Conferences

Making Europe/Making Europeans: The Ethnographic and the Everyday

April 10th-11th 2008
Center for European Studies Conference
UT Campus, Main Building, Room 212

Conference Organizers

Werner Krauss
Werner Krauss is a social anthropologist and currently an adjunct associate professor (DAAD – German Academic Exchange Service) in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His UT teaching includes the course “Introduction to European Studies.” So as one of the organizers of this conference he is really excited about the opportunity to present to our students and faculty some of the best scholars in this field “live and in person!”

His research focuses mainly on the politics of nature and the anthropology of landscapes, based on multi-sited ethnography and integrating science and technology studies. How do we create, shape, and administer the environment we inhabit, be it a village, a region, a nation, Europe, or the world at large? He has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Swiss Alps, Portugal and Northern Germany. His recent publications cover conflicts arising from the implementation of conservation strategies, as well as questions of heritage, material culture, landscape, sustainable development and alternative energies.  He is now writing a book with the working title “Climate, Coasts, and Catastrophes: Localizing Climate Change.”

Other fields of interest and courses I am teaching are human-animal relationships, soundscapes, sports, and cultural theory. His work has always been interdisciplinary, and, as an anthropologist, he likes to adapt to new (not only academic) environments, as you can see in the photo.

Ben Carrington
Ben Carrington is Associate Director of the Center for European Studies.  He is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and serves on the executive committees of the Center for African and African American Studies and the Center for Women's and Gender Studies.  He previously worked at the University of Brighton in England before moving to UT in the summer of 2004.   

Professor Carrington is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Carnegie Faculty of Sport and Education at Leeds Metropolitan University, England.

Keynote

Maurizio Cotta (Università di Siena, Italy)
Maurizio Cotta is currently professor of political science in the University of Siena and Director of the PhD programme in Comparative and European Politics and of the Master programme “Politics in Europe”. Visiting professor University of Texas at Austin (1989-90): Sciences Politiques Paris (December 1992-January1993) and European University Institute of Fiesole (1992-1993); Norwegian School of Management (January1994/5/6) visiting research fellow Yale University (1980-1981) and Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University (Fall 2000). Formerly member of the Executive Committee of the European Consortium for Political Research (1994-2000). Chairman of the Italian Political Science Association (2001-).

His main research interests are in the field of the comparative study of political elites and political institutions and of Italian politics. He is currently working on a research on the Europeanisation of Italian politics. He is co-director with H. Berst (University of Jena) of the European Science Foundation Network “EURELITE – European Political Elites in Comparison: The Long Road to Convergence)

Speakers

Les Back (Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK)
Les Back is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His main fields of interest are the sociology of racism, popular culture and city life. His work attempts to create a sensuous or live sociology committed to searching for new modes of sociological writing and representation. This approach is outlined in his most recent book The Art of Listening (Berg 2007).  He also writes journalism and made documentary films.

John Borneman (Princeton University, USA)
John Borneman has conducted fieldwork in Germany and Central Europe, and is currently engaged in research in Lebanon and Syria. He has completed projects on the symbolic forms of political identification, the relation of the state to everyday life, forms of justice and accountability, and on regime change. Currently he is working on an anthropology of secularism. From 1991 to 2001 he taught at Cornell University, and has been guest professor at the University of California, Berkeley; Stockholm University (Sweden); Bergen University (Norway); guest professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (France); Fulbright Professor at Humboldt Universitaet zu Berlin (Germany) and the University of Aleppo (Syria). He has written widely on kinship, sexuality, nationality, and political form, with an ethnographic focus on Germany--and currently Lebanon. His most recent publications include Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation (1992); Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice, and Accountability in Postsocialist States (1997); Subversions of International Order: Studies in the Political Anthropology of Culture (1998); Death of the Father: Toward an Anthropology of the End in Political Authority (2003), and The Case of Ariel Sharon and the Fate of Universal Jurisdiction (2004). Professor Borneman teaches courses on culture and international order, the anthropology of memory, and money, sex, and cultural diversity.

Michal Buchowski (University of Poznań, European University Viadrina)
Michal Buchowski is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Poznań and of Comparative Central European Studies at European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder. He was (2003-2004) a Distinguished Visiting Professor for International Affairs at Columbia University and he also lectured at the University of Kansas, Humboldt University, and Rutgers University. He was a Fellow of British Council, Fulbright Foundation, Kosciuszko Foundation and the Humboldt Foundation, and worked as a research fellow in the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin and CNRS in Paris. His scientific interest is in modes of thought and in Central European social and cultural transformations. He has published several books, among them most recently in English Reluctant Capitalists (1997), The Rational Other (1997), Rethinking Transformation (2001), as well as To Understand the Other (in Polish); and he is the co-editor of Poland Beyond Communism (2001) and The Making of the Other in Central Europe (2001). Currently he is working on issues related to the encounter of the free market and democracy with the realities of post-socialist Poland at the grass-roots level in Poland and Central Europe.

