Dr. Jan David Hauck receives ERC Starting Grant for Project on the Impact of Environmental Change on Children’s Development

UCLA Anthropology Alumnus Jan David Hauck (Ph.D. UCLA 2016) has been awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant (ERC StG). ERC grants are among the most prestigious research awards in Europe and recognize the scientific excellence of the applicants and the proposed project. Dr. Hauck will receive funding of 1.5 million euros for his project “Changing Environments, Changing Childhoods: A Cross-Environmental Ethnography of Moral Socialization in Three Small-Scale Societies,” investigating the impact of environmental changes on the moral development of children in three Indigenous societies.

Indigenous communities across the world have been experiencing rapid changes to the spaces they inhabit, such as deforestation or changing land use, forcing them to radically alter their ways of life and subsistence. But we know very little about how these may impact children’s upbringing, particularly their moral development and well-being. Through longitudinal, family-based ethnographic research in three Indigenous former hunter-gatherer communities in Paraguay, Malaysia, and Namibia, Dr. Hauck and his international team of researchers will analyze children’s everyday interactions with caregivers and peers across different environments, and their reflexive understandings of attendant moral values. The project is based at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich.

To read more about Dr. Jan David Hauck’s work, you can do so here