By Hélène B. Ducros and Louie Dean Valencia-García
Special Feature
By Randall Halle
The European project is one that I have come to describe as dis/union—a dynamic of push-pull factors that remain constant. Precisely because there is a European project, the dynamic of union and disunion, contentious skepticism and optimism, pro and contra, which are part of all polities, obtains within the EU and at the broader European level.
By Sarah Cooper and Koen Slootmaeckers
The disparagingly fickle and fleeting attention of citizens often times serves to dilute the extent of actual change following public scandals, but it arguable that the mounting critical mass of cases of sexual assault and harassment now punctuating the media’s gaze opens a prominent window of opportunity for the social movement on the political agenda.
By Brittany Murray and Matthew Brill-Carlat
Together, these contributions indicate new ways to narrate forced migration, rooted in past actions of hospitality while remaining responsive to contemporary challenges. As these contributions demonstrate, the call to build sustainable models of defying borders is at the same time a call to rethink academic categories.
By Eszter Gantner and Olga Dovbysh
In the last decade, there has been increasing interest in digital technologies and their influence on the production of memory, history, and heritage, not only within academic research, but also in politics, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia. The tendency toward selective history, heritage, and memory politics in the region manifests itself more and more in the digital sphere.
By Sigrún Ólafsdóttir and Jason Beckfield
Health is a major political, cultural, and societal issue across Europe. While health and illness have, of course, always been a part of the human experience, the epidemiological transition from infectious, deadly diseases to the increased burden of chronic and mental health problems, has put various pressures and constraints on policy makers.
By Hélène B. Ducros
Will we seize this moment as an opportunity to make strides in waste reduction and develop ecological solutions for surplus, unused, and rejected materials of all sorts, or will we simply seek out new trash havens elsewhere in the world?
By Randall Halle
“United in diversity” is the official motto of the EU. Yet this special issue appears at a moment when European unity seems distant, and diversity seems to foster disunion, conflict, and cultural clash, rather than accord. We may do well to recall that the motto reaches back to the immediate post WWII era and the attempts to overcome the cataclysm of the war.
By Maria Höhn, Brittany Murray, and Nicole Shea
As institutions of higher learning, we are uniquely positioned to draw on our robust local, national, and international educational and cultural networks to prepare our students for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of forced migration and displacement. Indeed, the coming era of human movement will, without doubt, challenge our existing national and global institutions, and our students must be able to respond to these challenges with intelligence, compassion, and ingenuity.
By Nicole Shea and Peter Debaere
Fresh water is essential for life. No plant, animal, or person can live without it. Because whatever we do requires a lot of water, cities and towns were initially built next to rivers or streams, and farmers grew crops where water was plentiful or accessible. Water abundance cannot be taken for granted any longer everywhere. A dry spell and record temperatures caught up with Europe this summer, testing farmers from Scandinavia and England as well as France, the Netherlands, Germany and southern European countries.
By Christopher M. Florio and Nicole Shea
The study of crime and punishment is bound up with the study of a host of other subjects, ranging from social welfare to immigration to imperialism, from law to race relations to education. It is our hope that this issue helps readers to understand how crime and punishment have long been and continue to be entangled with virtually every side of human existence.
By Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Nicole Shea, and Fabian Virchow
In this special issue, artists and authors take up these issues in a series of feature essays and works, short opinion pieces, and research reports, examining questions of radicalism and violence, prevention and intervention, and radicalization and de-radicalization across Europe and other parts of the world. The authors examine cases from Germany, France, Hungary, the U.K. and beyond, looking at social media, school-based interventions, the use of history by far groups, the role of public intellectuals, and more.
By Hélène B. Ducros
The articles and interviews included here clearly convey that food stands as an entry point into a wide range of contemporary and historical debates that touch all humans. What is more, they also indicate that food operates as a spatial and temporal link across a complex web of interconnected social, cultural, political, economic, environmental, demographic, nutritional, and physiological topics
By Nicole Shea and Emmanuel Kattan
The challenges of climate change, pandemics, mental illness, rapid technological change and its impact on work and individual freedom, migration and its social and political consequences are not always best understood under the prism of “crisis.” Rather, they seep into our collective consciousness, building on an increased sense of insecurity and powerlessness and shaping our relationships with others and the world.
By Eamonn Butler and Nicole Shea
It has been more than 40 years since the first formal, diplomatic relations between China and the European Union (EU) were established. In the subsequent years, relations between these two global economic powerhouses have significantly developed, with both the EU and China publishing and implementing a number of communiqués intended to build and strengthen partnership.
By Nicole Shea and Eszter Gantner
By now, urban public spaces have become strongly contested resources in present European cities, where multiple agents are claiming the right to these spaces. Reacting to this development, this special issue concentrates on European cities, focusing on their public spaces, their histories and their rich heritages.
By Katrine Øgaard Jensen and Kayla Maiuri
A selection of emerging writers from Nordic countries—Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the Faroe Islands.
