PATHWAYS is a tightly integrated, internationally co-operative and comparative project of social scientists at British, French, German and Dutch universities, seeking to advance knowledge in two areas: (a) the descriptive representation of citizens of immigrant origin (CIO) in the legislative assemblies of seven European countries (Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain) at the national and regional levels (where meaningful regional assemblies exist); and (b), for the first time, the parliamentary activities of representatives of immigrant origin (substantive representation). These are our dependent variables. In a second step, we will seek to build on, test and (where necessary) extend, explanations of the variations in representation we observe. These are based on empirical theories of political representation in liberal democracies with a particular emphasis on the impact of political institutions and macro-level contextual factors on representation. With regard to descriptive representation, our objectives are to collect data on the variation in the parliamentary ?presence? of CIOs across seven European democracies at national and regional levels of government, and analyse it in terms of age, gender, national origin, career and political history and examine the primary socio-economic, political and institutional factors that affect the access of CIOs to elected office. In relation to substantive representation, our objectives are to study variations and similarities of parliamentary activity of CIOs across the seven countries and analyse whether there is a relationship between descriptive and substantive representation (as hypothesised, e.g., by critical mass and mainstreaming approaches). In relation to both types of representation, our goals are to (a) to provide the social science community with original data on the political representation of CIOs in seven European countries ? some of which have been neglected in previous studies ? making the data freely available (duly considering data protection issues); and (b) to describe and explain variations and similarities in the descriptive and substantive representation of CIOs using, and extending, existing empirical theories of political representation in political science with particular emphasis on political institutions, strategies, social networks and political opportunity structures.

“Documenting Africans in Trans-Atlantic Slavery (DATAS)” (www.datasproject.org) develops an innovative method to explore African ethnonyms from the era of trans-Atlantic slavery, circa 1500-1867. Ethnonyms index African identities, places and historical events to reconstruct African culture that is linked to a history of slavery, colonialism and racism. The project centres on the need to understand the origins and trajectories of people of African descent who populated the trans-Atlantic world in the modern era. The development of a method for analysing demographic change and confronting social inequalities arising from racism constitutes a social innovation. The team’s methodology implements a research tool developed in Canada for handling ethnonyms that can be applied in a trans-Atlantic context from France and the United Kingdom to Brazil, the Caribbean and Africa. This innovation confronts methodological problems that researchers encounter in reconstructing the emergence of the African diaspora. A methodology for data justice is salient because ethnonym decision-making used in our digital platform, requires a reconceptualization of the classification systems concerning West Africans. This methodology depends on an open source relational database that addresses important decisions that researchers face in the field about how to develop best practices and a controlled vocabulary for four reasons. First, scholarly expertise on West Africans is scattered globally. Second, the slave trade was transnational, rarely limited to one country or population, and the transfer of Africans across borders reflects this global relationship between colonial and colonized. Third, DATAS makes available a vast amount of information of immense value to marginalized communities deprived of information on their own history. Fourth, the trans-Atlantic and trans-national nature of this project complements the aims of a platform predicated on global collaboration. The project treats ethnonyms as decision making tools as a method whose concepts require rethinking entrenched assumptions about demography, data justice and research transparency.