26th Conference of Europeanists. Council for European Studies

Sovereignties in Contention: Nations, Regions and Citizens in Europe
26th Conference of Europeanists of the Council for European Studies (Universidad Carlos III, Madrid, 20-22 June).

Amelie Kutter was the organizer and chair of the mini-symposium Struggles over sovereignty in asymmetrical settings: a mini symposium on peripherisation in the European Union, consisting of three panels. In the first one, Rescaling socio-spatial hierarchies under regimes of crisis she discussed her own work “Governing catch-up, policing space: towards a discursive political economy of peripherisation within the European Union”. The second panel of the mini-symposium Peripheralities and peripheral sovereignties in foreign policies of the European Union, included Elsa Tulmets' presentation “Peripheriality in the European Neighbourhood Policy: a view on official and academic discourses.” In the third panel, Governing peripherality through policies of cohesion, Elsa Tulmets acted as chair and Amelie Kutter as a discussant. The mini-symposium was glad to also welcome the post-colonial theorist and IFES’ partner Manuela Boatca (Universität Freiburg).

Christiane Barnickel presented the paper “Discourse coalitions in German legitimation policy” in the panel Party politics, ideologies, and projections on Europe and Susann Worschech took part in the panel Democracy and its Challenges: Populism, Partisanship, Civil Society, Regionalism with two papers: “Populism as a Political Substitute: Populist Politics in Poland and Ukraine and the Imitation of Democracy” and “Transnational Europeanization? Conceptions of Europe and Network structures of Nationalistic Movements in and around Ukraine”. Susann Worschech additionally presented her work “Searching for Ukraine's New Narratives: The Development of Ukrainian Arts & Culture and Germany's Foreign Cultural Policy since Euromaidan” in the panel Sovereignties: Cultural Challenges to National Models.

The IFES was actively present in the mini-symposium Reshaping Europe: Experiments, Agency, Cultural Practice, consisting of five panels and hosted by the recently created CES Research Network European Culture under the chair of our coming guest researcher Randall Halle (Pittsburgh University). In this frame Timm Beichelt presented the paper “A culturalist perspective on populism in Europe” in the panel Borders of Belonging, Techniques of Exclusion, and chaired the panel Migration and Mobilities, where among others Estela Schindel presented the paper “Europe and the gaze of the refugee. Three approaches to migration in theory, research, and film”.

Pawel Lewicki presented the paper “Moving subjects, disappearing subjects: HIV positive, marginalized migrants from Poland in Berlin” in the panel Social Disappearance in Europe. Exploring the uses of a trans-nationalized category beyond citizenship and sovereignty conceived and co-chaired by Estela Schindel and with the presence of IFES partners from the Universities of the Basque Country (Spain) and Lancaster University (UK).