Program - European Citizenship and Cultural Identity seminar

January 20, 2009

10:00-11:00: Uta Staiger, PhD Fellow, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities Cambridge University. Uta has recently submitted a PhD to Cambridge University on culture and citizenship in the European Union. She is currently working on institutional strategy and development for the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge. She also coordinates the Virtual Collaborative Research Environment for the FP7 project ENACT - Enacting European Citizenship at the Open University, and contributes to a study for the European Commission on youth access to culture. Previously, she was international project manager for two EU funded participatory youth arts projects, and a researcher for the cultural policy institute Interarts in Barcelona.

Culture and the Europeanization of Citizenship: normative and policy implications: 

The introduction of European Union citizenship in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty sparked an unprecedented set of formal questions on the rights, features, and practices of political membership within the EU. It also allowed political theory to explore the normative potential of citizenship beyond the nation state. This paper is interested in the role culture – as a concept, practice, and policy objective – has played for these debates. It is structured in three main parts. Firstly, it will briefly take stock of what the Europeanization of citizenship involves by reviewing the three aspects generally accepted to make up political membership: rights, identity, and participation. On this basis, secondly, it will consider the role culture may play for the definition and exercise of citizenship – whether traditionally in terms of cultural identity and the recognition of difference, or more recently, as an expressive and affective category of public political practice. Finally, the paper will bring these insights to bear on a brief but concrete analysis of culture and citizenship policy discourse in programmes, reports, and communications produced by and for the European Union.
Download slides  Culture and the Europeanization of Citizenship: normative and policy implications (pdf)

11:00-11:15: Coffee break 

11:15-12:15: Nicolette Makovicky, Dr Nicolette Makovicky is a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Her recent research has included studies of subjectivity, post-socialism and the morality of commerce and the transmission of knowledge amongst craft workers in Slovakia and Poland, as well as amongst antique dealers in the United Kingdom. 

Toll Gates, Highways and Byways: Citizenship, Civil Society and European Identity in Central Europe

The fall of Communism has been credited with a transformation of Central European citizenship through the introduction of market capitalism and the return of civil society. With their accession into the European Union in May 2004, the economic and civic concerns of Central European citizens were to be given a European, as well as national, platform. Fieldwork, however, showed that despite celebrating a 'return to Europe', ordinary citizens in countries such as Slovakia were primarily regarded the EU as granting possibilities of migration and financial aid towards infrastructure and cultural projects. Focussing on the cases of Slovakia and Poland, this paper aims to explore ideas of European identitiy and citizenship from an anthropological perspective, questioning presumptions of both intellectuals and ordinary citizens on the impact transition economy and EU accession for the shaping of citil society in Central Europe. Paper

12:15-13:15: Lunch break

13:15-14:15: Henrik Dahl has studied sociology at University of Copenhagen and communications at University of Pennsylvania and CBS. PhD 1993. Assistant professor at CBS and RUC from 1990 - 94. Honorary professor ("adjungeret professor") at CBS 2003 - 08. He is the author of numerous books and essays, among others "The Invisible World" (Den Usynlige Verden). He has worked with applied social science for almost two decades in various companies:

The invisible world! 

Although the term "cognitive geography" is not a formal discipline, the concept is sometimes used in (American) cultural geography. Generally, it refers to the processes that attribute meaning to geographical locations and to the results of such processes. Based on my recent book "The Invisible World" (Den usynlige verden), which is a case study of the making of Danish cognitive geography, I shall outline how a relatively stable cognitive geography is created through processes that merge physical planning and infrastructure with art, education and politics. Having done so, I shall furthermore describe the paradoxes that result when a particular, cognitive geography stabilizes (and is promoted by cultural and educational institutions), while social life and the corresponding, physical structures keep developing. It is such paradoxes that lead to the creation of an "invisible world".  Although the case study limits itself to Danish history and cognitive geography, it has implications that are relevant for most modern national states.

