Prof. Şule Alan, Adjunct Professor of Economics at Bilkent University, has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant.
Prof. Alan will be using the five-year funding of 2,500,000 euros provided by the council for her research project named “Social Inclusion and the Political Economy of Education: Building Social Capital in Ethnic Diversity.”
The overarching goal of the project is to offer evidence-informed policy actions to help build ethnically diverse communities characterized by tolerance and inclusion rather than conflict and segregation. The project builds on her decade-long research agenda to implement and test mitigative and preventative educational interventions involving large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to be run in parallel for four consecutive years. The results of this project will: (i) generate much-needed evidence to design effective educational policies aiming at building inter-ethnic cohesion in communities afflicted by mass migratory flows, (ii) unravel for the first time the role of public education in raising tolerant and inclusive generations, free from ethnic conflict and segregation.
European University Institute is the host institution while Bilkent University is involved as the partner organization.
Prof. Alan’s grant is the ninth ERC grant that has been received by Bilkent University researchers since the start of the ERC funding program in 2007.