MetDect examines long-term developments in the settlement patterns, local production of ornaments and visual culture by using metal-detector finds from Estonia. Despite the inherent limitation of the data (uneven level of contextual and empirical information), MetDect will demonstrate that the vast amount of metal-detector finds will significantly advance our current knowledge about the past. Unlike many other studies, this project focuses on the full variability of detected-artefacts in a long temporal scale (1800BCE–1800CE). MetDect will use a combination of methods drawn from humanities and natural sciences for investigating each topic. Settlement patterns and workshop areas will be examined by using GIS mapping and spatial analysis (e.g., point-pattern analysis), but production series of ornaments will be distinguished stylistically. Local production of ornaments is further examined by determining chemical composition (bulk alloy and trace elements) of selected production series. Lastly, new types and form variations of artefacts that are discovered by private detectorists will be compared with other visual sources (architectural and artefactual) in order to discuss circulation of ideas related to cross symbolism. MetDect will launch the first open-access database on metal-detector finds in the Eastern Baltic. Further, the results of this project will provide an important contribution to a wider debate regarding the usage of metal detectors by private persons. As such, MetDect offers a novel and ambitious research programme for studying metal-detector finds in the Baltic Sea area and beyond.

The main goal of the ERA Chair in Sustainable Futures (SustainERA) is to establish a new high-level interdisciplinary research group in the field of Sustainable Futures at Tallinn University (TLU), Estonia. The ERA Chair project has two main goals: 1) to establish an Open Lab in Sustainable Futures research that will facilitate collaboration between different Schools of TLU as well as with various external private and public partners in order to enhance interdisciplinary research and policy development in the field; 2) to build interdisciplinary research excellence, capacity and capability of TLU in the fields of sustainability and non-growth by bringing in new researchers including the ERA Chair Holder and doctoral and postdoctoral researchers. The ERA Chair project will achieve its goals by implementing a five-year Research Strategy comprising five ambitious objectives, which are focused on strengthening TLU’s position as an important research centre in the field of sustainability and non-growth research both locally and internationally. The main approach is achieved through interdisciplinary social science research for non-growth. The Open Lab and toolbox is established for public stakeholder engagement to develop educational interventions for sustainability and the research based recommendations for policymakers, organisations and businesses on how to work towards sustainable futures. Numerous training and workshop events will be organised to increase the level of research management and dissemination skills. Impacts of SustainERA are increase in number of R&I talents moving to TLU; increased participation of Estonia and TLU in EU R&D funding programmes; increased awareness of sustainable and nongrowth approaches; increased international, interdisciplinary and intersectoral mobility of researchers and innovators for nongrowth research; more entrepreneurial and better trained researchers and innovators; the reforms in nongrowth capacity building in TLU.

The Lifelong Learning Strategy for Estonia envisions digital turn in formal and informal education, order to change the learning paradigm towards more self-directed, creative and collaborative learning. One-to-one computing, digital learning resources, semantic web tools, linked data applications and interoperable cloud computing services will be used to build and evaluate tailored educational opportunities for every learner. This will maximize each student’s self-actualization aspirations and role in the tomorrow’s society and adaptation of educational institutions in Estonia along the expectations of rapidly changing job market and European education space. It is also well aligned with the EU Education & Training 2020 strategic framework, which aims at transforming education to deliver better socio-economic outcomes in the long term. Hence change in the approach to learning is needed in Estonia as well as across Europe, as teaching the skills needed in the 21st century demand creativity, entrepreneurial approaches and evidence-based policies at all levels and types of education. This in turn requires teaching methods and learning environment that considers each learner’s individual and social development and is tailored to his/her needs and capabilities. Latest developments in cognitive and developmental psychology enhanced by the innovations in the ICT sector show a strong potential for scalable applications to flexible and personalized approach to teaching. Current project together with the new ERA Chair holder specifically addresses the move towards implementing formative assessment method in schools, which in practice aims at supporting individual learning and development curve of the learner by evaluating personal progress.

The proposed project offers a new, pan-European intellectual history of the political imagination in the interwar period that places the demise of historicism and progressivism – and the emerging anti-teleological visions of time – at the center of some of its most innovative ethical, political and methodological pursuits. It argues that only a distinctively cross-disciplinary and European narrative can capture the full ramifications and legacies of a fundamental rupture in thought conventionally, yet inadequately confined to the German cultural space and termed “anti-historicism”. It innovates narratively by exploring politically and theoretically interlaced reinventions of temporality across and between different disciplines (theology, jurisprudence, classical studies, literary theory, linguistics, sociology, philosophy), as well as other creative fields. It experiments methodologically by reconstructing the dynamics of political thought prosopographically, through intellectual groupings at the forefront of the scholarly and political debates of the period. It challenges the sufficiency of the standard focus in interwar intellectual history on one or two, at most three (usually “Western” European) national contexts by following out the interactions of these groupings in France, Britain, Germany, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania – groupings whose members frequently moved across national contexts. What were the political languages encoded in the reinventions of time, and vice versa – how were political aims translated into and advanced through theoretical innovation? How did these differ in different national contexts, and why? What are the fragmented legacies of this rupture, disbursed in and through the philosophical, methodological and political dicta and dogmas that rooted themselves in post-1945 thought? This project provides the first comprehensive answer to these fundamental questions about the intellectual identity of Europe and its historicities.

The proposed project offers a new understanding of transnational memory as a process of translation by focusing on post-Soviet Eastern European attempts to make their local histories of the Second World War and the Socialist regime known globally. It examines these efforts through aesthetic media of memory – literature, film and art – that circulate globally and bring local experiences to global audiences and through the heated public debates that these works of art have provoked in different national and transnational contexts. It argues that the recently reinforced comparative and competitive political discourses about twentieth-century totalitarianisms in Eastern Europe can only be understood by exploring the arts that have developed more productive comparative and translational approaches and can therefore help to untangle the most recalcitrant nodes of confrontational political discourses and addressing the ethical and political complexity of remembering war and state terror. The project innovates methodologically by bringing together transcultural memory studies, translation theory and world literature studies to offer translation as a new model for conceptualising the transnational travel of memories that operates through transcultural memorial forms. What memorial forms have been used to make Eastern European memories intelligible in the global arena? What is gained and what is lost in this translation? What can the different ways that aesthetic acts of memory are received nationally and transnationally tell us about the frictions between these scales of memory and within the national itself? How has the globalisation of memory practices reinforced national memory in Eastern Europe? In providing the answers to these questions the project offers a transnational view of Eastern European attempts to negotiate their entangled histories of twentieth-century totalitarianisms within the global framework.