Project description
Tracing truth to find how belief and power cross borders
Misinformation and fake news spread fast. So, understanding how truth travels has never been more urgent. Across history, political and religious powers have used truth, or its manipulation, to shape societies, justify conflicts, and build identities. But how exactly do these truths move across borders? The ERC-funded TRASUS project aims to find the answer. Specifically, it will trace the trade of truths across the South Caucasus, a region long marked by competing ideologies and shifting boundaries. Through six in-depth ethnographic case studies, TRASUS will examine three ways truth circulates: missionary projection, diplomatic mediation, and extractive discovery. The goal: to reveal how truths are made, exchanged, and weaponised in today’s fractured world.
Objective
TRASUS investigates how religious and political truths move across boundaries. The objectives are to identify the modalities of how truths travel, to propel incisive understandings of how truth-values are attached to collective ideas, and how the resulting truths configure and reconfigure social worlds. Such an in-depth study that theorizes the workings of truth is of paramount importance in an age of misinformation and fake news, in which the transmission of truth is a crucial weapon of power.
The project will examine the ‘trade of truths’ along three modalities of transmission (which can intersect and overlap): a missionary modality involving the projection of truth onto those ‘in need’; a diplomatic modality involving the tactful mediation and management of knowledge; and an extractive modality geared towards excavating hidden truths.
These modalities will be tested in the South Caucasus, a region onto which expansionist projects have long projected their civilizing truths, and where sociopolitical fragmentation confounds the exchange of knowledge. By carrying out six case studies, the project will examine how these modalities are mobilized in missionary endeavors aimed at converting others, in the projection of nationalist truths onto ethnically cleansed areas, in efforts to mediate between opposing ethnic and religious groups, and in top-down practices of surveillance and bottom-up efforts of critique.
Based on long-term, historically informed ethnographic field research, the project will analyze how old and new technologies are mobilized in knowledge encounters, follow relevant ‘truth merchants’, and trace the trajectories of specific truths claims. In doing so, TRASUS will reveal the shifting interlocking of epistemic objects, human engagements with them, and the situations in which they are entangled. This will offer comprehensive and dynamic understandings of how truth is produced; and it will produce new insight into the biases, gaps, and limita
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
WC2A 2AE London
United Kingdom
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