ERC Starting Grant for Dr. Tessa Diphoorn

We are proud to announce that core team member and coordinator of the Contesting Governance Platform Dr. Tessa Diphoorn has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant. The European Research Council awarded Diphoorn and six other Utrecht-based scholars with a €1.5 million grant, to set up a research project, assemble a research team and develop scientific ideas.

Diphoorn's project is an ethnographic study and the various researchers will immerse themselves in groups of communities where firearms play a central role, such as gun owners associations and hunting clubs. 

These communities can be disruptive within societies, and exercise enormous power.

Role of firearms

With her research, she aims to answer questions such as 'how do these communities arise, how do these communities relate to each other, and what is their social impact?'. To engage in a comparative analysis, Diphoorn will recruit three PhDs to analyse communities of arms in Brazil, Germany, and South Africa, while she will focus on global communities of arms, such as international disarmament organisations. “With my research project, I hope to understand, among other things, the role of firearms in diverse societies." With her team, Diphoorn will design a new multisensorial ethnographic toolkit to better understand why firearms are so attractive for certain groups of people.