Demographic expertise has become a crucial perspective in debates around the development of modern welfare states. Since the 1960s, many reforms answer to demographic changes (e.g. ageing societies); and demographic calculations are now regularly used for the technical construction of social protection policies. In public debates, demographic statistics also serve as an objectifying rhetoric, legitimising welfare state reforms as necessary or inescapable. However, demography is not a black box: what exactly is counted in demographic assessments (age, sex, fertility, migration) varies a lot, between national contexts and historically over recent decades. This project examines from a historical and comparative perspective how demography became a core element of modern welfare state policies since the 1960s. By analysing three fields of the welfare state (old-age pensions programs, health care and family policies) in three representative European countries (France, Italy and Switzerland), SPADE aims to identify which actors and which institutions contributed to making the problem of the demographic sustainability of social protection systems a political priority, and which solutions were envisaged. The project thus broadens the historiography of the welfare states, traditionally marked by approaches from social and political history, with novel perspectives from the history of science. By combining transnational and comparative approaches and by looking at the origins of the discourse about the so-called “welfare state crisis”, SPADE cast a new light on the transformations that the welfare state as a whole has undergone since the 1970s.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, folklore studies have developed all over the world to the point of becoming institutionalized in universities in academic chairs. This is the case in Switzerland, in Basel and Zurich. In French-speaking Switzerland, however, folklore never managed to find its place in the academic world, and there were no sections of the

Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Volkskunde (Swiss Society of Folk Traditions) in Romandie. It is probably for this reason that the practice of the discipline in this part of the country has not yet been studied systematically. This silence is extremely problematic. Although folklore was not institutionalized, amateur production flourished between the end of the 19th century and the 1950s. This material and its authors have been completely neglected by historical research, partly because of the criticism formulated against the discipline, but obviously also because it was produced outside academic circles. Notwithstanding this academic lack of interest, the national and regional myths generated by this amateur production have become realities that are still invoked today, both for political and tourist purposes. There is therefore an urgent need to conduct a comprehensive study of this materials. The goal of my project is to reverse the approach generally used to study folklorists by focusing on the production of knowledge ‘from below’ and to write a history of this vast reservoir of knowledge, in order to provide scientists and the general public with tools to assess its real value. I look into the conditions of its production, as well as the folklorists’ networks to assess their impact on their research. Moreover, I address their political, religious, and scientific influences to determine whether the goals they pursued were guided by these interests and connections. Ultimately, this study shall highlight the reasons why the discipline has failed to become institutionalized in French-speaking Switzerland, and the relationships that have existed between Swiss folklore and local actors in this region. Thanks to my research, the works of French-speaking folklorists could be considered a heritage in their own right, in the same way as any other historical source, since this study would finally replace them in their production context.

The nature of the historical relationship between Africa and Europe, and the consequences of these two continents’ long-standing entanglement, has in recent years been the subject of fierce scientific and public debate. Those who advocate the ‘decolonisation’ of institutions, epistemologies, and subjectivities reference the racialised inequalities in wealth and power produced by the transatlantic slave trade and by colonial conquest. But these debates have, to date, overlooked a key and much more recent historical moment: the European scramble for African resources after the Second World War. Instead, established scholarship on the late-colonial era is preoccupied with European-directed development initiatives, the dissolution of empire, and the attainment of African independence. Narratives of European postwar reconstruction, meanwhile, pay no attention to the imperial angle.

Inspired by global history approaches, this project will connect the historiographies of late-colonial Africa and postwar Europe to provide the first comprehensive account of the role of African resources in the reconstruction of Europe after WWII. The project’s key innovative move is its broad conceptualisation of resource extraction. It will investigate the extraction of financial and material, but also human and intellectual resources from the African territories ruled by Britain and France, the two main imperial powers at the time, in the period 1945 to 1951. This will be examined through a series of case studies focusing on the role of African commodities and reserves in European economic reconstruction (financial resources); the role of African minerals and materials in the physical reconstruction of European cities, industry and infrastructure (material resources); the role of colonial labour in strategic European industries (human resources); and the role of African knowledge production in the postwar recovery of European societies (intellectual resources). Despite their different foci, the case studies are bound together through their common focus on issues of coloniality and processes of transfer.

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Die Art der historischen Beziehungen zwischen Afrika und Europa und die Folgen der langjährigen Verflechtung der beiden Kontinente sind in den letzten Jahren Gegenstand heftiger wissenschaftlicher und öffentlicher Debatten gewesen. Die Befürworter einer "Entkolonialisierung" von Institutionen, Epistemologien und Subjektivitäten verweisen auf die durch den transatlantischen Sklavenhandel und die koloniale Eroberung entstandenen rassifizierten Ungleichheiten in Bezug auf Wohlstand und Macht. Diese Debatten haben jedoch bisher einen wichtigen und viel jüngeren historischen Moment übersehen: die europäische Nachfrage nach den Ressourcen Afrikas nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Stattdessen befasst sich die etablierte Forschung zur spätkolonialen Ära mit europäisch gelenkten Entwicklungsinitiativen, der Auflösung der Kolonialreiche und der Erlangung der Unabhängigkeit afrikanischer Staaten. Narrative über den europäischen Wiederaufbau in der Nachkriegszeit wiederrum schenken dem imperialen Blickwinkel keine Beachtung.

