Think – Construct – Network
The Constructive Advanced Thinking (CAT) initiative was founded in 2019 within NetIAS (Network of European Institutes for Advanced Study) and has now entered its fourth round of calls for applications. Time to take stock.
The idea evolved in October 2018 at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study and was based on two objectives: to foster networks of excellent early career researchers dedicated to developing new ideas and to understand and tackle current or emerging societal challenges. Saadi Lahlou, director of the Paris IAS, explains how it developed:
“CAT is the result of a constructive compromise and the collective intelligence of our institutes. I was eager to add to the main model of the “open call” of the Paris IAS a call oriented towards addressing societal issues. The criteria were that the programme is low cost, technically feasible in terms of logistics and appealing to participating institutes. In its first version (October 2018), the goals were to explore new problems with an open mind and fast-track the future EU elite and elite networks of researchers.”
Based on successful experiences at other institutes, participation in the programme was restricted to early career researchers and a short duration of the research stays, combined with a long project duration. “This led to very interesting features that should be food for thought when launching future programmes, as they all go in the direction of less administration, less formality, more flexibility and more collegiality,” says Saadi Lahlou, summing up their efforts. The idea was tested among a few NetIAS institutes to see if it was viable, and the programme was then launched in the spring of 2019.
The CAT programme is designed for groups of three to five early career researchers of any discipline with less than ten years’ experience after earning a doctorate, including doctoral researchers. In any case, the principal investigator (team leader) must have a stable position for the duration of the project. The groups can include a representative of a stakeholder organization related to the theme of the project. In order to engage in fruitful discussions and mature their ideas, the groups are given the opportunity to meet for short stays (i.e. a maximum of two weeks) in different participating institutes and to engage with their fellows and local research communities. Projects can last up to three years (subject to positive mid-term evaluation).
Challenges – Ideas – Funded Projects
Since the start of the programme, ten interdisciplinary CAT groups have been selected, their topics ranging from reshaping European cities and (anti-)corruption concepts, to light as a key predictor of health, conditions at nursing homes as well as negative attitudes towards inoculation (the latter already selected in 2019 – well before the pandemic). Brilliant minds from across the globe have built research teams around emerging societal challenges. In the latest call for applications, in 2021, the following two innovative young ideas were selected:
“Challenges for the development of fair language-based assessments of health, education, behaviour, and beyond”
Project team: Damian Blasi (PI – Harvard University, USA – Max Plank Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany – Higher School of Economics, Russia), Joseph P. Dexter (Harvard University, USA), Amber Gayle Thalmayer (University of Zurich, Switzerland), Adolfo Martin Garcia (University of Santiago de Chile, Chile)
CAT project “Challenges for the development of fair language-based assessments of health, education, behaviour, and beyond”
Linguistic behaviour serves as a reliable, cheap and increasingly automated resource to assess different aspects of individuals and societies, ranging from education to health and cognitive states. Speech samples might help detect incipient health issues, newspaper corpora are used to reveal what we collectively think about minority groups and wordlists are the basis on which we determine verbal development – among a vast number of examples. However, these developments – which we label language-based assessments or LanBAs – were devised, tested and deployed primarily only on a handful of large and commercially central languages, with English dominating the scene. Since the 6,500 extant languages can and do vary substantially (and in every dimension), transferring LanBAs from English to them is often fraught with important technical and linguistic challenges, which might not be appreciated by practitioners in need of them. The consequences of this bias, which we are only just starting to understand, is that speakers and signers of minority languages have at their disposal more expensive, less efficient and potentially biased LanBAs.
The project addresses this complex and multifaceted issue by gathering a diverse set of experts covering cognitive neuroscience, digital humanities, comparative linguistics, developmental science and cultural psychology with three main tracks of activity. First, it critically synthesizes the scientific evidence revealing the Anglophone bias in LanBAs, aiming at finding differences and commonalities across our fields of practice. Second, it engages policymakers, experts on language technologies and other non-academic agents with the purpose of building a clear course of action to transfer findings into practical recommendations amenable to impacting the current state of the art in the development of LanBAs. Third, it engages with the general audience through diverse media strategies, including filming a short documentary on the topic of the group visits to the different IAS.
“Screening European Populisms (2008-2020): Audiovisual Fiction, Social Media and Political Affect.”
Project team: Valerio Coladonato (PI – Sapienza University of Rome, Italy), Marc Guinjoan (University of Barcelona, Spain), Dom Holdaway (University of Urbino, Italy), Elena Pilipets (University of Klagenfurt, Austria – University NOVA Lisbon, Portugal), Lidia Valera Ordaz (University of Valencia, Spain)
CAT project “Screening European Populisms (2008-2020): Audiovisual Fiction, Social Media and Political Affect.”
