29 January 2011

European politics of remembrance and the question of a European public sphere

6th General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research

Last Minute CfP: European politics of remembrance and the question of a European public sphere

Where: University of Iceland, Reykjavik

When 25-27 August 2011

Deadline for submission: February 1

Open Section

Research on both transnational pan-European politics of remembrance and an unfolding European public sphere have permeated empirical political science in the past few years. The proposed panel will feature research projects which examine exactly this nexus between European politics of remembrance and an emerging European public sphere from different angles.

Among others, Aline Sierp (Siena) scrutinises the way the EU has dealt publicly with the memory of WWII since 1945 by tracing back discussions on how the Nazi/Fascist past should be remembered and by analyzing disputes on the establishment of a calendar of official remembrance days. Jens Kroh (Essen) discusses the emergence of a European public sphere vis-à-vis the remembrance of the Holocaust in the wake of the 2000 Stockholm Holocaust conference by examining the levels of simple encounters, assemblies and networks, and the mass media. Bernhard Forchtner (Lancaster) maintains the persisting significance of nationally framed memories of the Holocaust and WWII, and does so by systematically analysing newspaper articles from various European countries which contain rhetoric of judge-penitence (i.e. the construction of European identity through acknowledging Europe’s past wrongdoings) during the Iraq war in 2003. Felix Münch’s (Giessen) research focuses on the cases of Estonia and Latvia to demonstrate the conflictual relations between local debates, which are informed by the equality of remembrance of Nazism and Stalinism, and European efforts to implement a standardised negative founding myth on the basis of the Holocaust.

Elisabeth Kuebler (Vienna) seeks to map out the current academic debate with particular emphasis on the question whether a European public sphere can continuously exist beyond highly moralising and scandalizing issues such as politics of remembrance. By investigating both the supranational and the national level, the panel thus explores the manifold relations between pan-European politics of remembrance and (a) European public sphere(s).

Further paper contributions are very welcome. They can be submitted via the ECPR Conference Website. The deadline is 1 February 2011. In case of queries, do not hesitate to get in touch with the panel chair Elisabeth Kleuber, University of Vienna (elisabeth.kuebler@univie.ac.at); co-chair: Aline Sierp, Università degli studi di Siena (sierp@unisi.it); and Jens Kroh, Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI), Essen (jens.kroh@kwi-nrw.de)

Source: H-Memory

No comments: