Anthropologist Don Kulick receives ERC grant

The ERC Advanced Grant is one of Europe’s most prestigious research grants, awarded to well-established top researchers. Its aim is to enable researchers to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs.

A total of 255 prominent research leaders in Europe will receive the grant, including 10 at Swedish higher education institutions. One of them is Don Kulick, who leads the project “People Who Aren’t Really There: ‘Non-persons’ as a field of scholarly inquiry.” The project is a broad interdisciplinary effort that will run for five years, 2025–2029, involving researchers from Sweden, Australia, Hong Kong and Canada.

Research on invisibilisation

Through this project, Kulick wants to bring together research on how invisibility, silencing, disregard and ignorance are created in different social contexts and what consequences these aspects can have for individuals, groups and communities.

Previous research has emphasised how invisibility and silencing oppress and violate people. Kulick’s new project will broaden the perspective and highlight people whose non-presence is a crucial part of their profession, such as simultaneous interpreters.

“I want to explore how non-presence can be both a power strategy and a resistance tactic, but also how it can be a desirable goal that can result in different types of reward and satisfaction. I also want to build theories around how social relations of disregard require active participation from everyone involved: those who are ‘there’ as well as those who are not really ‘there’,” explains Kulick.

Annica Hulth