Physical comfort and emotional well-being are common expectations and aspirations across 21st-century Europe. This fellowship explores an important episode in the historical development of these cultural and social norms. The 18th century was a time when the wealthy, at least, had access to a growing range of goods, commodities and technologies, and were becoming increasingly aware of their individual identity. The research focuses on the changing relationship between physical and emotional comfort in the context of the country house, and explores a number of key questions about how the desire for comfort related to gender and life course, and to material objects and the growing specialisation of domestic spaces; how it was perceived through different senses and how it was juxtaposed with feelings of discomfort; and how it was conceived and experienced in two contrasting countries within Europe – places with very different societies, economies and climates. The research draws on a wide range of archival sources and material objects, and engages with a variety of social and cultural theories and research methodologies: textual, statistical and artefactual. It is characterised by strong engagement with the heritage sector, through the provision of new interpretive frameworks and materials for selected historic houses, and with the public, who are invited to become actively involved as project associates and contribute to the analysis of objects and archives. Successfully completing of the project will involve knowledge transfer between the researcher and host institution, and will significantly develop the researcher’s career. It will produce a range of tangible outcomes, including academic publications, open access publications on dedicated web-pages, and public workshops and exhibitions, and will build sustainable networks of academics and professionals, thus enriching and integrating the ERA.

Combating the effects of climate change (CC) is one of the top priorities of EU policy. In order for CC mitigation & adaptation measures to be successful, they must be based on sufficient knowledge about ecosystems & how they respond to change, which is complex & not linear. The identification of spatio-temporal patterns & their relationship with the underlying ecosystem processes is one of the ongoing scientific challenges in which scale-dependency constitutes one of the principal pitfalls. Passive or active Earth Observation (EO) sensors offer a vital toolset to address this issue, by providing long archives at a variety of spectral & spatial resolutions, from the global (e.g. AVHRR), & the regional (e.g. Landsat) to the local, very high-resolutions (e.g. WorldView, Orthophotos, drones). The objective of PantEOn is to obtain empirical evidence about the long-term evolution & regime-shifts due to Climate Change of the functional & structural properties of Mediterranean ecosystems. This evidence is crucial for the identification of ecosystem resilience thresholds & the development of land degradation indicators. A multi-scale methodological framework will be developed in order to bridge the existing eco-hydro-geomorphological process-based knowledge of the Fellow, gained from 16 years of field experimentation & monitoring, with the advanced EO experience of the Hosts, to investigate & identify the spatio-temporal pattern/process relationships. The key for the proposed approach is to relate spatio-temporal patterns of vegetation with connectivity of soil surface components with respect to overland flow of water & sediments. The concluding objective of PantEOn is to provide an advancement in the design of operational indicators for the assessment & monitoring of land degradation, within the Land Degradation Neutrality framework suggested by the UN, in order to achieve the target of the Sustainable Development Goals to combat desertification by the 2030.

This research project focuses on the transnational comparative analysis of the similarities, differences, and connections between social movements that focus on Consensual Non-Monogamies (CNMs), both in Portugal and in the UK, with an emphasis on polyamory. It will consider how this political theme is taken up in different contexts, and how those contexts impact social movements, how they influence one another (via the geographical circulation of cultural products, activists, ideas and affects), how different macro- and micro-political strategies develop and interconnect with other social movements, and how they become enmeshed with the media representations produced about and by those groups. It focuses on the mediatization of intimate citizenship, as well as the history of activism and the interaction among social movements in Europe, and fills a gap in the extant literature on CNMs and sexual politics, opening up new understandings for Human Rights, citizenship, social and legal justice. The project takes into consideration the gendered, racial, sexual and classed aspects of political engagement and visibility, as well as the fluid definition of what is considered “political”. Funding for this project will allow the Experienced Researcher (ER) to considerably increase his academic and employability profile by advancing his position as a leading expert on CNM-related research in Europe; by improving his publication record in English; by allowing him to expand his areas of expertise into Political Theory, Sociology, Law, as well as reinforcing his expertise on gender and sexualities; by diversifying his methodological portfolio and allowing him to receive media, academic writing and PhD supervision training. MMU, the host institution, would benefit from diversifying its academic backgrounds, increase its international connections with other Higher Education Institutions, as well as its solidifying its role in the field of CNM-related research.