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Researchers at the University of Southampton have been awarded nearly €7.5 million from the European Research Council (ERC) to launch four exciting new research projects.
ERC Starting Grants support early-career researchers to lead independent projects, build research teams and establish themselves as leaders in their fields.
Political scientist Dr Daniel Devine will be studying how political trust affects support for policies that might be necessary but costly.
"Democracies face increasingly tricky and complex problems, from dealing with climate change to financing social care," says Dr Devine. "Addressing them often involves people making sacrifices, like paying more taxes or changing their behaviour, but that's not always a popular proposition.
"One way of making that easier, it's commonly argued, is to increase trust in the political authorities. But the evidence base on that is under-developed."
The project will carry out a large amount of data collection, focus groups, and experiments to develop a theory for if, when, and how trust matters, providing a valuable resource to bolster support for addressing complex policy problems.
Oceanographer Dr Alessandro Silvano will deploy a new set of instruments and autonomous systems to observe, for the first time, the ocean conditions under sea ice in areas of West Antarctica that are rapidly changing.
He says: "These areas are difficult to reach. The measurements will help us better understand recent changes in sea ice and ice shelves, as well as their effects on global ocean circulation and sea-level rise caused by melting Antarctic glaciers.
"The new observations, combined with satellite data and computer models, will provide a new picture of oceans under the ice in Antarctica."
Paleoclimatologist Dr Alexandra Auderset aims to uncover the origins and evolutionary consequences of one of the most important biological partnerships in the oceans.
"Photosymbiosis is a partnership between microscopic marine animals and photosynthetic algae that allows both partners to thrive in the nutrient-poor tropical ocean," explains Dr Auderset.
"Today, similar symbioses underpin some of the most productive and biodiverse marine ecosystems on Earth, including coral reefs, but we still do not understand how these relationships originated, evolved, and responded to major environmental change."
Using fossils spanning the last 100 million years, combined with new geochemical techniques developed at Southampton, the project will reveal when photosymbiosis evolved, how often it was gained or lost, and whether it helped species survive past episodes of global warming and environmental upheaval.
Finally, Human Geographer Dr Thomas Dekeyser will be studying the close connections between AI and authoritarian politics in the world today.
"As the technology becomes increasingly available to powerful governments and corporations, we are witnessing the uptake of various types of AI for activities, discourses, and ways of governing that align with authoritarian interests, including the centralisation of power and the repression of dissent," Dr Dekeyser explains.
"We need to investigate exactly how, when and why AI technologies give rise to illiberal behaviours and institutions."
Comparing AI technologies in four different countries, the project uses qualitative research methods to examine how AI, rather than simply extending or automating, might significantly reconfigure the nature of authoritarianism.
