Below, you can upload your tickets, workshop files, and other information we asked you to send to us.
Register for the special workshops.
In due time, you will find information on how to.
Material for the workshops will be available here soon.
This is the preliminary schedule for the Summer School. You will find a final version in your Summer School bag.
| Monday 04.08.2025 | Tuesday 05.08.2025 | Wednesday 06.08.2025 | Thursday 07.08.2025 | Friday 08.08.2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Location: | Villa Europa | Innovation Center, Campus | Innovation Center, Campus | Völklinger Hütte | Innovation Center, Campus |
| 09:00 – 10:00 | Welcome & Get together | Introduction of the day | Group Workshop | PhD Presentations Peer Feedback | |
| 10:00 – 11:00 | Special Workshop I | ||||
| 11:00 – 12:00 | Presentations | ||||
| 12:00 – 13:00 | Lunchbreak | Lunchbreak | Excursion: UNESCO cultural heritage | Final Discussion & Evaluation | |
| 13:00 – 14:00 | End at 14:00 | ||||
| 14:00 – 15:00 | Group Workshop I | Special Workshop II | |||
| 15:00 – 16:00 | Open Registration | Group Workshop | |||
| 16:00 – 17:00 | Welcome-Buffet | Group Workshop | |||
| 17:00 – 18:00 | Greeting | Dinner | |||
| 18:00 – 19:00 | Opening Keynote: | Buffet | |||
| 19:00 – 20:00 | Reading: Gazmend Kapllani | Keynote: C. Ceyhun Arslan Thinking with rather than Studying or Representing the Mediterranean |
Please use this option to upload any documents we asked you to share with us, including tickets and abstracts. You can upload .jpg, .jpeg, .png, and .pdf files.
Each workshop description includes preparatory readings and/or materials to download. These are essential for active participation, so please make sure to review them carefully in advance.
A shared identity is often seen as a crucial foundation for any political community, fostering cohesion and stability. In recent years, European identity has gained increasing prominence. After decades of relative stagnation, survey data now point to a growing sense of attachment to Europe—and even to the EU—among its citizens. Paradoxically, this trend coincides with the continued rise of right-wing and Eurosceptic parties, as evidenced by the 2024 European Parliament elections.
From a political science perspective, this apparent contradiction raises important questions about the role of identity in shaping political attitudes and behavior across Europe. But European identity also intersects with broader research areas such as politicization, polarization, and solidarity within the EU. Yet, higher levels of attachment do not necessarily translate into pro-integrationist attitudes. The attitudinal consequences of European identity remain context-dependent, and in many cases, ambivalent.
This workshop provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of research on European identity from a political science perspective. It will also address key methodological challenges, including vague conceptual definitions and underdeveloped measurement instruments, that continue to hamper empirical analysis. By drawing on international and interdisciplinary expertise, the workshop seeks to critically engage with these issues and facilitate a broader exchange on how identity both reflects and shapes political dynamics within and beyond the European Union.
Despite the vast body of research on Europe and European identity, a fundamental question remains surprisingly overlooked: What does “Europe” actually mean? While most existing research relies on top-down approaches, using definitions imposed by institutions, scholars, or policy frameworks, in this workshop, we will shift the focus to bottom-up perspectives, exploring how ordinary citizens conceive the idea of Europe.
We will talk about the social representations of Europe: the shared, culturally (and politically) embedded understandings that provide meaning and guidelines for attitudes and behavior. These representations are diverse and vary both across nations and within them, influenced by history, culture, geography, politics, and personal experiences. Our discussions will explore why these meanings matter and the broader implications of differing understandings of Europe, especially when the concept of Europe is conflated with the European Union. Such distinctions have tangible effects on belonging and exclusion, both within national communities and in a broader European context; geopolitical processes, such as EU enlargement; policy domains, such as migration or asylum policies; attitudes toward and solidarity of citizens with different cultural groups.
Additionally, we will consider the instrumentalization of European identity – how political and institutional actors mobilize ideas of Europe, identity and belonging for strategic purposes, often reinforcing and rarely challenging dominant narratives. The workshop draws primarily on social and political psychological perspectives, while also integrating postcolonial approaches that critically the dimensions of European self-understanding.
How do literary and cultural representations reconfigure Europe’s inside(r)s and outside(r)s? How is Europe a problem for the postcolonial, and the postcolonial a problem for Europe? When literary scholars question Europe, Eurocentrism and their epistemological legacies, how might they negotiate scholarly and institutional complicities in these structures?
One of postcolonial studies’ foundational critiques has been the work of identifying and disarticulating Eurocentrism and Europe’s fashioning of itself as a self-generating apex of human civilization. Over the past decades, postcolonial critics have also increasingly questioned the presumptive inevitability of being in conversation with Europe, as well as the discipline’s cumulative fetishization and homogenization of this ‘Europe’ as its agent of oppression. Calls for Europe to recognize and reckon with its own postcoloniality have multiplied. There is, moreover, by now a growing tradition of studies that mobilize postcolonial concepts for analyses concerned with Europe’s ‘internal peripheries’. How might we think these different vectors together? This workshop will not so much provide answers to such questions, as try to create a framework for thinking with them in relation to participants’ own projects, and the methods employed in pursuing in them.
