting the focus of trafficking research away from criminals and networks of criminals toward following the objects of desire. Prior approaches to trafficking research cast trafficking as an interface between organised crime (people moving the objects) and white-collar crime (affluent people receiving goods); objects were not considered social agents in these networks. Trafficking Transformations pushes the boundaries of mainstream criminology, proposing an innovative object-centred understanding of trafficking networks, and exploring the ultimate question: How do objects cause crimes? The project will use object biography, a multi-sited ethnography technique, to investigate the influences and transformations of trafficked criminogenic collectables in international illicit markets. Through data collection at multiple sites along trafficking pathways, the transformations of criminogenic collectables, the networks that they create, and the people they influence will form a narrative, a biography of trafficking. This will reveal the hidden lives of illicit commodities prior to their appearance as objects of conspicuous consumption in public markets, and holds the prospect of destabilising existing assumptions about the formulation, maintenance, and disruption of transnational criminal networks, transforming our understanding of organised crime.

The objective of the AENEAS project is to develop a concept and design for a distributed, federated European Science Data Centre (ESDC) to support the astronomical community in achieving the scientific goals of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The scientific potential of the SKA radio telescope is unprecedented and represents one of the highest priorities for the international scientific community. By the same token, the large scale, rate, and complexity of data the SKA will generate, present challenges in data management, computing, and networking that are similarly world-leading. SKA Regional Centres (SRC) like the ESDC will be a vital resource to enable the community to take advantage of the scientific potential of the SKA. Within the tiered SKA operational model, the SRCs will provide essential functionality which is not currently provisioned within the directly operated SKA facilities. AENEAS brings together all the European member states currently part of the SKA project as well as potential future EU SKA national partners, the SKA Organisation itself, and a larger group of international partners including the two host countries Australia and South Africa.