Populist forces have recently transformed the political landscape in Europe, challenging the legitimacy of institutions and representational systems. Frequently aligned with reactionary – sometimes explicitly post-fascist – platforms, these actors emphasize ethnonationalist and exclusionary societal views. The mainstream media, politicians and migrants are demonized, and mistrust in the system is a widely circulated currency. Affect plays a central role in the success of this worldview – such as anger at perceived victimization and loss of social status, resentment against elites and attachment to leaders who “bravely” defy political correctness. Populist affect is now also inseparable from our digital media environment; while citizen access to political discourse has grown, their interactions are increasingly shaped by their respective ideological and affective communities.
Narrative work is a crucial element of populist mobilization, yet the role of audiovisual fiction in these processes remains significantly understudied: grasping this relationship is necessary in order to disentangle populisms’ capacity to transform affect into democratic erosion. From the citizen’s perspective, political affect and audiovisual fiction spread through an uninterrupted flow – but due to disciplinary fragmentation, scholarship often tackles isolated parts of the experience and misses the whole picture. The project aims to trace and reconnect the different dimensions of the process by analyzing narrative and stylistic aspects of films and TV series in a number of Western European countries and tracing their reception, interactions and appropriations in social media content and online political conversations. The project will focus on the impact and circulation of key case studies in a number of Western European countries between the onset of the 2008 financial crisis and Brexit. The collaboration of scholars in film, TV, digital media and political sciences, as well as two organizations working in political participation and in media literacy (SALTO Participation & Information; Media & Learning Association), will enable a better understanding of the role of fiction in creating and spreading populist affect in this political conjuncture.
CATs visiting the Zukunftskolleg
After the COVID-19 pandemic had slowed down group visits to the institutes, 2022 saw a considerable increase in research visits, with 18 taking place within the network, two of them at the Zukunftskolleg.
In April 2022, we welcomed the Constructive Advanced Thinking (CAT) group of Gørill Haugan (Trondheim, Norway), Suvi-Maria Saarelainen (Helsinki, Finland), Helena Larsson (Kristianstad, Sweden) and Jessie Dezutter (Leuven, Belgium) to the Zukunftskolleg.
They spent their time working to advance their project, but also to exchange with members of the Zukunftskolleg.
They had already presented their project “Unravelling existential suffering and its relation to depression in older adults: EXIST-well in nursing homes” in April 2021 at the Jour fixe. Their research focuses on challenges for nursing home professionals facing older patients with existential concerns due to loss of autonomy and cognitive and physical capabilities. These are also risk factors for developing geriatric depression. Although the correlation between symptoms of geriatric depression and existential concerns seen in nursing home residents is obvious, a viable connection between the two topics still lacks. In their research, they want to introduce an interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between existential loneliness and depression in nursing home patients and implement this in psycho-educational training for nursing home professionals. The work is based on the perspectives of both nursing home residents and nursing home professionals.
“The time together was very fruitful for us,” reports the group. “Without the stays, we would not be able to conduct this project. Each stay encourages us to take time to discuss, think, concretize ideas and refine our studies. Conducting the studies remains a challenge since we have no personnel working on this study, but the vibe and energy is so stimulating that each of us carves out time to conduct them. We also involve our doctoral researchers and master’s students, if they are interested, which offers them possibilities to enter into contact with international scholars as well.
We would like to thank you for the great welcome and the perfect organization. We fully enjoyed our stay here and feel encouraged and motivated to continue our project. The stay in Konstanz, as in Paris, provided us with new and fresh long-term ideas that do not easily evolve when we are in the daily rat race at our universities.
We highly value the programme and are grateful to be part of it!”
You can find here an overview of the group’s schedule during their stay.
Monday, 25 April:
Morning: Meet-and-greet with the ZuKo Central Office and discussion with the team.
Afternoon: Data analysis discussion of the study where Suvi is taking the lead (Study 5 IPA Chaplains) and agreement on how to proceed.
Tuesday, 26 April:
Morning: Discussion of the systematic review of meaning in late life and the scoping review on existential isolation, where Jessie is taking the lead (Study 1 and 2). Agreement on how to proceed and what we have already learnt. Conceptual discussion on how the phenomena are related, based on our current findings.
Afternoon: Lab visit with Sarah Stoll, explanation of all experiments and very interesting Q&A. Jour fixe with the fellows. Discussion with the CAT team on how the semi-automated content analysis (as explained at the Jour Fixe presentation) might help us in our systematic reviews or later in the qualitative studies. Follow-up discussion in the evening with the team.
Wednesday, 27 April:
Morning: Data analysis discussion of the qualitative study on existential loneliness, where Helena is taking the lead (Study 4 In-depth qualitative study EL). Discussion of the concepts and the data analysis technique. First findings. Agreement on how to proceed.