Dorle Dracklé (University of Bremen, Germany)
Dorle Dracklé is Professor for Social Anthropology and Intercultural Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. From 2005-2007 president of EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists) she is now editor of the journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale. Various fieldworks in Portugal on media and diversity, elite, culture, economy and the European Union. Current research interests include media, science and technology studies (“Infrastructure and Alternative Energies”), economy, politics and policy, teaching and learning anthropology. Recent publications: The Rhetoric of Crisis: On The Cultural Poetics of Politics, Bureaucracy and Virtual Economy in Southern Portugal (2008, in German); Current Policies and Practices in European Social Anthropology Education (2004, edited with Iain Edgar); Educational Histories of European Social Anthropology (2003, edited with Iain Edgar); several edited books on The Anthropology of Europe, Youth Cultures, Old Age and Death. At the moment she is preparing a book on her international research project: “Netcultures – eGovernment and Ethnic Identity in Five National Contexts”.

Grant Farred (Cornell University, USA)
Grant Farred is Professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University. He is author of, most recently, "What's My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals" (Univ of Minnesota Press, 2003), "Phantom Calls: Race and the Globalization of the NBA" (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2006) and "Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football" (Temple University Press, 2008). His forthcoming works include "Bodies At Rest, Bodies In Motion: The Event of the Athlete" (Univ of Minnesota Press, 2009) and "The Politizen" (Cornell University Press) He is the General Editor of the journal "South Atlantic Quarterly."

Richard Giulianotti (Durham University, UK)
Richard Giulianotti is Professor of Sociology at Durham University.  He is author of Football: A Sociology of the Global Game (Polity, 1999), and Sport: A Critical Sociology (Polity, 2005).  He has recently co-authored, with Adrian Walsh, Ethics, Money & Sport (Routledge, 2006).  He is editor or co-editor of ten books on sport, most recently (with Gary Armstrong) Football in Africa (Palgrave, 2004), Sport and Modern Social Theorists (Palgrave, 2005), (with David McArdle) Sport, Civil Liberties and Human Rights (Taylor & Francis, 2006), and (with Roland Robertson) Globalization and Sport (Blackwell, 2007).  He has published numerous articles in mainstream and specialist journals, and has given papers and invited speeches at many international conferences.  His recent research has focused particularly upon the intersections of sport and globalization.  He has co-authored several articles with Roland Robertson, one of the founding figures of globalization studies, and they are currently completing a book for Theory, Culture & Society/Sage.

Sarah Green (University of Manchester, UK)
Sarah Green's particular interests focus on location, analysing how people locate themselves both in the world and in relation to themselves and others, and how that is informed by political conditions, as well as by imagination and diverse ways of knowing. She has analysed that in all her research - by exploring the politics of gender and sexuality in doctoral work on feminist separatism and the formation of ‘community’ and ‘safe space’ in London (Urban Amazons Macmillanand St.Martins Press, 1997); then in a study of the politics of the intense promotion of new information and communications technologies (ICTs), by studying the relationship between ICT networks and geophysical space in Manchester (e.g. "Scales of Place and Networks: an ethnography of the imperative to connect through information and communications technologies." Current Anthropology 2005, Vol. 46, No. 5, pp. 805-826); and in terms of constructions of space, place and landscape on the Greek-Albanian border, which included a study on how some places, such as the Balkans, seem to continually appear and disappear (Notes from the Balkans, Princeton University Press, 2005). In research she is currently developing based on the Greek-Turkish border in the Aegean, she aims to bring these three strands together, in studying the process of making and unmaking the conceptual and geophysical boundaries of ‘Europe’, focusing particularly on the circulation of, and talk about, money.

Tracey Heatherington (University of Wisconsin, USA)
Tracey Heatherington has been working on ethnographic projects related to the cultural politics of environment, development and "resistance" in Sardinia, Italy, since 1990. She earned a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 2000, and taught at the Queen's University of Belfast and The University of Western Ontario before joining the faculty at The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in 2004.

She now teaches a variety of courses related to globalization, culture and environment, and she is working on a book about Sardinia and the global dreamtimes of environmentalism. Her evolving research interests include environmentalism and postnational identity construction in the European Union, the neoliberalization of environmental management, sustainable development in Romania, and the use of new reproductive technologies in wildlife and biodiversity conservation.

