Title Affiliations Abstract "A diachronic study of the English dative alternation" "Department of Linguistics, Department of German" "Dative alternation refers to the phenomenon whereby verbs denoting a kind of transfer may occur in two different constructions (e.g. John gave Mary a book vs. John gave a book to Mary.) This research project aims at offerening a historical description of the different language changes that are involved in the emergence and evolution of this type of alternation. Additionally, an explanation is sought for each of these changes. The research methodology consists of a literature survey and (historical) corpusresearch." "Case alternation in present-day German: A corpus-based analysis of the conditions of use of accusative and dative with non-transparent two-way prepositional verbs" "Department of Linguistics" "Building on corpus-based analysis, this project explores the motivations behind the case alternation between accusative and dative in verbal constructions with two-way prepositions in present-day German from a constructionist perspective, considering both cases as parts of alternating constructions with semantic functions in their own right, and focusing on the interplay between the constructions and the semantic and morphosyntactic properties of the lexical items." "Nitrogen fixation through plasma-liquid interaction: Computational and experimental studies." "Annemie Bogaerts" "Plasma Lab for Applications in Sustainability and Medicine - Antwerp (PLASMANT)" "The NH3 produced in the Haber-Bosch (H-B) process today sustains over 40% of the global population in the form of fertilizer. However, the H-B process is an extremely energy-intensive and CO2 emitting process that does not have much room left for optimization. In light of the pressing issue of climate change, the world thus calls for an environmentally friendly alternative for nitrogen fixation. My project will explore plasma-liquid interaction as a possible alternative. Plasma-based NH3 synthesis in general has the advantage of working at ambient conditions and can be coupled to renewable energy. Plasma-liquid interaction provides an additional advantage of eliminating the CO2-emitting methane steam reforming step, as it uses H2O as the hydrogen source instead of H2. To be able to optimize NH3 synthesis through plasma-liquid interaction, an in-depth knowledge of the underlying mechanisms is needed, which I aim to obtain through a combined 0D-2D modeling approach. I will use two different plasma sources, i.e. jet and DBD, and investigate their advantages and how to optimize their NH3 production. A research stay is planned at MIPSE for the development of the DBD model. Finally, I will perform experiments for validation of the models, as well as to gain a more complete understanding of the plasma-liquid systems and their capabilities." "Unchaining Classicism: Aby Warburg (1866-1929) and Classical Reception Studies" "Barbara Baert" "Art History, Leuven" "Why would someone use forms and ideas from Greco-Roman antiquity? For a long time, the answer was obvious: because ancient art and literature represented an ideal of balanced beauty and wisdom. This project explores an early alternative to this ‘Classicist’ answer and traces its implications for today’s classical reception studies, or the study of post-antique engagements with antiquity. Instead of paying lip service to Classicism, the art historian Aby Warburg (d. 1929) showed how artists – from Botticelli to Manet – had also used ancient materials to unsettle the present rather than to glorify an ancient ideal. He also asked what such reuses told about their times. One example shows something of his innovation. When Percy Gardner discussed the ‘influence of Greek art’ (1921), he confronted classical Caryatids with Rodin’s sculpture of a fallen Caryatid carrying her stone (1905). He did so to illustrate Rodin’s inferiority in ‘ideality’. But when Warburg explored ancient sources for the reclining figures in Manet’s disturbing 'Déjeuner' (1863), he analyzed the painter’s reuse of antiquity as revealing modern views of nature. For him, the ways artists had used ancient models went beyond Classicism and implied wider cultural issues. In multiple ways, Warburg anticipated modern reception studies, although this field of study largely ignores his work today. By placing his ‘survival theory’ in its cultural contexts, this project shows Warburg’s relevance for current scholarship." "WISARD, beta-delayed proton decay as a probe for weak interaction studies" "Nathal Severijns" "Nuclear and Radiation Physics" "With this project we will search for the possible existence of an as yet unobserved (scalar) form of the weak interaction, the force in Nature responsible for the type of radioactivity producing beta radiation. For this, the energy will be determined of protons that are emitted following this beta radiation, in the decay of the radioactive isotope 32Ar. More specifically, the energy difference will be determined between protons that are emitted in two opposite directions with respect to the direction of the preceding beta radiation. This is the first time that this method will be applied to protons. It is potentially more sensitive to the new physics searched for than methods that have previously been employed for this. In the measurements to be performed a 0.1% precision is aimed at. At this level of precision our measurements will constitute an alternative way to search for this new form of the weak interaction compared to the measurements performed at the LHC accelerator at CERN, with similar sensitivity but in a very different energy region. A few competing experiments in nuclear beta decay, with very similar aims as ours, are currently being prepared at other research institutes. However, these will use very different measurement techniques. Therefore, possible instrumental (systematic) effects will be very different for all measurements, allowing to reach an even higher accuracy than will be possible in each individual project." "Building resilience in Urban Food Systems. The challenge of scaling-up alternative food distribution networks. An exploration through comparative case-study analysis." "Frank Moulaert" "Architecture and Society, Division of Geography and Tourism" "This dissertation focuses on the governance of alternative food networks (AFNs). The aim is to identify, conceptualize and empirically investigate the critical governance tensions conditioning the genesis and the life-course of alternative food initiatives. To this purpose this dissertation develops a Hybrid Governance Approach (HGA) which identifies three types of governance tensions - i.e. organizational, resource and institutional - and analyses the interrelations among them in different case-studies of local food initiatives in the Brussels-Capital Region. An international case study - Toronto - is investigated to learn from