While much of our research, as well as our policy and public engagement work, will naturally be organised within our disciplinary clusters, at the same time we will work in a more cross-disciplinary fashion on three main thematic areas that form our strategic priorities for the period 2024-2027.
Gender
The question of gender relationships and gender stereotypes has come to the fore recently owing to the distressing statistics and news emerging about femicides and domestic violence in Greece, Cyprus, and globally. This thematic priority will seek to examine, and call attention to, the position of women in Greece and Cyprus from various disciplinary and cross-disciplinary angles, both domestically and in a comparative perspective. Besides our current project on media discourses on femicides in Greece, we are developing projects on gender-based occupational segregation, the position of women in Greek politics, everyday sexism, and attitudes towards domestic violence against women, intra-household inequality, female poverty, and others.
Growth
Despite Greece’s impressive exit from the crisis, the Greek economy suffers from significant legacy problems of industrial structure and the strategic orientation of its economy. The same argument can be made for Cyprus, especially after the eruption of the war in Ukraine that destabilised the country’s (over)reliance on Russian capital. Our priorities in this area will focus on issues of industrial policy and competitiveness/ productivity, including projects on Greece’s recovery plan (Greece 2.0), the strategic investments framework, productivity and capital misallocation, and problems of demography and sustainability, among others. Particular attention will be placed on Greece’s and Cyprus’s adaptation efforts under the twin transition–green and digital–with prospective projects looking at industrial energy consumption shifts and the development of digital finance in the two countries. Other aspects of economy and governance, such as labour market reforms, health and education policy will also contribute to this field.
Citizenship
Greek and Cypriot society has arguably many elements of traditionalism (informality, clientelism, family-based solidarity) affecting people’s perceptions of and attitudes towards a series of issues, from questions of ‘profit’ and ‘career’ to questions of social solidarity, civic engagement and the role of the State in serving its citizens. The modernisation and integration of their economies have put strain on this more traditionalist social edifice. In this research theme, we want to encourage and facilitate research that will address the drivers and implications of societal attitudes towards civic engagement, social solidarity, migration, the State (e.g., the notion of ‘tax-paying citizen’) and cultural minorities–also in relation to religious and gender-identity issues. Prospe- ctive projects within this theme include analyses of the impact of recent crises and ‘polycrises’ on people’s preferences and trust to political and other institutions; identity formation within and against diasporic communities; attitudes towards the rights of cultural and ethnic minorities; and questions of meritocracy and the provision of public and social welfare services.