Jonathan Bowden (Augsburg): Contact structures, deformations and taut foliations

H. Eynard has shown that any two taut foliations whose tangent distributions are homotopic as plane fields are also homotopic as foliations. We give examples of taut foliations that are not homotopic through taut foliations. Using similar methods we also show that the space of representations of the fundamental group of a hyperbolic surface to the group of smooth diffeomorphisms on the circle with fixed Euler class is in general not path connected. Time permitting, we shall also discuss the related question of which contact structures can be realised as perturbations of taut/ Reebless foliations.