Six talented postdoctoral researchers capable of having a positive impact on society and the economy, from various universities and research centres around the world, are to conduct their research projects at UPF thanks to grants obtained in the 2023 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships (MSCA-PF) call, within the framework of the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. The grants awarded to these six young researchers, who will be supervised by professors from the corresponding departments of the University, are endowed with funding of between 161,000 and 181,000 euros, over two years.

Three of the researchers are linked to the Department of Humanities: Celia Martínez Sáez, from Occidental College (Los Angeles, USA), with the project “Embodying Glocal Feminism: A New Cultural Movement in Catalonia (2017-2023) (GlocalFem)”; Mathieu Gaulène (University of Nîmes, France), with “Radioactive decontamination in Fukushima and the fabric of a collective memory (RADmemCo)”, and Luciana del Gizzo (Institute of Hispanic American Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina), with “Surrealism as Multicultural Experience: The Transatlantic Bonds of the Surrealist Group and the Self-Reevaluation of Latin-American and European Cultural Identities (MULTISURREALISM)”. They will be supervised, respectively, by three professors from the Department of Humanities: Maria Dasca, a tenure track lecturer of Catalan literature and culture; Markku Lehtonen, an expert researcher in energy and environmental policy, and Domingo Ródenas de Moya, a full professor of Spanish Literature and Hispano-American Literature.

Of the remaining three researchers, two will be linked to the Department of Political and Social Sciences: Balsa Lubarda, from the Damar Research Institute (Montenegro), with “Exclusionary environments of the emerging energy and political transitions (EXEMPT)”, and José Manuel Mójica (Colegio Mayor de Antioquia, Colombia) with “Social Learning for Urban Climate Justice in Latin America (LEARN-UCJ)”, both supervised by Beatriz Rodríguez Labajos, a researcher at the UPF Department of Political and Social Sciences and a member of the JHU-UPF Public Policy Center Research Group.

Finally, the last Marie Curie researcher will carry out his project in the Department of Economics and Business: Bruno Conte, who is currently already linked to this department as a tenure track lecturer (in addition to being affiliated to the BSE), undertaking the project “Spatial Policies for the Environment and Equal Development (SPEED)”, supervised by Paula Bustos, an ICREA-UPF research professor.

All the projects to be conducted at UPF are endowed with 181,152 euros, except GlocalFem, with 165,312 euros

The Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships, convened by the European Commission and open to excellent researchers of any nationality, are endowed in this 2023 call with an overall budget of 260 million euros. 1,249 postdoctoral researchers, from eight different fields of knowledge have been selected from a total of 8,039 applicants.

The objective of these grants is to increase the creative and innovative potential of researchers from around the world who have a doctorate and wish to acquire new skills and competences and develop their professional career through international mobility, while contributing their talent to the host institutions. Those selected this year (42% women) represent some 80 nationalities and will be working in 45 countries in Europe and the rest of the world.

The six projects to be carried out at UPF
 

GlocalFem: exploring how the feminist movement of the fourth global wave is transposed to Catalonia

The project by Celia Martínez Sáez aims to explore how the global fourth wave of feminism interweaves with regional nuances, specifically focusing on the case of Catalonia. It will examine the intersection of cyberfeminism and globalization with local factors such as the historically minoritized Catalan language, the stateless Catalan national identity and the feminist authors of the Catalan-Moroccan diaspora, as well as urban changes in the city of Barcelona.

GlocalFem, based on documentation and the analysis of podcasts, television series, films, social media accounts and new spaces in the city of Barcelona, together with interviews with feminist content creators, emphasizes the need for an interdisciplinary analysis model and proposes a new lens, “glocal feminism”: “Through my research, I wish to promote feminist discourse within local contexts and minority languages and reconfigure the panorama of knowledge production”, Celia Martínez Sáez asserts.

RADmemCo: studying the relationship between the decontamination of Fukushima Daiichi, Japanese idiosyncrasy and the collective memory

During the years following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in Japan, the Japanese authorities carried out decontamination works in Fukushima Prefecture on an unprecedented scale, even compared to the decontamination after the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Mathieu Gaulène, in the project RADmemCo, posits whether the particular Japanese way of dealing with disasters played an important role in the choice of this large-scale radioactive decontamination. Also, whether this decontamination work influenced the perception and collective memory of the nuclear accident.

