While at SCAS, Anders Ekström will work on a book with the provisional title “After Presentism: Places of Temporalization in Late Modernity”, which focuses on past and present experiences of anthropogenic climate change in northern Scandinavia as a crisis of modern temporality. He will also continue his efforts to develop integrative research on temporal governance, theories of historical time, and Anthropocene temporality in close collaboration with existing programmes at SCAS and beyond.

Ekström will be a Global Horizons Fellow at SCAS during the academic year 2025–2026.

During his time at SCAS, Kristoffer Kropp, will focus on a book-length project about social science and EU-research policy. The book analyzes the relationship between social science and EU-research policies and the Europeanization of social science since the 1970s and provides new empirical knowledge on the negotiation and struggle over the relationship between social science and political institutions over the past five decades. The book analyzes the reconfiguration of social science and political institutions at a transnational level. In the book Kropp will develop a field-theoretical perspective to understand empirical cases such as the organization of European research projects, shifts in EU-research policy and the establishment of European social scientific associations. The book will offer a theoretical framework for understanding relations between fields through homology, as a structural and processual concept for understanding power relations. The study will focus on two interrelated processes. Firstly, focusing on the production of social scientific knowledge, it will interrogate how new European fields of social science are shaped by the actions of social scientists through the establishment of institutions and relationships among social scientists in Europe and concrete research projects. Secondly, it will analyze how this emerging field is linked to European bureaucratic and political fields, examining the various forms of mediation between the two and how it had conditioned the Europeanization of social science. Kropp will be a SCAS-Nordic Fellow in the academic year 2025-26.

During his time as a Barbro Klein Fellow at SCAS in the fall of 2025, Jing-Bao Nie will devote his time to the project “Authoritarian Biopolitics in China within a Global Context: A Transcultural Socio-ethical Inquiry”. This undertaking asks how ideologies impel authoritarian biopolitics in practice? What are the intrinsic and consequential socio-ethical wrongs of such biopolitics? Can it be ethically resisted? These questions are overwhelming but mandate renewed answers in the face of the steadfast global expansion of neo-authoritarianism and neo-totalitarianism. Through a transcultural socio-bioethical approach, this project investigates the practices and ideologies of state-planned birth control from the one-child to three-child policy, yousheng (eugenics), and human gene editing in China within a global context. Normatively, it examines how authoritarian biopolitics violates fundamental human values, such as “humane politics” and “the supreme importance of the people” rather than the nation-state and political power, through a creative transcultural ethical dialogue of classical Confucianism and Daoism with liberalism and feminism.