Conversations about Identities, Disciplinarity, and the Study of the European Union
April 10 - 11, 2008
Join us for two days of conversations that seek to map out challenges and possibilities in the contemporary study of Europe. Our guiding assumption is about the need to assemble a study of Europe that can be more than just another corner of knowledge production. How to make the context of the study of Europe into a sphere for the concrete and practical criticism of our own institutions?
Thursday, April 10
Session One: 9:00 - 10:15
Proposing a Problematic: How to Study an 'unidentified political object'? Thomas C. Wolfe, University of Minnesota, Department of History
Starter Questions: 1) How do we relate to Europe as an object in the present versus a kind of potential for the future?
2) How is 'democracy' studied, and how are 'governance practices' studied?
3) What languages of theory and what practices of emprical study construct European realities? Where and how do theories and facts obscure what is important?
Session Two: 10:30 - 11: 45
Proposing a Problematic: How to Think about the construction of the EU? Stuart McLean, University of Minnesota, Department of Anthropology
Readings: Jacques Derrida, from The Other Heading, 1992; John Ashberry, “Europe,” from The Tennis Court Oath.
Starter Questions: 1) What is 'Europe' made of?
2) When the European Commission and other bodies talk about the 'construction' of Europe, what kinds of entities are being mobilized to this end?
3) Can one think of the construction of Europe in more than merely ideational and discursive terms?
4) What kind of politics (including cultural politics) might emerge from a view of Europe, not as a coherent and stable identity, but as a historically contingent and radically unstable material-semiotic assemblage that is continuously performed into being in different ways in different times and places by a variety of human and other-than-human actors?
Lunch Break: 12:00 - 1:15
Session Three: 1:30 - 2:45
Proposing a Problematic: Disciplinarity and the Problem of Political Science of the EU. Mika Aaltola, University of Minnesota visitng professor of Political Science.
Starter Questions: 1) How do disciplinary definitions and practices of knowing shape our encounters with 'Europe'?
2) What does the field of international relations in particular do to establish a relation of forces and ideas that contain and perhaps constrain our understandings?
Session Four: 3:00 - 4:15
Proposing a Problematic: The EU's Experiments with Identity. Douglas Holmes, State University of New York, Binghamton, Department of Anthropology
Readings: Holmes, Douglas R., "Experimental Identities (After Maastricht)."
Starter Questions: 1) How might we understand the ways in which a fundamental change in the underlying dynamics of identity formation is underway in Europe?
2) How might we understand the registers of consciousness that are emergent in liberal and illiberal forms of expression?
Session Five: 4:30 - 5:45
Proposing a Problematic: Migration and Radical/Activist Cartographies. William Walters, Carleton University, Department of Political Science
William Walters, “Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics,” Citizenship Studies, Vol 8, No. 3
Starter Questions: 1)How might we interpret the significance of cartographic representations of migration in terms of constructions and knowledges of Europe? More generally, what role do everyday representations, technical diagrams, and artifacts play in the construction of Europe?
2) Constructivist studies of European identity have tended to operate in a major key, focusing on flags, anthems, speeches, languages, memorials. What might we learn by thinking Europe in terms of minor histories (Deleuze): the unstable ensemble formed by the play of innumerable little lines of emergence, invention, contestation and the effects they put in circulation? As such, can we speak of a becoming-Europe, a Europe which ultimately escapes the EU’s apparatus of capture?
Friday, April 11
Session Six: 9:00 - 10:15
Proposing a Problematic: Security, Structure, and Infrastructure: Thinking Euorpean 'Stateness.' Julian Reid, visiting professor at Lapland University, Department of International Relations
Michel Foucault, Lecture on security and police, 29 March, 1978.
Starter Questions: 1) How does Europe think of its security?
2) How does a Foucauldian history of state and government formation help us understand contemporary discourses regarding the "security of infrastructure"?
Session Seven: 10:30 - 11:45
Proposing a Problematic: Poverty, Marginalization, and 'Culture' in the EU. A. Jamie Saris, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Department of Anthropology
Starter Questions: 1) How does the emergence of the literature questioning the ability of the EU to assimilate its ostensibly culturally different minorities obscure much of the recent history of the uses of culture to model various types of marginality in Europe?
2) Does the recognizablity of some of the terms through which the EU manages both poverty and wealth creation, such as community, present special challenges to the qualitative social sciences who construct seemingly similar objects of research?
3) What sort of politics does this discourse construct and what sorts of possibilities for novel subject positions and forms of actions does it encourage or allow?
Lunch Break: 12:00 - 1:15
(Graduate Students are invited to lunch, contact Tom Wolfe to RSVP)
Session Eight: 1:30 - 5:00
Proposing a Problematic: Gestures and Extensions: Teaching the EU, American Higher Education and the Study of Europe, Institutions and the Curse of Interdisciplinarity, Problem of Graduate Student Training, Possibilities of a volume or journal.