RegPol² Marie Curie ITN

Geomedia logo

The ITN RegPol² is funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme with the objective of preparing 16 young researchers for careers in academia, public administration, NGOs and the private sector. The research topics within the project focus on a better understanding of the development of regional disparities between metropolised regions and the remaining parts in Central and Eastern European countries. The network includes public and private partners from Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.

For further information please visit the project’s website: http://www.regpol2.eu/

Bianka Blüschke PhD thesis, “Development Perspectives for Village Communities in Rural Estonia”, Bianka Blüschke focuses on regional identity and its influence on regional development in rural Estonia. Lately, regional identity has been increasingly related to the logic of economic competitiveness of regions. However, the assumption that this identity is inherently positive has to be scrutinized and questioned, taking into consideration the problematic role it can play in peripheralization processes. Additionally, the research aims to demonstrate that regional identity is a contested discourse and becomes visible through its mobilization by different actors embedded in power relations.

For further information, take a look at http://www.regpol2.eu/researchers/   Visiting fellwow (RegPol² secondments)

Aura Moldovan is a junior researcher and PhD student at the Babeș-Bolyai University (Romania) in the framework of the Marie-Curie-Training network RegPol². Aura has finished her Bachelor Studies in Sociology at the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and then obtained a Master’s Degree from the Technical University in Darmstadt, Germany, specializing in urban and spatial sociology.

Project: Territorial Mobility and socio-spatial polarisation in Romania. Spatial perceptions and relations influence regional mobility while at the same time mobility constitutes and reproduces such perceptions and relations. Adopting a New Economic Geography framework, the project develops a multi-level perspective on migration processes, aiming at understanding the interdependencies between the spatial levels in more detail. This project uses the cases of Romania and Hungary and draws on applied expertise of GEO.

In the course of her project, she will conduct a secondment at Geomedia OÜ from September until November 2015.

Sebastian Schulz is a junior researcher and PhD student at the University of Tartu (Estonia) in the framework of the Marie-Curie-Training network RegPol².

Sebastian has studied Human Geography, Public Law and Sociology at the University of Bonn/Germany and at University College Cork/Ireland. For his diploma thesis he analyzed the impact of EU Regional Policy on spatial development in the Republic of Ireland, with the focus on governance and the consistency of European and national regional policy.

ProjectEuropean and national regional and innovation policies reproducing peripheries. The ESR 3 project studies whether regional policy in the Baltic States, East Germany and the Slovak Republic has gone through Europeanisation (convergence with EU programmes and values) or retained own development paths (divergence) and whether this has had an impact on the efficiency of regional policy or helped reproducing peripherality in the CEE.

In the course of his project, he will conduct a secondment at Geomedia OÜ from October until November 2016.

Cyril Blondel is an experienced researcher at the University of Tartu (Estonia) in the framework of the Marie-Curie-Training network RegPol². Currently, he is completing his PhD at the University of Tours on cross-border cooperation and interethnic reconciliation between Serbia and Croatia during the EU pre-accession context. Previously, he has obtained M.Phil. and M.Prof. in urban & regional planning at the University of Tours, France, and a MA in politics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Project: Theoretical foundations for transnational comparative research on governance of core-periphery relations. The term “governance” bears normative, theoretical and methodological meanings. This makes it necessary to entangle the different discourses around the concept of governance and propose sound theoretical foundations to improve transnational comparative research on the governance of core-periphery relations.

In the course of his project, he conducted a secondment at Geomedia OÜ in January 2015.

Martin Graffenberger is a junior researcher at the Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde (Germany) and a PhD student at the University of Leipzig in the framework of the Marie-Curie-Training network RegPol². Martin holds a combined Magister Artium (M.A.) Degree in Economic Geography, Geography and Economics from the RWTH Aachen University (Germany) and a Postgraduate Certificate of Technology Management from the Open University (UK).

Project: The role of business innovation in the development of ‘peripheral’ and ‘backward’ regions in East Germany and peripheral Estonia. The project investigates the role of business innovation in the development of “peripheral” and “backward” regions” in East Germany and in Estonia outside of the Tallinn agglomeration with Tartu University and Geomedia. The inclusion in global networks of information flows and production chains as well as the various ways to generate innovations are completely under-researched when it comes to entrepreneurial activities in peripheral regions, but these aspects bear the potential to promote change from an entrepreneurial bottom-up perspective. In the course of his project, he will conduct a secondment at Geomedia OÜ from March until April 2016.

For further information, have a look at http://www.regpol2.eu/researchers/

       

More news