 14:15-15:15: Trine Stauning Willert, PhD and post doc with a socio-cultural approach to Modern Greek Studies particularly related to gender, education and religion. She has worked extensively on the relationship between constructions of Modern Greek national identity and the idea of European identity in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Her current research project has the preliminary title Religious innovation and education in Greece. National, European and multi-cultural frameworks:

Voices in the city of Athens 2008: Greek youth between global, European and national citizenship

In December 2008 the killing of a 15 year old boy by a police man resulted in large peaceful as well as violent demonstrations by school pupils and students all over Greece. The streets in the centre of Athens were packed with young demonstrators for over a week and vandalisms were estimated at 800 million euro. My paper will analyze the events in Greece based on my fieldwork in Athens with secondary school pupils in 2002 and my present research project on religion and religious education in Greece. I will consider the young Greek citizens’ possibilities for taking active part in political life and estimate the prospects of a renewed religious (Christian) commitment as an answer to the state’s failure to inspire hope and confidence in its young citizens.

15:15-15:30: Coffee break

15:30-17:30: Panel for Young Scholars:

Anne Kaun, PhD Student, Södertörn University, Institute for Media and Communication Studies and BEEGS - Baltic and East European Graduate School. Topic of the doctoral thesis: Mediated public connection in the Baltic States:

Mediated Public Connection and Civic Culture in the Baltic States

My PhD project encompasses a discussion concerning the identities of emerging adults’ in relation to what they understand as the political and public – their public connection. Are there different perceptions of what public issues actually mean for young people with distinct ethnic backgrounds? Through what media orientated strategies is public connection developed and possibly deepened? What does a different articulation of mediated public connection mean for the formation of cultural citizenship? Following Dahlgren civic culture is a necessity for democracy and questions how people do develop into citizens and how they do identify themselves as members of society (Dahlgren 2003: 153). During the seminar I would like to discuss how the two mentioned concepts of mediated public connection and civic culture are separable from, but at the same time relatable to each other.

 Sune Lægaard, PhD, Assistant professor, Centre for the Study of Equality and Multiculturalism, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen:

 A Multicultural Social Ethos: Tolerance, Respect or Civility? 

This paper focuses on theoretical questions about the meaning, possibility and normative desirability of a multicultural social ethos. An ethos is social when it informs the social interaction among people, not only in formal institutional contexts, e.g. in relation to the state, but also in informal everyday contacts, e.g. in civil society. A social ethos can be multicultural in the sense of applying to interactions under conditions of diversity of values and cultural pluralism, and in the further sense of being a requirement of normative theories of multiculturalism. The paper considers how one might specify the character or content of a multicultural social ethos, and discusses toleration, respect and civility, understood as social virtues and characteristics of social relations, as candidates for this. It is argued that both tolerance and positive respect are problematic in relation to multicultural diversity and that civility provides a structurally satisfactory answer to the combined problems facing tolerance and positive respect. Although civility also has its problems, these do not necessarily indicate principled defects but arise from the nature of the situations to which a multicultural social ethos is supposed to apply. These issues are relevant to European integration both in the sense that European states are multicultural societies, and in the sense that the EU advocates (at least some forms of) multiculturalism.

Download the paper A Multicultural Social Ethos: Tolerance, Respect or Civility?

Gro Hellesdatter Jacobsen, PhD Student, Centre for the Study of Equality and Multiculturalism, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen:

Differential Treatment of Ethnic Minority Children – Exceptions in the Logic of the Welfare State?

The welfare state relies on a mutual social contract between its citizens, which implies a logic or relation between receiving care and security on the one side and submitting to control and social order on the other side. Some theorists argue that the welfare state is currently intensifying this relation between welfare and control, as it increasingly meets threats to the social order with enforcing a state of exception, of which suspension of civil rights of terrorist suspects is an obvious example. In my paper I will discuss whether there is a parallel to the welfare state's treatment of citizens deviating from the social order on a smaller scale, such as ethnic minority families with different life styles and other first languages. I will examine this logic of the welfare state with special reference to current Danish policies of differential treatment of ethnic minority children and suspension of rights and autonomy of their parents, and discuss these policies in relation to the welfare state's ideal of equality.

