Our interdisciplinary group sets out to pose and explore some central questions about the bases and dissemination of European identities. During the last two decades, as the borders of the EU have dramatically opened up towards the east and the south-east, there has been intense debate about the meanings of European citizenship. In recent years we have witnessed the frontiers of the continent being crossed and re-crossed by the flow of migrants, the flow of goods, symbols and media technologies, and the flow of new narratives and discourses. These processes have brought the question of borders right within the old ‘heart’ of Europe, transforming the way in which the continent is conceived from ‘within’ and from ‘outside.’ What is the relationship between this new geography, and how its political, social and cultural components are imagined? How are discourses about the European past located and locating in the present? And if expansion has subverted existing paradigms and analytic models, what challenges still confront the search for alternative, transnational approaches?

We aim to unite scholars from a wide range of different disciplines to explore these issues together, bringing Cambridge graduates into contact with academics from other institutions. Our group has two principle areas of focus - one concerned with material culture, and the other with the politics of identity and representation. Firstly, we are eager to consider how European identities have been constructed and transferred through objects and things, and reflect on the connections between European artefacts and technologies and European social norms. Secondly, we hope to interrogate discourses and processes that are perceived as distinctly ‘European’ from the viewpoint of the ‘periphery’, and especially from the experiences of the Balkan countries. Through these two themes, both fascinated with borders as sites of controversy and collision, we look forward to offering a forum for the creative exchange of ideas. With the fresh public interest surrounding supranational, regional and ethnic issues, it is an exciting time to participate in thinking through new lines of inquiry and comparative perspectives.

Lent Term 2010

The European Identities and Encounters Graduate Research Group, following four terms of research seminars, reading sessions, invited lecturers series, vivid discussions and debates on the aporias and questions on ‘European Identification(s)”, completed a first trajectory of its work with the two-day graduate conference on 20-21 November 2009 at CRASSH. The outcome of the vibrant exchanges of critical ideas at the conference among scholars from a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical background in the social sciences and the humanities turned the attention of the group to the significance of the debate on the affective elements of identification.

Thus, we decided to launch a new series of reading sessions for Lent term 2010 where we will be reviewing literature relating to affect(s). Our main aim is these reading sessions to serve as a theoretical background for pushing our interdisciplinary focus one step further towards a critical understanding of identification procedures as well as the passions, fantasies and attachments involved in the elaborations, developments or failures of politics ofin Europe. This term’s reading sessions will eventually lead to a series of presentation of graduate research case studies or invited scholar’s work during Easter term 2010. and