similarities and differences in the ways local food networks experience and address governance tensions in the two city-regions’ food policy trajectories. The empirical findings of this dissertation help to unravel the contradictions and dilemmas that AFNs face in their dynamic reproduction. The need to cope with their own spatial-material growth, to secure necessary material-operational resources - among which arable land to feed (alternative) food systems - as well as the necessity to deal with often contradictory multi-level socio-institutional environments are among the key factors of governance tension in AFNs. The analysis is also attentive to the outcomes of the governance tensions in the life-course of local food initiatives and thus to the promising organizational strategies, self-reflexive and co-learning dynamics put into place by AFNs to cope with the experienced tensions or to channel them into sustainable directions." "How alternative are alternative media? A multilevel and multimethod investigation into the contribution of online news startups to media pluralism in Flanders." "Pieter Maeseele" "Antwerp Media in Society Centre (AMSoC)" "In this current age of fake news and post-truth, traditional forms of journalism are under pressure. At the same time, online news startups are proliferating in today's digital media environment. These generally present themselves as alternatives to traditional, mainstream media and professional journalism. While past research has focused on content, production or interpretive strategies of the audience, there remains a gap in alternative media scholarship in terms of research that combines these three levels in a comparative design. The aim of this research proposal is to investigate if and how alternative media contribute to media pluralism in 21st century media landscapes. To this end, we put forward a highly innovative multimethod design, in which a quantitative and qualitative content analysis are used for the content level, interviews with the involved editors and contributors and document analysis for the production level, and online data streams and focus groups for the user level. In this way, this proposal not only puts forward a multi-methodological approach that combines the paradigm of cultural media studies with rigorous social-scientific research. It also makes this study comprehensive and able to triangulate its results into these different levels, thereby offering a multidimensional picture of how these digital media startups push the boundaries of journalism and also provide new ways of engaging the audience with the news." "Rethinking the status of refugees beyond the camp: a Lefortian response to Agamben's critique of democracy and human rights." "Toon Braeckman" "Research in Political Philosophy and Ethics Leuven (RIPPLE), Leuven International and European Studies (LINES)" "Liberal theorists of democracy traditionally believe in the rule of law and universal human rights. Yet a group a anti-liberal thinkers such as Agamben have recently argued that rights are not universal but depend on political institutions that can arbitrarily take away these rights. For them, the current plight of refugees, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants in Western democracies illustrates their point. It shows that our democracies allow for an increasing lawless space ('the camp') where people become rightless and are exposed to the arbitrary intervention of a police force. Yet I believe that the radical anti-liberal view is a problematic as the liberal view it seeks to replace. In my project, I will therefore develop an alternative theoretical framework that offers a 'third way' that would criticize liberal theory without therefore embracing the radical conclusions of anti-liberal critics. To develop this alternative, I will draw on the political theorist Lefort. I will first develop an alternative to Agamben's theory based on Lefort's paradigm and then see what this alternative model would mean for our understanding of refugees and illegal immigrants. I will then examine how the alternative model could respond to four major objections and publish the research-results." "Broadcasting the Culture War - Audience Engagement in YouTube’s Alternative Community" "Ike Picone" "Communication Sciences" "Since 2018, YouTube has become known as a powerful radicalizer. Scholars alerted that algorithmic recommendations amplify extreme political content disseminated within a network of alternative influencers. Recently, this radicalization framework was critiqued for being too technology-centric, and a more thorough empirical account of audience engagement was called for. The proposed PhD-project intends to present such an account, covering audience engagement with six popular alternative influencers in three crucial historical periods on YouTube: Alex Jones and The Young Turks (2008-2014), Steven Crowder and Tim Pool (2014-2017), ContraPoints and PhilosophyTube (2017-2020). Their audiences left a vast sum of digital traces via small acts of engagement, e.g., (dis)likes and comments. These traces are planned to be studied employing a netnographic approach, integrating quantitative large-scale computational linguistics and qualitative thick descriptions. The expected result is a theorization on how radical political narratives tie into the everyday practices of YouTube audiences that can serve societal stakeholders in the field of media literacy to build on civic values and radicalization prevention. Moreover, the project methodologically contributes a new YouTube analytic module within the 4CAT Capture and Analysis Toolkit to help future researchers study YouTube empirically in a novel way." "Connecting morphosyntax and lexical semantics with Elastic Net regression" "Freek Van de Velde" "Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics (QLVL), Leuven" "This project proposes to use regularization methods from machinelearning, more specifically Elastic Net regression (and its siblingsRidge and Lasso), to look into lexical semantic effects inmorphosyntactic alternances. These regularization techniques applyshrinkage to the coefficients and can thus be used for variableselection, especially when the number of predictors is very large. Invariationist studies, this is often the case if one wishes to enterlexemes associated with a construction into a regression model topredict constructional variants. We combine the Elastic Net regulatorwith k-fold cross-validation - a standard procedure - to avoidoverfitting. Our approach mitigates the various drawbacks present inalternative approaches that are currently used in variationistlinguistics, like random factors in mixed models and collostructionalanalysis. We look at ten multifactorially driven alternances fromDutch. The project offers a transparent pipeline that can easily beextrapolated to other case studies, and to other languages."