Content note: Please note that, in the course of the workshop, we might read and address sensitive subjects and language.
Note: Please select a short passage from one of the readings that resonates with your own work, and briefly describe how it does so. Please send this to me (lgasser@uni-osnabrueck.de) by the 1st of August.
In an attempt to overcome the notorious definitional ambiguity of „Europe,“ the continent is often framed in terms of its past. Institutions like the House of European History in Brussels—established to promote a shared narrative of the past in the hope of fostering European integration—illustrate this tendency to root European identity in collective memory.
As discourses surrounding Europe’s past—especially regarding the Second World War and the Holocaust—are increasingly used and abused in our war-ridden present, this workshop turns to literature to ask pressing and difficult questions.
We will focus on selected passages from A Space Bounded by Shadows (Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum, 2021), a novel by the acclaimed German-Turkish author Emine Sevgi Özdamar. Deeply preoccupied with Europe and its layered histories, the novel opens with a striking scene at the Greek-Turkish border; a geographical and symbolic threshold of “Europe,” marked by traumatic legacies both past and present. Through this text, we will examine the kinds of narratives about European memory that are being produced and contested.
We will ask:
Guided by the work of Ann Rigney, a pioneering scholar in memory studies and comparative literature, the workshop will also explore broader conceptual questions: What—or who—is Europe? What is memory? And how do memory and literature intersect to shape not only our understanding of the past, but also our relationship to the present and future? Ultimately, we will reflect on the potential of literary texts not only to represent memory, but also to critique, complicate, and generate new narratives of European memory.
Note: To participate in the workshop, please read the selected excerpts from the novel in advance. If you read German, you are welcome to consult the original version. Additionally, please read the paper by Ann Rigney, which will provide important conceptual context for our discussion.
The 19th-century saw the rise of new national museums, botanical gardens, and other institutions seeking the attention of the public. Many of these emerged during and in interconnection with debates about social, scientific and technological developments in Europe and beyond. Concepts such as ‘civilization’ were enriched with other central theories of the time, such as the theory of evolution to suit the general obsession with science. Used by archaeologists to characterise and compare ancient civilizations, by ethnologists to describe peoples from rural regions, non-European colonies and overseas territories and by socialists, intellectuals and politicians to describe and compare European countries competing with each other, terms like ‘civilization’ were not only used cross-disciplinary, but eventually became a buzz word of the time, tying scientific, historical and political interests together.
The museums and institutions that emerged from these debates had them built right into their walls, where they usually persisted until today. Sometimes, these topics are especially hard to trace for Europeans, because they are the fundament for premisses and approaches to systematisation and exchange still today. This course, therefore, aims to deconstruct some of these places centered around the case study of the Dutch Rijksmuseum and the assumptions built into them to explore where and how concepts of epistemic superiority such as ‘civilization’ translated into the institutions’ structures.
Whether in the taxonomies of ethnographic collections, the spatial logic of exhibition halls, or the framing of flora and artefacts from colonised regions, epistemic superiority was not just articulated in texts—it was built into walls, walkways, and catalogues. These structures continue to shape how knowledge is produced, curated, and legitimised today.
In this workshop, we will examine selected historical sources—from floorplans to speeches, from photographs to museum guides—tracing the entanglements between institutional form and epistemic authority. Whether your research focuses on museums, exhibitions, archives, or other heritage sites or you are interested in the interconnection between knowledge institutions and debate on epistemic superiority, this is a space to critically reflect on how knowledge was—and still is—ordered, valued, and made visible.
To prepare for this workshop, please read and reflect on the source materials provided via the link.
Roelants (Ed.): Guide to the NationalMuseum at Amsterdam with Illustrations by Wilm Steelink and Ground-Plans (1890) [read pages 1-13 (optional until 32) and have a look at the pictures and ground plans]
V. de Stuers: Holland op zijn smalst, in De Gids 37 (1872).
A. Loseke: Challenging the Framing of Asia and the Role of the KVVAK (Royal Asian Art Society in the Netherlands. The Asian Pavillon of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (2020).
If you would like to contribute a source from your own research that might enrich our discussion, feel free to send me a short email including:
If time permits, I’d be happy to include participant-submitted materials in our discussion
In this workshop we will ask ourselves where narratives of European colonial activities can be found in museums today and what challenges the material heritage from that period pose for institutions and more widely for issues of national but also European identity. We will consider in particular the case of the Benin treasures that were dispersed across the continent and which some institutions and countries have chosen to restitute. We will also consider how different European countries have created legal frameworks for the restitution of artefacts from colonial contexts.
Readings for the workshop
(Deep L translation of two chapters in English are below as well as the full French book)
Bodenstein, Felicity, Damiana Otoiu, et Eva-Maria Troelenberg. Contested Holdings: Museum Collections in Political, Epistemic and Artistic Processes of Return. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2022.
Appadurai, Arjun. « Museum Objects as Accidental Refugees ». Historische Anthropologie 25, no 3 (2017): 401‑9.
