EUROSPHERE

EUROSPHERE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN OSNABRÜCK

On 13-14 November 2009, EUROSPHERE international conference is held in Osnabrück, organised by the EUROSPHERE team at the University of Osnabrück.

The EUROSPHERE project, after almost three years of theoretical and methodological work and extensive data collection, will introduce its first results in autumn this year. The EUROSPHERE theoretical and methodological approaches will be presented to international scientific community as well as to European Union institutions, representatives of governments, politicians/political parties, NGOs, think tanks, and to the general public.

The central research topics of Eurosphere will be addressed here contrasting Eurosphere research and its first results with critical views in theoretical and empirical terms. For this purpose, the conference will focus on two major thematic issues:

Does a European Public Sphere (EPS) exist and how can it be approached?

The tension between diversity and unity in the EU as a challenge for a EPS – which are the structural consequences of diversity for EPS (and vice versa)?

The conference will be divided in two parts, each part addressing one of the guiding questions.

The conference programme can be downloaded here (updated 15th of October).

More information about the conference, including the registration form, can be found here

Contact details: kamackev@uni-osnabrueck.de

SEMINAR FOR EUROSPHERE RESEARCHERS, OSNABRÜCK, 15 NOVEMBER

After the First International Conference, the EUROSPHERE scholars will stay in Osnabrück for one more day to take part in the internal seminar for the Workpackages 4-7. The aim of this seminar is to finalize the research plans for the following EUROSPHERE workpackages:

Workpackage 4: The Impact of Citizens on the Articulation of European Public Sphere Workpackage 5: The Role of Social and Political Actors in the Articulation of European Public Sphere Workpackage 6: The Impact of Communicative Public Spaces on the Articulation of EPS Workpackage 7: Gender, Intersectionality and the Public Sphere

After presenting these workpackage objectives and work plans by workpackage leaders, the leaders of task groups within each workpackage, i.e. scholars responsible for writing analyses on a specific topic, will then introduce analytical and theoretical approaches for their studies. These plans will be discussed first internally in each task group and then also by other EUROSPHERE researchers.

QUO VADIS, EUROPE

EUROSPHERE Coordinator Hakan G. Sicakkan and Prof. Kjersti Fløttum, together with the EUROSPHERE research team at the University of Bergen and several master students, take part in “QUO VADIS, EUROPE?”, a project funded by NIL Slovakia, Fund for Internationalisation of Education.

“QUO VADIS, EUROPE?” is coordinated by the Faculty of International Relations, University of Economics, in Bratislava, Slovakia. The third project partner is the Faculty of Business and Science, University of Akureyri, Iceland.

During this project, researchers, PhD candidates and students from Slovakia, Norway and Iceland will focus on three inter-related themes: Stability, Prosperity and Culture. Within these themes, a special attention will be given to topics such as migration, borders of Europe, Europe’s position in yesterday’s, today’s and tomorrow’s world, traditions, identities at national and European level, or European paradigm of values. The results of the project will be published in a joint study.

An international workshop and conference will be organised for each of the three main themes. The first workshop/conference will be held in October this year in Slovakia, the second event will take place in the beginning of the next year in Iceland, and the last workshop and will be organised in April 2010 in Bergen.

EUROSPHERE summer course in Tallinn 27.-31. July 2009

On July 27-31, 2009, the Eurosphere project organised a Summer School on Diversity and the European Public Sphere. The course was open to PhD students involved in the Eurosphere project and other students who share a more general interest in issues related to EUROSPHERE research topics.

The theme of the course was ‘diversity and European Public Sphere. PhD students were introduced to different approaches to diversity and the European Public Sphere, including both traditional theories and contemporary studies on these phenomena. Theoretical, methodological and empirical contribution of EUROSPHERE to the existing literature was evaluated, and the analysis of recent social and political re-structuring in European polity and its repercussions on the diversity and public sphere was examined on the basis of the preliminary results from Eurosphere research.

The course was hosted by the EUROSPHERE team at the Tallinn University, led by Prof. Mikko Lagerspetz.

The programme of the course is available here (PDF).

More details about the course can be found here.

EUROSPHERE’s Single Case Studies in the 16 Countries

In Single Case Studies, researchers in the 16 EUROSPHERE countries analyze political parties, social movements, think tanks and media. Materials being collected include data about the institutional features of the above actors, data from interviews with formal and opinion leaders in these organizations, and data about media framing of diversity and EU.

After sampling the organizations to be included in the project, a PhD course for the project field researchers, collecting institutional data, and the first round of the media content analysis, EUROSPHERE researchers have now started the interviews with organizations. In this process, approximately 1000 social and political elites are being interviewed by EUROSPHERE researchers. The main objective of data collection and analysis activities during the single case studies is to create a knowledge base on how organizations contribute to the articulation of different types of public spheres in contexts of complex diversity.

Over 70 researchers are participating in the various tasks related to Workpackage 3, and the data are being collected on approximately 200 national, transnational and regional actors. The workpackage started in February 2008 and will be completed in mid-2009. It will be followed in the next period by cross-national comparative analyses of the data (Wokpackages 4-6).

More information here (PDF)

Workshop:
The Crystallisation of National Identities in Contemporary Europe

The workshop was organised by IMER/University of Bergen and EUROSPHERE, and took place on 17-19 September 2008, Bergen. It dealt with a trend of ‘crystallisation’ of national identities or neo-nationalism. It discussed the issues such as relations between national identities or neo-nationalism on one hand, and globalism, emerging European state-forms or historical European national diversity on the other hand, and implications these new phenomena have. From EUROSPHERE, Hakan Sicakkan and Yngve Lithman participated in the seminar with papers.

IMER web page

Gender Research:
Exploring Parallels Between Four FP6 Projects

Lise Rolandsen Agustín (Aalborg University) represented Eurosphere in the 10th International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women Mundos de Mujeres/Women´s Worlds, 2008. The conference’s general theme was ‘New frontiers: dares and advancements’, with a special emphasis on two central issues: violence and migrations.

Lise Rolandsen’s paper 'Gendering the public spaces: equality and diversity in the study of European public spheres' was presented at the panel 'New research agendas on gender politics and policy in the European Union', together with contributions from three other 6th Framework programme projects: RECON, FEMCIT and QUING. These were represented by Yvonne Galligan and Sara Clavero (RECON): ‘Researching gender democracy in the European Union: Challenges and prospects’, Beatrice Halsaa and Solveig Bergman (FEMCIT): ‘Women’s movements and citizenship in multicultural Europe’, and Malin Rönnblom (QUING): ‘Critical frame analysis in the Quing project: Challenges and pitfalls in comparative studies of gender equality policies’.

As a result of the inspiring panel where many parallels were found between the four EU projects, another panel was proposed for the European Feminist Research Conference in Utrecht in June 2009, where researchers from these projects would meet again. The idea is to meet regularly and explore possibilities for further collaboration. 

EUROSPHERE Online Working Paper Series

The Online Working Paper Series makes available to public pre-publication article manuscripts that have been written by EUROSPHERE researchers as a part of their contribution to the project workpackages.

Eleven papers have been published so far. They explore issues debated in the Workpackages 1 and 2, i.e. a set of theoretical diversity perspectives on European public spheres concerning the dimensions of multi-level polity and multi-level governance, incorporation of minorities, noncitizens’ political rights, European institutional- pluralism as applied to asylum policies, European citizenship, and Europeanization of political parties.

Go to EUROSPHERE Online Working Paper Series