The Asian Monsoon is primarily driven by continent-ocean thermal contrasts, and frequent hydro-meteorological extreme events emphasize that it is affected by recent global climate change in response to increasing atmospheric level of carbon dioxide (pCO2). The medium and longer-timescale effects of circulation changes in the monsoon system control precipitation in continental Asia and, in the past, shaped Eurasian paleoenvironments and biotic evolution. The Asian monsoons have long been thought to have originated ~23 Million years ago, driven by regional uplift. However, recent studies have shown that the monsoons are millions of years more ancient than previously thought and were regionally similar to today during the high pCO2 Eocene Greenhouse episode. These studies open a vast array of new questions: (1) How did these early monsoons evolve through the Eocene? (2) How did they react to the numerous, short-term hyperthermal and hypothermal pCO2 events that ruled this period? This research project proposes to address these issues by focusing on three key sedimentary records in the Eocene monsoonal realm: in China, Myanmar, and Turkey. After refining the local stratigraphy through U/Pb geochronology of volcanic deposits, the three records will be investigated with respect to different geochemical and mineralogical paleoclimatic proxies. Elemental geochemistry and clay mineralogy will help to understand the evolution of seasonality and precipitation; stable and clumped isotope analyses on pedogenic carbonates and soil organic matter will document past rainfall amount, temperature and pCO2 variations; U/Pb dating on aeolian dust deposits will allow the reconstruction of past wind patterns. The resulting findings will document the short- and long-term variations of the monsoons during the Eocene, and in light of modern global climate change, will furnish the basis for a substantial advance in our understanding of monsoonal forcing factors in a warmer, high-pCO2 world.

This research proposes to examine what comprises 'opinion' in today's world of instantaneous communication. How, might it be said, does thought lapse into opinion? It is an urgent question in a time when the world, with its modes of global interconnection and digital platforms, is so heavily characterized by chaotic political debate and image proliferation. The project aims to develop, by reinterpreting select German scholarship, a philosophical, social and critical theory of what it means to articulate and lay claims of perspective, belief and attitude within the contours of twenty-first century social communication. I will argue that a social ontology of 'opinion' requires two distinct levels of analysis: on the one hand, there is a macro level, whereby the broad contours and determinations of opinion are examined as inherently caught up in what Theodor W. Adorno calls the 'Halbbildung' of industrial culture and the institution of public opinion as a development of modern society. On the other hand, utilizing what G.W.F. Hegel calls 'picture-thinking', there is a micro level, whereby a particular epistemic structure adequate to this social situation emerges with its own patterns and forms of validation adapted to the structures of digital communication technologies. Together, these approaches will comprise a social and philosophical reconstruction of ?opinion? characteristic of social communication today. The project can be situated within social and philosophical context whose line of investigation incorporates the discourses of epistemology, cultural and political theory and intellectual history. By formulating a philosophy of opinion, I aim to provide vital new insight into how and why this distinctive epistemological structure of thought has become ever more pervasive in our 'post-truth' society.

About 30 per cent of the world’s population are children. Children are not only the most important people for their parents, but also the future of our societies. Providing them with the best possible education is of inestimable importance. Which education is best, however, is a question that is continually being negotiated. For a long time, this question was answered primarily by national governments. For some years, however, ongoing processes of globalisation are significantly shaping education, leading to what scholars term the global turn in education. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have become core actors in this global turnaround. They are increasingly joining forces in education-related transnational networks (i.e., global non-governmental spaces) that express an obvious claim to influence schools and education systems worldwide. Hence, questions arise about the associated risks and benefits for schools, particularly with regard to education's role in promoting educational achievement and equal opportunity among students from different backgrounds. However, despite this increasing relevance scholars have neglected to investigate transnational networks of NGOs in the field of education. EmergEd aims to drastically improve scientific knowledge on NGOs in education by analysing the emergence of global non-governmental spaces in education and how they influence education systems and schools – a contribution from which a far-reaching scientific – and in the long run societal – impact is to be expected. It will do so by developing an inter-disciplinary methodology integrating (inferential) Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Discourse Network Analysis (DNA), alongside qualitative data analysis based on Grounded Theory, to contribute to further theory building. This methodology is highly innovative as it draws theories and methods from different disciplines together in novel ways and thus follows an approach at and beyond the frontiers of disciplines.

Rhythm perception is important for a wide range of higher cognitive abilities ranging from time perception to predicting the occurrence of future events, from perceiving language to dancing to the beat of the music. Despite considerable amount of research in rhythm in various scientific disciplines, the way the human mind perceives and produces rhythm is not fully understood. While many interdisciplinary studies look at how performance in one cognitive domain compares to performance in another, it has proven difficult to link the mechanisms for rhythm perception across perceptual and cognitive domains directly. This project therefore looks how rhythm in music and spoken language interact by relying on rhythm synchronization: i.e. the phenomenon that our mind tends to automatically synchronize our motor-activity to the rhythm we perceive auditory (e.g. tapping a finger to the beat of music, the gestures that accompany speech, and singing). Because rhythm in spoken language and music is shaped by experience with culture specific music and our native language, in addition to adults, this project also studies young infants from birth through the crucial early stages of vocal and motor development. The studies in this project rely on a combination of acoustic analyses and electrophysiological methods (sEGM) to determine how rhythm in language and music is synchronized, how synchronization unfolds in time and how differences in rhythm in the two domains affect rhythm synchronization. By looking at similarities and differences in the rhythm of spoken language and music, the project attempts to create a blue-print of the shared and domain-specific cognitive mechanisms necessary for rhythm processing. Because we are surrounded by rhythm in our everyday life, the study of rhythm synchronization can thus help us understand how different rhythms interact and how they influence our daily life and our behaviour.

This is a project for higher education student and staff mobility between Programme Countries and Partner Countries. Please consult the website of the organisation to obtain additional details.