Paparazzi Ethnography

11/28: Brussels. Fairly inconstant weather. Cigarette smoking still allowed. Women wear casual and men wear perfume. Belgian waffles on every corner but also chicken wings. Campari on ice or Campari with no ice and soda water.

I have been in Brussels now for several days, staring out of a hotel room window while mulling over comments I received from various professionals in different cities concerning the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grant due February 17, 2013. The grant itself is a generously large 5 year research funding stream with individual requests amounting up to € 2.75 million. Review decisions are made on the basis of a 2 step process, the first step consisting of a 2-page resume; 2-page outline of scientific career; and 5-page outline of the proposed research. In all, 9 pages of Times New Roman, 12 point, 2 cm margin, type-written paper. The second stage, if successfully passing the first, is a 15-page outline of the proposed research. Finally, if the research merits the high standard of the scientist panel reviewers, there is an interview at the ERC Executive Agency right here in Brussels.

The latest set of intelligence gathering comes to me from Horace Penroe, a pseudonym referring to an ERC program officer who was kind enough to meet with me on Friday to go over details of the proposal. Earlier in the week, in Oslo, I attended a workshop led deftly by Mette Skraastad (see below) and organized by ERC national contact point person, the Research Council of Norway‘s (RCN) Per Magnus Kommandantvold, who I had met earlier this year, in January, at the Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromsø.

It was then, where I participated on a panel cross-talk for research funding, invited by Jen Baeseman to represent the US standpoint on behalf of the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists — and along side Rena Levin, the Norwegian Fulbright Program Officer with whom I was making my acquaintance because I had been short listed for the award — that I first heard in detail about the ERC program from Per Magnus. Luckily, U. Tromsø’s ERC grant administrator, Thorbjørg Hroarsdottir, and budget coordinator, Bjørg Hunstad — familiar to me from an RCN proposal I turned in just a few weeks earlier through my faculty sponsorship from Sidsel Saugestad in the Department of Anthropology — suggested that I apply for a research title in order to go after the ERC.

And thus, was the windy road that led me to Brussels, my last stop in gathering background information for the final preparation of the proposal.
When the sun comes out in Brussels, the city carries a stereoscopic feel, as if every scene were taken as a daguerreotype, and then painted over with colors.
There are a number of threshold concerns that I have to consider when preparing the proposal, and that require some time to gel, hence, the mulling around in a hotel room, allowing the information to settle before getting back to writing in California on Thursday.

One area in particular surrounds the concepts of “innovation”, “high risk”, “preliminary findings”, “incremental research”, all terms of art over which the ERC places great emphasis. In simple terms, a proposal must be innovative and of a high risk nature, but there should be preliminary findings to ensure the research can be carried out successfully and these findings should not be so well developed so as to suggest the proposal is an incremental part of an earlier project. More precisely, I have to make very clear that what I am going to do is unique and has great potential. If I claim that no one has done it before, I should therefore know the “state of the art”, and cover from it all angles. Be “assertive without sounding arrogant” as it was explained to me.
The ERC Executive Agency is located in an oval shaped steel and blue glass tower that can be seen from the botanical garden in these photos above.

From my hotel room window, seen at the top of this post, the roof of the botanical garden’s glass house can be seen on the left. From afar, the oval of the ERC building casts a reflection upon a glass sky scraper located nearby. Up close and inside the ERC oval tower, looking through Horace Penroe‘s window, the adjacent building appeared in stark manner.

Not everything taken under consideration is a key theme. There are also many small details that require clarity. There is the selection of which panel to submit my proposal to, which was a mystery until Friday. There are a number of Social sciences and Humanities (SH) Evaluation Panels to select from. What key words would be important to differentiate my project would be important. My resume, what I state as my experience on two pages. The definition of innovative, etc.

But what I found most helpful about meeting with folks, and traveling through various offices and workshops, is not so much the process of getting a feel for the ERC proposal process, but in fact, getting a feeling of curiosity about the proposal itself.

There are in fact, so many documents, website pages, PDFs to go through, which on the surface of things, do not make a lot of sense or attract attention. But in fact, each of these pages is quite important and the information represented is key to fashioning the language of a proposal. The trick, if you will, then, is to figure out how to interact with this language, to develop a passion for its code, to be drawn to its pages as a style of life — as a lifestyle over all others.

Among such “passion” for the text, I found myself booked into a disco hotel, Hotel Bloom, with the sound of an electronic high-hat (tst tst tst) — and addictive minor chord progressions permeating every space.

It is a wonder, how music and movies can permeate the consciousness so rapidly, and become so infectious without the slightest interruption other than the time it takes to walk into a room

9/10: While speaking with U. Tromsø’s Thorbjørg Hroarsdottir about our upcoming submission to the European Research Council (ERC), we remembered to check in with Norwegian Research Council’s Per Magnus Kommandantvold, National Contact Person for ERC, with whom we organized a phone call to request advice on our visit to the Cognizant Program Officer at ERC in Brussels.