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Promoting labour mobility across Europe is a central objective of the Europe 2020 Strategy and it aims to tackle increasing labour and skill shortages in the EU. Cross-border labour mobility is expected to benefit both individual citizens, employers and the aggregate economy. In addition, intra-EU mobility is a means to foster European integration. Although migration into OECD countries increases, driven largely by people moving within the EU, migration into and within Europe is still short of target levels. Despite a favourable legal framework for mobility, migrants still face a wide range of problems and obstacles that hamper cross-border labour mobility. Employment prospects for immigrants are below those of natives and overqualification, i.e. employment below skill levels, is widespread in most European countries. Consequently, the growth potential of immigrants is far from realised. Little is known about transnational mobility patterns and the length of migration episodes as well as about retention processes of foreign employees. There is considerable scope to make existing labour mobility more efficient and beneficial for all parties involved. GLOMO’s focus is on global mobility into EU countries and within the EU and its impact on careers. The policy making white papers and research suggest that the future Europe will witness even higher and more natural mobility. To assure that Europe is ready for it, our objectives are (a) to systematically generate knowledge about the mobility phenomenon and its implications (success factors, effects and added value); (b) provide trainings to (further) develop early-stage and senior researchers understanding the complex multidisciplinary phenomenon of mobility, and (c) suggest relevant implications for individuals, organisations, the European societies and economies. The joint research and training programme will be conducted within an interdisciplinary and intersectoral network of experts in the field.

The stand-alone project Traversing the Contemporary (pl.): Choreographic Articulations Between European and Indian Dance (Austrian Science Fund [FWF] P_24190-G15), critically interrogates the aesthetic category of the “contemporary” for concert dance in Central and Northern continental Europe. The project purposefully attends to a diversity of form. Case studies, which centrally look at choreographic articulations between European and Indian dance, conducted by postdoctoral researcher Sandra Chatterjee, analyze the choreographies’ cultural hybridities and aesthetic multiligualisms, without depending on the (Indian) origins and nationalities of the choreographers- at the same time as of course the positionalities of the choreographers play an important role for the analysis and contextualization of the works. In the European context, contemporary works that engage Indian dance are own primarily through the British choreographer Akram Khan, who is known as one of the most important choreographers of Europe. The doctoral researcher Anna Wieczorek looked at Khan’s work as one of three protagonists of European dance (Akram Khan, Sidi Larbi Cherkauie, and Faustin Linyekula), whose work can be looked at through the lens of interculturalism. Her emphasis was on looking at the negotiation and performance of cultural difference physically, rather than through language. However, a number of choreographers work within continental Europe on choreographic articulations between European and Indian dance in very different contexts. The conditions of production as well as reception, as well as the cultural and personal contexts of the choreographers in continental Europe differ vastly from the British context- hence the project works to shed light on those works and contexts. The choreographers whose work is central to the project (centrally the Johanna Devi Dance Company in Berlin, Rani Nair in Sweden, and Kalpana Raghuraman at the Korzo Theater in Den Haag, as well as Priya Srinivasan and Revanta Sarabhai) work fluently and rigorously with multiple aesthetic conventions, theatrical forms and movement languages. The choreographers of the three central case studies were born and raised in Europe (except Srinivasan and Sarabhai). They are European choreographers, but Indian dance and aesthetics are not foreign to them. Traversing multiple cultural forms, movement languages and aesthetics is integral to their artistic identities as European choreographers. Approaching their works and the conditions of production and reception in which they are contextualized via the categories of “familiar” and “foreign/other” – which continue to dominate current discourses of migration and cultural multiplicity in Europe does not suffice. The project’s central research question therefore takes postcolonial theory’s notion of a contested “now“ as its starting point (for example as advanced by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty within his critique of historicism as a European intellectual tradition[1]). Translating the premise of a contested now to the category of the contemporary suggests that there are criteria that limit “the contemporary” and exclude that which is its other. The initial assumption of the investigation is therefore, that the choreographic practices that are at the center of this research project do not unambiguously fit into the category of the contemporary in European dance. This category and its boundaries, therefore, need to be expanded.

In the past decades, there has been a considerable rise in the number of apologies offered by states for injustices and human rights violations. Among transitional justice scholars, there is significant debate about how useful such apologies are. Whereas some have applauded these gestures as an important step in peacemaking processes, others have argued that they may not fit in all cultures and may even be a risky tool for peacemaking. Unfortunately, theorizing and research in the field of transitional justice is still in its infancy and has not systematically addressed questions of cross-cultural variability yet. So, at present, we do not know whether political apologies are a universally viable way to restore justice and harmony. My project addresses this challenge. Using an innovative, interdisciplinary, and multi-method approach with in-depth interviews, (experimental) surveys, and content analyses of apologies, I analyze whether there are universals in how political apologies are valued, expressed, and interpreted or whether this varies as a function of cross-cultural differences in key values (collectivism and individualism) and norms (face and honor). Based on these findings, I build a theoretical framework that will fundamentally advance our understanding of the potential value and role of apologies in transitional justice processes. This project breaks new ground because it is the first to take the difficult step to collect cross-cultural data to examine whether key assumptions regarding political apologies hold across cultures. It is also the first in this area to use a multi-method approach, which makes it possible to take into account the complex reality of political apologies. Combining insights from transitional justice, cross-cultural psychology and anthropology, this project places theorizing on transitional justice on a much firmer footing and paves the way to more cross-culturally valid models to restore justice and promote reconciliation.

A key aspect of the European integration process is the right to free movement. Such a right is actually seen by both citizens and policy-makers as the core element embodying the notion of EU citizenship. ‘EU movers’, notably mobile EU citizens who have exercised their free movement rights and settled in a Member State different from the one in which they were born or raised, represent between 2% and 3% of the total population residing in the EU27. Their numbers have increased since 2004 and especially since 2007, when the Central Eastern European countries joined the EU. Such recent intra-EU mobility has been primarily economically motivated: EU citizens from the new Member States look for better job opportunities and life prospects. However, mobility has been a feature of European integration from early-on: people have moved from their Member State of origin to another Member State to pursue job or study opportunities, for family reasons (marriage for instance) or simply for better quality of life (looking for warmer climates and a slower pace of life) since the introduction of free movement rights.