Dissident Voices in Theorising Europe

Description

The past decade has witnessed a yawning chasm open between scholarly attempts to theorise European union and the political realities of the EU in crisis. The decade that has witnessed the ascendency of political systems analysis, neo-liberal assumptions of efficiency and Europeanisation studies within Europe has also seen the failure of intergovernmental attempts to reform the EU, economic crisis across Europe, and a collapse in popular support for the European project. Dissenting voices that attempt to theorise Europe differently and advocate another European trajectory have been largely excluded and left unheard in mainstream discussions over the past decade of scholarship and analysis. Mainstream EU scholarship broadly accepts the premise that the EU is a neo-liberal, state-like political system and that Europeanisation is a one-way process. Dissident voices theorising Europe challenge these mainstream assumptions and adopt a variety of ontological, epistemological and methodological standpoints. What they share is their starting point that the study of Europe has a dominant set of discursive, intellectual and academic practices which they seek to challenge. This workshop presents a set of draft papers for a prospective special issue of the Journal of Common Market Studies due for publication in 2016. The special issue presents an array of dissident perspectives. What they do is to open up different possibilities and understandings of the EU. The special issue is polyphonic in seeking a broad range of dissenting voices from different disciplinary and cultural settings. The purpose of the special issue not to definitively address one analytical problem in EU studies, neither is it to establish a new school or paradigm in EU studies. Instead the shared research question is to explain why the gap between theoretical scholarship and political realities has opened over the past decade, and how to address this mismatch. The special issue argues that another Europe is possible and one that challenges predominant ideas about both the EU and the field of EU studies.

Period	26 Jan 2015
Event type	Workshop
Location	Canterbury, United KingdomShow on map