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
The Georgian Dilemma: Backstage vs. Front Stage Discourses on Europeanisation
The paper analyzes the Georgians’ popular discourses on Europeanisation after the country initialled the Association Agreement with the EU in November 2013.It investigates into a dilemma the Georgians encounter: their strong aspiration to integrate with the EU is combined with their perception of Europeanisation as a threat to the national identity.
The Role of the European Union in Democratic Developments in the Baltic States
After the collapse of the Soviet Union newly independent states were free to choose their own political and economic paths. Despite the fact all the Soviet Socialist Republics and Soviet satellite states share the same point of departure, only some of them experienced the successful transition from communism to democracy. On the examples of the Baltic States and Moldova, this paper will analyze the role of the economic performance and external incentives, in this case manly the role of the EU that may have influenced the course of the transition from communism to democracy in those countries.
Participation of Member States in EU Functional Cooperation: The Case of Twinning in Ukraine
The present paper means to explore and explain the process of selection of Twinning partners from different EU member states (MS) by the Ukrainian government. The Twinning instrument is an integral part of EU functional cooperation, which entails financial and technical assistance to the ENP countries in a bid to support the latter with administrative reforms and legislative approximation to the EU acquis communautaire. Although there exists a formal selection procedure drawing on the quality and relevance of MS administrative system for the needs of the beneficiary country, there has been little scholarly evidence of its actual application to date.
Eastern Europe – Integral Part of Europe. Retrospective into the Future
Ever since, the European concept of harvesting on cultural diversity for common prosperity and peace, materialised in terms such as "EU-Regio" and “Interregio” etc. apparently has been undermijned and financially reduced into a fig-leaf, while egalitarian and merely quantitative "convergence" criteria are enforced upon all. Moreover, with reducing everything to numbers, an erroneous and counterproductive paradigm of finance overruling and sabotaging what meanwhile has been called "real economy" is the main tool of repressing European countries and their self determination together and in peaceful with their neighbors. Europe, and its perception in the world, thus, remains increasingly far behind its potentials.
“The Antichrist Lives in the West”: The United States and Western Europe as Russia’s Geopolitical “Other”
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian political elites continuously attempt to “re-invent” Russia and establish its relationship with the West anew. Interestingly, the notion of the Antichrist plays an important role in many conceptions aiming at re-inventing the post-Soviet Russia. It appears not only in the Dugin's neo-Eurasianism, but also in other political, historiosophical, and even scientific conceptions.
Conrad Under Western Eyes
My essay, uses the case of Joseph Conrad to document the shifting ways that Anglo-American scholars have written about this émigré Polish novelist over the course of the twentieth-century. Less a study of Conrad's fiction than a reception history of the changing ways that Conrad's fiction and authorial persona have been construed by Anglo-American scholars over the last century, my paper uses Conrad to chart the changing 'imagined communities' that emerge not in Conrad's fiction but in the act of critical and scholarly engagement with his fictions.
Garrison Stories: Poland in the Imagination of Twentieth Century Western Soldiers
The myth of Eastern Europe stems from many sources, but study of the myth makers has focused primarily on politicians, philosophers, writers and other intellectuals. This focus overlooks many other groups of myth makers, including soldiers. Soldiers make up a vital resource for studying the myth of Eastern Europe. Military personnel make up a large percentage of “visitors” to Eastern Europe in both war and peace, and their memoirs, memories, and perceptions of Eastern Europe decisively shape the perception of “over there” when they return home. Even more importantly, soldiers’ imaginations about fighting in Eastern Europe help to shape the popular imagination of the region in a way that intellectuals do not.
Art, Politics, and PR. The Krupp Company and the First “Semi-official „Exhibition of Polish Art in Western Germany 1962/63
Drawing on new archival material from both German and Polish archives, the paper explores and analyzes the multifaceted entanglement of politics, culture and PR exemplified by the exhibition’s background and reception. The Folkwang exhibition not only provides a striking example for the interdependences of political fiascoes on the one and successes of cultural initiatives on the other hand. It also illustrates how in the process of Polish Western-German rapprochement art and culture were used as instruments of political image-cultivation. Not least, the exhibition epitomizes a period in which the rigid principles of Western German Ostpolitik began to corrode: The ambivalent stance, often resembling a veritable walk on egg shells, which Western German representatives took on the exhibition – sometimes declaring it neutral ground, sometimes charging it with political significance–is symptomatic here.
Memory of Absence: Krakow’s Jewish Ghetto Memorial as Counter-Monument
The Ghetto Memorial both occupies and blends into the civic environment of Plac Bohaterow Getta and intentionally invites interaction from passersby who use the chairs while waiting for public transportation. Its design reflects the specificity of its site (through its allusion to furniture being piled in the Square prior to the deportation of the Jews) while also employing design strategies used in other contemporary memorials such as those to the 1995 bombing at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and to the 9/11 terrorist attacks at the Pentagon in Washington, DC. This paper examines Krakow’s Jewish Ghetto Memorial as an example of a counter-monument and considers its impact on viewers and its efficacy as a public memorial space.
Budapest’s ‘Memento Park’: Public Art, Communist Heritage and Contested Representations of the Past in Post-Communist Europe
This paper uses an analysis of Memento Park, a park that contains forty-two of Budapest´s communist statues and monuments, to challenge discourses on communist heritage. It develops into an enquiry of the multiple paradoxes in the identities of sites displaying communist heritage in Eastern Europe, particularly those presenting works of monumental propaganda. It is centred around comparisons between Memento Park and similar parks in Lithuania, Bulgaria and Russia.
