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.

This project (short name, XSPECT) aims to harness the emerging science of the predictive brain to deliver new insights into the nature, scope, mechanisms and (most importantly) the very possibility of conscious experience. The project thus explores and extends the vision of the brain as an inner engine continuously striving to predict the incoming sensory barrage. The key innovation is to consider this increasingly popular vision in the special context of embodied agents able to predict many of their own evolving states and responses – agents able to ‘expect themselves’. These crucial self-expectations span the interoceptive (targeting the internal sensory flows signaling our own physiological states, such as hunger, arousal, itch, and muscular and visceral sensations) and the exteroceptive (targeting the world, and our own behaviors as they might unfold over multiple scales of space and time). XSPECT explores the idea that such interacting states of complex, layered self-prediction hold the key to understanding much that is puzzling about conscious experience. The project is divided into three simultaneously active sub-projects. The first sub-project concerns relations between prediction, motor action, and experience. The second sub-project targets the role of interoceptive prediction in the construction of experience. The third sub-project considers ways in which more reflective forms of conscious experience (involving agency, selfhood, and the introspection of own experiential states) are further enriched by a spiraling array of socially mediated higher-level self-predictions. XSPECT will combine integrative philosophical argument, collaborative experimentation, and leading edge interdisciplinary research and discussion, leveraging two very successful but under-communicating research programs (‘embodied cognition’ and ‘the predictive brain’) to offer new perspectives on the puzzle of conscious experience.