By Hélène B. Ducros
With this special feature, EuropeNow confirms the web of connectivity that exists between nations of Europe and nations of Africa, as not only rooted in geopolitics and global economic flows, but also increasingly in global cultural flows, which support the enduring linkages and reciprocal influences between the two continents and shape the ways in which both Africans and Europeans apprehend the local and the global.
By Manuela Achilles, Kyrill Kunakhovich, and Nicole Shea
This special issue examines the resurgence of far-right groups, considering how recent events in Charlottesville can illuminate radical movements in Europe. It focuses on three key elements: nationalism, nativism, and the revolt against globalization. Nationalism was the word most associated with the Charlottesville rally, whose participants often called themselves “white nationalists.” By this, they meant that a racialized national identity should be the condition for political belonging.
By Nicole Shea and Peter Haslinger
In this special anniversary edition of EuropeNow, curators Peter Haslinger and Nicole Shea highlight the importance in research and culture of smaller central and eastern European regions. The research presented here assesses the concepts, paradigms, and methods for the re-evaluation of multi-ethnicity, diversity, and mobility in a globalized and “post-factual” era, and seeks to identify factors and agencies that help to explain the current trends towards the obsession with security agendas.
By EuropeNow Editors
A selection of contemporary Bulgarian fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
By Erik Jones, Regine Paul, and Nicole Shea
The inescapable politics of knowledge production about and for a Europe in crisis demands scholarly transparency. In this issue, we consider the value and limits of their disciplinary perspectives in explaining the recent crises of European Integration. We nail our colors to the mast by arguing that a political economy approach is valuable – and ought to be cherished – for seeing more than just economics vs. politics at play in explaining crisis and navigating Europe’s future.
By Jennifer Elrick, Oliver Schmidtke, and Nicole Shea
We have seen two opposing trends across Europe: On the one hand, civil society has demonstrated a great degree of compassion with the plight of refugees, organizing local welcome committees and, in the Canadian case, even putting pressure on the government to accept more refugees from Syria as a fundamental humanitarian commitment of the country. On the other hand, the populist Right has exploited the influx of so many refugees for their political mobilization.
By Hélène B. Ducros and Katrine Øgaard Jensen
In Europe, from the time of religious pilgrimages or journeys to spa towns for thermal treatments, all sorts of people have undertaken recreational travel since at least the Middle-Ages, even if motivations differed. But, it is with the industrial revolution that tourism took on a new face with the practice of the tour. Later, the emergence of paid leave in many places gave the impetus for the first mass tourists.
By Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, Kayla Maiuri, and Gill Allwood
Given the severity of challenges facing Europe, from Brexit and the Trump administration’s thinly veiled hostility to the EU and NATO, to the on-going influx of refugees and the rise of populism, writing about gender and sexuality might seem quaint, even indulgent to some people. They would be mistaken. Any thorough examination of the political, social, and economic situation of Europe in the early twenty-first century takes gender and sexuality seriously.
By Maria Höhn and Nicole Shea
In this challenging time of governmental retrenchment—with its accompanying cuts to the Arts and Humanities—many foundations have been stepping up and pivoting their missions to a defense of democratic values and shared cultural heritages. At the same time, institutions of higher learning, think tanks, artists, policy makers, and NGOs have been reimagining their mission and innovating new models of collaboration not only among like-minded institutions, but across disciplines and national boundaries.
By Katrine Øgaard Jensen and Hélène B. Ducros
Our global dependence on fossil fuels, nuclear power, intense resource extraction economies, genetic manipulations, air, soil, and water contamination, and byproducts of modernity such as waste material like plastics and other synthetic polymers have caused great disturbances in the Earth ecosystems on which many species depend, including the human species.
By Nicole Shea, Aline Sierp, and Jenny Wüstenberg
In this issue, we have invited research, artistic explorations, and campus initiatives to look at how different entities are dealing with the problem that eyewitnesses are dying and that memory starts to move from social memory into cultural memory.
By Katrine Øgaard Jensen and Mirza Purić
This month’s special feature investigates how language, lyrics, poetics, and politics speak to and push against each other in a politically charged climate, which to many Europeans echoes eerily of a not-too-distant past
By Nicole Shea and Turhan Canli
In political analysis, scientific inquiry, literature, poetry, language, and the arts, we examine the loss of culture and identity and the effects of trauma on the human mind, as well as the healing power of artistic expression.
By Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn
Three scholars of European politics find Against the Troika to provide a refreshing, if not entirely original, analysis of what has gone wrong in the euro area.
By Inga Ulnicane and Nicola Francesco Dotti
Contributors to this special feature address theoretical and empirical aspects of some of the key transformations: massification of higher education, reforming academic careers, and increased focus on international collaboration and productivity in research.
By Courtney McNamara and Jennifer J. Carroll
The essays presented in this special feature address the growing public and political concern over increasing levels of social stratification and reveal the political relevance of health inequalities across Europe. Specifically, we asked health inequality experts to reflect on some of the biggest challenges surrounding health inequalities in different European countries.
