Euroacademia Conferences
Europe Inside-Out: Europe and Europeanness Exposed to Plural Observers (9th Edition)April 24 - 25, 2020
Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities (9th Edition)June 12 - 13, 2020
8th Forum of Critical Studies: Asking Big Questions AgainJanuary 24 - 25, 2020
Re-Inventing Eastern Europe (7th Edition)December 13 - 14, 2019
The European Union and the Politicization of Europe (8th Edition)October 25 - 26, 2019
Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities (8th Edition)June 28 - 29, 2019
The European Union and the Politicization of Europe (7th Edition)January 25 - 26, 2019- 7th Forum of Critical Studies: Asking Big Questions AgainNovember 23 - 24, 2018
Europe Inside-Out: Europe and Europeanness Exposed to Plural Observers (8th Edition)September 28 - 30, 2018- Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities (7th Edition)June 14 - 15, 2018
Papers
Critical Comparison of “Green Growth” and “Carbon Footprint” Theories: Analysis of Low-Carbon Innovations Implementation Practice as a Tool for Climate Stabilization
Some case studies of implementation of renewable energy technologies and the technologies for carbon capture and storage (CCS) are used to demonstrate a contradiction between economic growth and environmental (climatic) consequences of their implementation. It is proposed to switch to open innovation principles in order to involve the whole mankind into solving the issues of climate stabilization. The necessity of returning to the paradigm of “limits to growth in all spheres of human activity” as an alternative way of human development is substantiated.
„La Réunification – C’est Moi“ – Performing Identity in Politics: Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the German Reunion in the Election-Campaigns of the 1990ies
Abstract: The German reunion in 1990 marks not only a big change for German society, it can also be seen as the turning point in the so far luckless carrier of the German Bundeskanzler Helmut Kohl. Within no time he transforms from the unfortunate Chancellor close to resign in 1989 to the worldwide acknowledged „Kanzler der Einheit“ and thus to a Statesman of high reputation. The transforming of this (public) Identity can be traced back by analyzing his Election-Campaign-Spots. In my Essay I want to discuss the pictures provided in the spots of the years in 1990, 1994 and 199
A Symbolic Ethnography of Hope in the Era of Hyper-Consumption: Uncovering Love as a Nordic -Transylvanian Synthesis through Bureaucratic Sublimation
The proposed text is a “thick description”(Geertz, 1973) of the “symbolic order”(Lacan, 2006:12) mediating love letters, emails, and sms-es in the contemporary context of consumption-oriented and media-driven emotional blunting and hypersensitivity to clichés. The text is left on purpose in its raw format in order to allow for an unmediated understanding of the mechanisms inherent to it. The purpose is to show the paradoxical nature of the symbolic and its transformative potential to the imaginary, which in turn might constitute the very seed of hope for an alternative scenario of contemporary emotional experience.
Thomas Cole: An Exegesis of Time
This paper examines that being present occurs in a privatized public space during a post-structuralist slippage between the tension of nature and civilization. As Cole’s painting series The Course of the Empire (as his subsequent series, The Voyage of Life) is bipartite in its assessment of idealism and reality according to the canvas number and sequencing, this paper will culminate in a consideration of the slippage between the collective and individual identity within the American context. Further, providing a new reading of the reception of Cole’s The Course of the Empire.
“Biographical, Historical, Sociological and Literary”: American Myth and Symbol Revisited
The time is right for a reconciliation of the myth and symbol school of American Studies, which was influential in the United States from the 1930s to the 1960s, with its poststructuralist and postnationalist successors. After introducing the central claims of this school and summarizing subsequent criticism made against them, this essay defends it from two angles: cognitive and pedagogical. The cognitivist discussion examines the way that the myth and symbol critics theorized symbolism and its relation to emotion at three separate levels of culture.
America Played Out: Fictive Dominance in Richard Maxwell’s Neutral Hero
In Neutral Hero (The Kitchen, 2012), auteur writer/director Richard Maxwell of the NYC Players undertakes “the utterly impossible feat of portraying neutrality.” For an artist who has spent a career effacing the extraneous vocal and physical stylings of his performers, this endeavor is in one sense entirely of a piece with his peculiarly asymptotic larger project of banishing artifice from the stage. In another sense Neutral Hero reveals an interest in something else, an interest that may have been latent all along, in that indivisible remainder which no amount of diligent, arithmetical manipulation can eradicate.
The Anomie of Silence in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Silence enacts, I argue, the grandfather's exile from his homeland and the life he had envisioned, from his own words, his family, and the conventional parameters that frame existence ('yes' and 'no,' 'something' and 'nothing'); too, silence constitutes an exile from the creative potential of "the spoken word" and from life, because of a fear of creating destruction. But more than impervious and passive (as some have argued), is silence not a mode affective and 'teeming' (as Cage describes it), and perhaps even necessary for the reconstitution of one's self. In the text, I argue, silence emerges as an exile into a different mode, a mode of restless mobility that is, at the same time, open and generative.
Staging Multiple Identities: The Temporary Facade at Palazzo Farnese for Queen Christina of Sweden
Fascination with Queen Christina (1626-1689), has endured since the 17th century. Giacinto Giglio (1594-1641) wrote, 'while many said she was a hermaphrodite, she professed to be a woman." King Louis XIV marveled, "she swore like a trooper." Most striking, however, are the multiple identities she was assigned in Rome: unmarried queen who abdicated her throne; convert to Catholicism; supporter of the Catholic Church; paradigmatic Catholic ruler; founder of the Academy of Arcadia; collector and connoisseur of art.
Locating Identity in Contemporary Indian Art: Tejal Shah and Nikhil Chopra
In contemporary art the body has been recognized as the principal arena for the playing out of the politics of identity. Using it as a dynamic signifier of lived experience, two contemporary global Indian artists, Tejal Shah(b.1979) and Nikhil Chopra (b.1974), use the body to revolt against the binaries of conventional representation. Their work encapsulates the potential for an individual to represent wider issues such as cultural difference, historical context, sexual preference and the transgression of gender roles.
Material Antagonisms; Melancholia, Undeadliness and Performance
I propose that the zombie might encourage the contemporary practitioner to reclaim the materiality of melancholia in order to trouble the ‘exclusionary systems of identification’ enforced by contemporaneity. Instead of being framed as depressive failure, the practitioner's melancholia might post-critically collapse the identity-based protocols of a live situation with a performance of zombie-like affect. The practitioner would harness melancholia as an embodied and haptic objectivity beyond the constraints of subjective identity.
