Social Sciences

Transnational Migration and Inequality: Implications for Health and Health Services

UiO PI: Heidi E. Fjeld
Berkeley PI: Seth M. Holmes
2018

Amount Awarded: $24,800

Globalization, labor market needs, armed conflict and deteriorating socioeconomic situations have resulted in increased transnational migration globally. This mobility as well as varying legal definitions and transnational migration management policies have resulted in many people fluctuating between regular and irregular migrant status with variable entitlement to welfare, residency and work. They live temporarily in any one location, serially crossing national borders and moving in and out of multiple geographies and sociocultural communities, hence the...

Pronominal Elements in Understudied Languages of the World

UiO PI: Pritty Patel-Grosz
Berkeley PI: Amy Rose Deal
2018

Amount Awarded: $24,474

How do pronouns vary across languages? How do they not vary? This project brings together four linguists with expertise in languages of different families and regions as the beginning of a long-term collaboration focused on these questions. We propose to hold two workshops in 2018-2019, one each in Berkeley and in Oslo, focusing on different aspects of pronominal typology in under-studied languages. Our first workshop focuses specifically on first person pronouns and logophors, which have recently been shown to feature a substantial amount of semantic...

Modal Semantics of Eastern Polynesian Languages

UiO PI: Rachel Katharine Sterken
Berkeley PI: Seth Yalcin
2018

Amount Awarded: $18,800

Our project will carry out the first ever detailed formal semantic analyses in languages of the Eastern Polynesian family. The languages we focus on are Hawaiian and Rapa Nui. Our emphasis will be on how concepts of modality‚ “possibility and necessity‚” are expressed in these languages. The project will contribute to the documentation of understudied and endangered languages while extending our general understanding of the diverse ways modal concepts are expressed in natural languages. We are guided by the basic idea that one cannot discern what is essential...

Does Feeling ‘Moved’ Bind Relationship Partners Together? Experiments Observing Interactions in Couples and Among Strangers

UiO PI: Beate Seibt
Berkeley PI: Iris Mauss
2018

Amount Awarded: $24,900

Kama muta theory explains being moved, touched or having heartwarming experiences. In online experiments, diary and recall studies we have confirmed, among other conclusions, that this emotion is evoked by a sudden intensification of a communal relation, that it often encompasses one or several perceivable bodily sensations, and that it increases self-reported devotion to a relationship. This opens the intriguing possibility that one person's being moved in a dyadic relationship signals to both relationship partners the closeness and value of this...

Comparing Extremes: US Hyperincarceration and Norwegian Penal Exceptionalism, 1960-2017

UiO PI: Sveinung Sandberg
Berkeley PI: Loïc Wacquant
2018

Amount Awarded: $25,000

This project seeks to compare and contrast the carceral systems (jails, prisons and detention centers for juveniles and irregular migrants, as well as probation, parole, and community supervision) of the United States (and inside the US, California) and Norway over the past half-century. While both societies are wealthy and postindustrial, Norway and the US are worlds apart in terms of the scale and scope of punishment in each country and their respective tendency to use custodial sanctions. The US is the world's leading incarcerator: it locks up some 2.3...

The Basis for Legitimate and Justified State Intervention in Families: USA and Norway

UiB PI: Marit Skivenes
Berkeley PI: Jill Duerr Berrick
2018

Amount Awarded: $18,000

Termination or curtailing of parental rights is one of the most invasive and consequential decisions a state can make. Strong critiques of child protection interventions are uttered regularly in the mass and social media, and the legitimacy of child protection systems is challenged both in the U.S. and in Norway. This project aims to study the basis for legitimate and justified state intervention by examining citizens' opinions and sentiments on the child´s best interests and thresholds for child protection intervention through survey vignettes and survey...

Native/Immigrant/Refugee: Crossings and Divides

UiB PI: Christine Jacobsen
Berkeley PI: Leti Volpp
2018

Amount Awarded: $25,000

Who is a refugee, who is an immigrant, and who is a native? These are critical questions at a time when nation-states are tightening and manipulating their borders and increasingly criminalizing subject mobility, and thus these designations are alternatively cast as aspersions or grounded as the basis of claims. Refugees, immigrants, and natives - whether indigenous persons or not - are typically constructed as separate legal and social categories, and thus studied in isolation from one another. This interdisciplinary research project will examine how these...

Agriculture and Food Systems Sustainability in California and Norway at Farmer and Landscape Scales: A Comparative Analysis

UiB PI: Inger Måren
Berkeley PI: Alastair Iles
2018

Amount Awarded: $23,700

In the face of current sustainable development challenges (e.g., UN's Agenda 2030), increased knowledge of our agriculture and food systems is of utmost importance. The global North - including the US and Norway, use a disproportionately large proportion of unsustainable inputs to the food system. On the positive side, both California and Western Norway are known centers of agricultural technological and institutional innovation to support sustainable landscapes and food systems, each with different strengths and vulnerabilities. This project will identify...

Understanding Healthy Workplaces: Cross-Cultural Comparisons between Norway and the United States

NTNU PI: Siw Tone Innstrand
Berkeley PI: Christina Maslach
2018

Amount Awarded: $25,000

The nature of the work environment has a major impact on employee health and well-being, on job performance, and on other organizational outcomes such as absenteeism, turnover, and healthcare costs. However, there is no comprehensive model of which work environment factors produce healthy workplaces in which employees can flourish and perform their best work, and which factors produce conditions that render employees stressed and ineffective. Our proposed research will enable us to develop and test the viability of: (1) a model of healthy workplaces, based on...

The New Arctic and the Digital Ocean: A Comparative Study of US and Norwegian Arctics

NTNU PI: Vidar Hepsø
Berkeley PI: Michael Watts
2018

Amount Awarded: $20,000

In December 2017, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report proclaiming a "New Arctic", signaling a massive, irreversible phase change in the material composition of the Arctic Ocean and its peripheries. Once a forbidding "frozen ocean" blockaded with sea ice, the polar sea is now construed through the lens of runaway melt, thaw, liquefaction, and off-gassing-transformations not only quantitatively but architectonically expressed. The very idea of a constitutively new ocean entails radically restructured political and economic...