Inspiriert von Ansätzen der Globalgeschichte wird dieses Projekt die Historiographien des spätkolonialen Afrikas und des Nachkriegseuropas miteinander verbinden, um die Rolle afrikanischer Ressourcen beim Wiederaufbau Europas nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg erstmals umfassend darzustellen. Die wichtigste Neuerung des Projekts besteht in der umfassenden Konzeptualisierung von Ressourcengewinnung. Es wird die Extraktion finanzieller und materieller, aber auch menschlicher und intellektueller Ressourcen aus jenen afrikanischen Territorien untersuchen, die zwischen 1945 und 1951 von den beiden wichtigsten imperialen Mächten jener Zeit, Großbritannien und Frankreich, beherrscht wurden. Diese Analyse wird anhand einer Reihe von Fallstudien vorgenommen, die sich auf die Rolle afrikanischer Rohstoffe und Reserven beim wirtschaftlichen Wiederaufbau Europas (finanzielle Ressourcen), die Rolle afrikanischer Mineralien und Materialien beim physischen Wiederaufbau europäischer Städte, Industrie und Infrastruktur (materielle Ressourcen), die Rolle kolonialer Arbeitskräfte in strategischen europäischen Industrien (Humanressourcen) und die Rolle afrikanischer Wissensproduktion beim Wiederaufbau europäischer Gesellschaften nach dem Krieg (intellektuelle Ressourcen) konzentrieren. Trotz ihrer unterschiedlichen Schwerpunkte sind die Fallstudien durch ihren gemeinsamen Fokus auf Fragen der Kolonialität und Transferprozesse miteinander verbunden.

As the consequences of the Anthropocene become one of the most pressing political issues of our time, humans are beginning to grapple with their destructive relationship to nonhuman life. What does it mean, for example, to kill animals in order to study them? A historical exploration of violent humanistic knowledge practices in the age of Empire.

Since 2022, Russia's war against Ukraine has led to a fundamental reassessment of established paradigms of East European studies and imperial history. Starting in the 1990s, the paradigm of 'New Imperial History' had attempted to emancipate historical research on empires from a critical theory of 'imperialism': From this perspective, empires should not be seen as 'prisons of nations' but rather as at least temporarily successful models of organising economic and cultural interaction under the conditions of ethnic heterogeneity. Today, power asymmetries between the centre and the peripheries of empires as well as the role of political violence in maintaining imperial rule are increasingly coming into focus again. Furthermore, many historians of Eastern Europe have argued under the heading of 'decolonisation' that the historiography of empires should pay more attention to the perspectives of people at imperial peripheries instead of focusing on the discourse of elites in the centre.

My second book project draws on these recent impulses by aiming to shed new light on the history of urban modernisation in the late Russian Empire through a comparative study of developmental dynamics in three cities at different imperial peripheries – Vilnius, Tbilisi, and Tashkent. In contrast to traditional approaches, I understand 'modernisation' not as a linear process with a clearly defined goal but as a discursive construct that was of central importance for strategies of legitimation – as well as delegitimation – of imperial rule: Actors of the imperial centre used successfully implemented urban development projects as evidence for their purported civilisational superiority and thus for the legitimacy of their rule. This could amount to an equation of 'modernisation' and 'Russification'. Peripheral actors, on the other hand, could challenge these discursive hierarchies by constructing their local cultures as superior, by pointing to their own initiatives of 'modernisation', or by criticising the concept of 'modernisation' itself. In connection with this level of discursive history, the project examines practices of urban 'modernisation' which developed in the often conflict-ridden interplay of central and local initiatives and included political/administrative as well as economic/infrastructural and cultural aspects.

By capturing the patient experience of living with EPP and afamelanotide treatment this study aims at investigating symptoms, disease burden and treatment benefit and risks. Not only, but most notably with respect to (chronic) rare diseases, generic instruments such as the EQ-5D questionnaire are unable to capture the specificities of the condition. While specific instruments may be more appropriate in this respect, they too squeeze the patient experiences into the narrow frame of a pre-given form that can be analysed statistically. Thus, we argue, the inductive, qualitative analysis of patient narrations following the Constructivist Grounded Theory methodology adds a crucial dimension in understanding the burden of EPP and similar diseases.