To answer these questions, the author will conduct an ethnographic study of the actors in this decontamination work in the village of Iitate, some 40 kilometres north-west of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. “My project aims to understand the genesis of this decontamination work, focusing on the collective memory of disasters”, Mathieu Gaulène explains.

MULTISURREALISM: broadening the perspective on the role of surrealism in 20th-century Latin American culture

By studying a set of surrealist cultural magazines published during the 1930s and 1940s, the project by Luciana del Gizzo will examine the intercultural exchange between Latin American and European surrealist artists and writers, examining how their ideas, agreements, frictions and debates had an impact on the revaluation of Latin American artistic and symbolic production, as well as on the understanding of European civilization.

Employing an interdisciplinary approach (studies of literature, visual arts, discourse, graphic design and the history of ideas), the project MULTISURREALISM will focus on the literary and artistic production of this surrealist multicultural network. “The ultimate goal of my research is to broaden the perspective on the role of surrealism in 20th-century Latin American culture, which promoted transatlantic links that have enriched both cultures and opened them to the world”, Luciana del Gizzo reflects.

EXEMPT: understanding the exclusions in different ideological varieties of environmentalism and environmental policies in Serbia and Montenegro

The project by Balsa Lubarda that focuses on the little studied contexts of Serbia and Montenegro, will analyse the underlying exclusions in different ideological varieties of environmentalism and emerging environmental policies, a broad range of concerns in this area that have only recently been acknowledged on a larger scale.

The three fundamental goals of EXEMPT are, first, to conceptualize “exclusionary environmentalisms”, explaining how different imaginaries and ideologies underpin this exclusion; second, how “microfascism” -the silent exclusion and tacit elimination of “unwanted” elements from an imaginary- occurs in everyday environmental activism and politics; and finally, to explore and test the communicative ways in which exclusion can be mitigated, in an attempt to “open up” ecology to different imaginaries, experiences, and geographies. “EXEMPT will examine environmental imaginaries and their related ideological foundations in the light of explicit and implicit exclusions in the emerging contexts of environmental activism and politics”, Balsa Lubarda asserts.

LEARN-UCJ: discovering the potential of social learning for urban climate justice policymaking in Latin America

Latin America stands out for being the most urbanized, unequal and one of the most disaster-prone regions in the world. Its vulnerability to climate change is increasing rapidly, severely, and intersectionally, affecting impoverished communities, which do not benefit from economic growth and are excluded from policymaking. The project led by José Manuel Mójica, focusing on Bogotá (Colombia) and Mexico City (Mexico), sets out to discover the potential of social learning for urban climate justice (UCJ) policymaking and planning.

LEARN-UCJ will use a transdisciplinary approach and a participatory (diversity and networking) and ethnographic (data collection through interviews and on-site observations) methodology, in addition to incorporating training and knowledge transfer: “One of the project’s main objectives is to establish the Alliance for Climate Fair Cities (ACJC), a collaborative network that will provide innovative ideas to help develop more equitable policies”, José Manuel Mójica affirms. 

SPEED: analysing how the interaction between different environmental policies can affect the EU’s energy transition

For the past few decades, the connection between the economy and climate has been the focus of the world’s attention. However, while scholars and policymakers have questioned the sustainability of the global economy, many factors have limited the design and implementation of globally coordinated mitigation policies. In such a context, unilaterally, the developed economies are designing and implementing stricter environmental policies, such as the European Green Agreement, to guarantee net zero emissions in the EU.

In the SPEED project, Bruno Conte will analyse how the interaction of these environmental policies (with each other and with the rest of the world) can affect the EU’s transition towards a growing economy with net zero emissions, and ensure that such a process might lead to equal economic development within the EU and around the world. “Based on state-of-the-art spatial economic models and the combination of these models with new and high-resolution spatial datasets, I will carry out counterfactual policy experiments that show the efficiency of these environmental policies”, Bruno Conte states.