January 21, 2009

9:30-10:30: Jan Ifversen is currently head of the Department of History and Area Studies, Aarhus University. Until 2004 associate professor at the section of European Studies, PhD from the Centre of Cultural Research at Aarhus University. He has written two books, one of which, together with Anne Knudsen, is on European post-war history (Hjem til Europa, Gyldendal 1992), and several articles in English and Danish on conceptual history, the history of the idea of Europe and European identity politics. He is currently engaged in a project on analysing the role of European integration in history text books on European post-war history:

European Identity Politics

Identity politics is most often related to minority issues. The era of national identity politics seems long gone. But the concept of a European transnational identity has gained prominence in recent years. The EEC already in 1973 decided that the promotion of a European identity was in important step in the direction of further integration. Since then the EU has developed a regular identity politics which includes symbols, citizenship and culture. In my paper I will outline some of the main steps taken in this identity politics and discuss the problems and traps involved in conceptualising a European identity.
Download the Power Point European Identity Politics

10.30-10:45: Coffee break 

10:45-11:45: Henrik P. Bang is coordinator for the comparative politics group in the Department of Political Science at University of Copenhagen. He has published extensively within his research fields which are political systems analysis, network governance, and political participation. From his most recent publications can be mentioned "Political community: The blind spot of modern democratic decision-making." February 2009, Journal of British Politics Vol.4, Issue 1; "Good Governance in Network Society: Reconfiguring the Political from Politics to Policy" (with Anders Esmak, RUC). March 2009, Administrative Theory and Praxis, Vol. 31, No. 1; "Everyday Makers and Expert Citizens: Active Participants in the Search for a New Governance." May 2009 in J. Fenwick & J. McMillan (Eds.), Public management in the postmodern era: Challenges and prospects,. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar; "Between Democracy and Good Governance." October 2009 in Michael Böss: The Nation-State in Transformation: The Governance, Growth and Cohesion of Small States under Globalisation, Aarhus University Press.

Political authority in contemporary Europe

Political authority is often characterised as a legitimate regime but the perception of it has been bound to the modern nation-state. This has favoured a perception of authority as a subordinating practise vis-à-vis the citizenry. The political scientist David Easton and the philosopher and sociologist Michel Foucault break with this idea and thereby open up for a new perception of political communities. Easton in his earlier days criticized the state hierarchy model for having its foundation in a vitalisation of the political as a friend-enemy relationship that makes the circulation of elites the substance in the political and thereby excludes any imagination of political community as rule by the people. Foucault in the 1980s breaks with his own earlier perception of the political as power/ counter power and develops a new concept of authentic exercise of political authority in which rhetoric is bound to tell the singular truth as it appears in the specific situation and to commit itself to empowering lay-people to be able to make a difference. These concepts make it possible to perceive the commonality aspect of authority as one of the basic building blocks for an empowering and self-governing European political community.

11:45-12:45: Nico Carpentier, PhD, is an assistant professor
working at the Communication Studies Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB - Free University of Brussels). He is co-director of the VUB research centre CEMESO and vice-president of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA – formerly ECCR):

The Belly of the City. Alternative Communicative City Networks

In contrast to the informational city, the communicative city model is characterized by a normative stance on a series of social, political, ethical and spatial dimensions. Building on an expanded version of Kunzmann’s description of the communicative city, this article emphasizes the importance of alternative media organizations for developing the (concept of the) communicative city, both at the discursive and the practice-based level. In other words, the existence of urban alternative media and their defining features (where the participatory and the translocal are highlighted) contribute to the development of the discourse of the communicative city, which is one of the representational regimes that aim to produce the city, its inhabitants and its communities. The material existence of these urban alternative media simultaneously bears evidence that the communicative city already exists, although some of its key practices remain hidden in the belly of the city, often ignored by the official city cultures. This article aims to revisit alternative media theory in order to show the importance of this belly of the city for the city. The article starts with an overview of four distinct approaches towards alternative media (the community media model, the model of alternativeness, the civil society media model and the rhizomatic media model), which show the importance of the participatory and the translocal for alternative media theory and for the communicative city. Download the paper The Belly of the City. Alternative Communicative City Networks