Lunch: Lunch with the fellows; several engaging and interesting talks on a broad range of topics.
Afternoon: Very engaging and stimulating talk with Dr Richter on our project and related topics (e.g. tiredness of life as a topic in Germany, care and treatment of NH residents in Germany, psychotherapy for very elderly individuals, etc). Sarah facilitated the meeting with Dr Richter in a very professional and attentive way (translation issues, change of plans due to the testing needed). Brief talk with one of the fellows, Abena Yalley.
Thursday, 28 April:
Morning: Private time for work with the home universities.
Afternoon: Walk and discussion within the CAT team on how to manage a lab, how to supervise doctoral students in a qualitative manner, how to maintain a healthy work-life balance, international mobility.
Friday, 29 April:
Morning: Discussion on the next steps that need to be taken for the ongoing studies and for the new studies (Study 3 In-depth qualitative study MIL; Study 6 & 7 Nurses and psychologists); discussion of the timeline for the studies and who will be involved, discussion of author order and involvement for the upcoming manuscripts, planning the stay in Paris (what will we have achieved by then and what will be present, a daily schedule has been drafted), discussion of which international conferences we can attend as a group (and submit symposia abstracts for), discussion of possibilities for applications for funding based on the CAT project.
Afternoon: Follow-up talk with Abena Yalley (for Gorill), individual work on the CAT studies (for Suvi, Helena and Jessie).
Two months after the visit by Jessie and her CAT group, the Zukunftskolleg was able to welcome Valerio Coladonato’s group for the kick-off meeting of their CAT project “Screening European Populisms (2008-2020): Audiovisual Fiction, Social Media and Political Affect”. The team members present in Konstanz were: Valerio Coladonato, Dominic Holdaway, Lidia Valera Ordaz; Elena Pilipets attended remotely. The group was joined by Maia Klasseen as the representative of one of the two stakeholder organizations of the project, SALTO Participation & Information.
“This launch visit was extremely helpful and productive thanks to the warm welcome and collaborative approach of everyone we had the chance to interact with at the Zukunftskolleg – for which we are really grateful. Through a number of formal and informal conversations, and thanks to the collegial and rigorous feedback we received, we were able to focus on several key issues and questions that needed refining, as well as gain momentum in the definition of the interdisciplinary methodology (which was the main aim of this first research stay).
The research stay was also a particularly important time for team building, as it represented the first opportunity for several team members to meet in person. We would like to thank the Zukunftskolleg and in particular Maria Zhukova for all their support, as well as all the fellows we interacted with. These days gave us plenty of ideas to work on, and we hope to get the chance to share the future results of our project with the academic community in Konstanz!”
Here is an overview of the group’s activities during their stay.
Monday, 20 June:
First informal presentation and work meeting (in attendance: Gruia Bãdescu, Anne Ganzert, Malinka Pila, Evgenia Steinberg, Maria Zhukova). We received feedback on the methodological approach, particularly on how to integrate further geographic/cultural areas, and on how to select the appropriate disciplinary skills to add to the ones already present in the team.
Tuesday, 21 June:
Jour fixe presentation. Here we attempted to respond to the feedback from the first day, specifying how we will narrow down the selection of relevant case studies and laying out a more specific approach for analyzing them.
Wednesday, 22 June:
Lunch with the fellows; afternoon meeting with Maria Zhukova, Andrea Lailach-Hennrich and Evgenia Steinberg. This was an opportunity to discuss the political theory framework of our project, to encompass the specific role of aesthetics and film analysis and to reflect on how to incorporate a longer historical perspective beyond the period we are focusing on.
Thursday, 23 June:
Internal work meeting. Here we detailed the next steps, including potential participation in upcoming conferences (e.g. ECREA – European Communication Research and Education Association in October), as well as the submission of a proposal for a special issue of the peer-reviewed publication SERIES – International Journal of TV Serial Narratives.
Friday, 24 June:
Individual work on literature review; logistical organization of materials and resources to implement the second phase of the project.
Continued engagement in innovative research initiatives
With its few guidelines and very unbureaucratic application process, CAT is designed to maximize the creativity of research groups. The collaboration between different institutes in different countries aims to give these groups access to a great variety of high-level thinkers and researchers in order to go beyond the current frontiers of knowledge and to develop highly innovative ideas on how to address very complex societal issues.
Ten participating institutes welcomed project applications from new groups for the 4th call up until September 2022, and the selected groups will be able to start their work from January 2023 onwards. The CAT programme is expanding, as new NetIAS members are joining and willing to host teams of excellent early career researchers, and is thus becoming a flagship initiative of NetIAS. According to the agreed principle of annual rotation, the 2022 call will be managed and coordinated by the IIAS in Jerusalem, which has taken over from the CEU in Budapest.