Ian Henry (Loughborough University, UK)
Ian Henry is Professor of Leisure Policy and Management and Director of the Centre for Olympic Studies & Research in the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences. He graduated from the University of Stirling in 1975 with a degree in English and Philosophy before completing a masters degree in Recreation Management (1976) and a PhD (1987) both at Loughborough University.

From 1976-1980 he worked in facility management and sports administration in local government, before taking up lectureships at Ilkley College in 1980, Leeds Polytechnic in 1987 and Loughborough in 1989. In 2001 he was Visiting Professor at l'Université Aix-Marseille II (l'Universite de la Mediterranee), in 2006 at Hitosubashi University, Tokyo and in 2007 at University of Technology, Sydney (at the School of Sport. Leisure, and Tourism and the Australian Olympic Studies Centre). He is currently Editor of European Sport Management Quarterly, the journal of the European Association of Sport Management.

Kira Kosnick (Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
Kira Kosnick is Junior Professor of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. After receiving her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology (2003) from the New School for Social Research, NY, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow for the EU Fifth Framework Project "Changing City Spaces: New Challenges to Cultural Policy in Europe" before taking up a lectureship at the Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University in England. Her book Migrant Media: Turkish Broadcasting and Multicultural Politics in Berlin has been published by Indiana University Press in 2007. She is also co-author of an ethnographic study on Islamic amateur television production in Germany, Islam auf Sendung: Islamische Fernsehprogramme im Offenen Kanal (Berlin: Dagyeli Verlag 2007, together with Anke Bentzin, Jeanine Dagyeli, Ayfer Durdu and Riem Spielhaus). Her current work focuses on cultural transformations in European cities that are influenced by immigration, and on the emergence of new migrant socialities.

Sandro Mezzadra (University of Bologna, Italy)
Sandro Mezzadra studied Philosophy and Political Science at the Universities of Genoa and Bologna. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Turin in 1993. He was a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, of the Max Planck Gesellschaft f¸r Rechtsgeschichte, and a visiting researcher at Duke University, at Goldsmiths (University of London) and at the Centre for Cultural Research (University of Western Sydney).

As assistant professor of "History of Political Theories" since 1999, and as associate professor since 2007 he teaches Contemporary Political Theory and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Bologna (Faculty of Political Sciences). Since 1999 he has taught European History in a masters course organized by the University of Bologna in Buenos Aires. He is in charge of the internationalization process at the Department of Politics, Institutions and History.
His research interests have been focused for many years on the history of political, legal, and social sciences in Germany between the 19th and the 20th century. In recent years he has worked especially on the subject of citizenship, both from an historical standpoint and focusing on contemporary discussions (with particular reference to Europe). He has explored the relation between citizenship, migration, and globalization in a series of essays that have been translated in several languages and have been widely discussed at an international level. He has also played an important role in introducing postcolonial criticism in Italy.

He is member of the editorial board of a number of Italian and international journals including ´Filosofia politicaª, ´Scienza & Politicaª, ´Studi culturaliª, ´Multitudeª, ´Subjectivitiesª and ´Historical Materialismª

Rajko Mursic (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)
Rajko Mursic is an associate professor of methodology and cultural anthropology at the University of Ljubljana, where he teaches courses in methodology, theories of culture and society, and popular culture. He received his B.A. in philosophy and ethnology (1991), M.A. in cultural anthropology (1995) and his doctorate in ethnology (1998) – all from the University of Ljubljana. He is the author of Non-verbal Sound Games: from Philosophy to Anthropology of Music (Katedra 1993), Center for Dehumanization: Ethnological Description of the Rock Group (Frontier 1995), and Trate: The Story of the Youth and Rock Club (Subkulturni azil 2000); all in Slovenian. He (co-)edited seven anthologies – the most recent are Europe and its Other: Notes on the Balkans (Co-edited by Bozidar Jezernik and Alenka Bartulovic) (University of Ljubljana 2007) and Places of Encounter: In memoriam Borut Brumen (Co-edited by Jaka Repic) (University of Ljubljana 2007); both in English. Currently he is working on several edited volumes, among which is Popular Music and National Culture: Viewing the World from the Balkans (LIT Verlag) with co-editor Alenka Barber Kersovan.

Kenneth Olwig (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden)
Kenneth Olwig was appointed to the Swedish University of Agricultural Science as Professor in Landscape Planning with specialty in landscape theory and history in January 2002.  He was previously professor in Landscape History and Planning at the Department of Geography at the University in Trondheim (NTNU), Norway.  He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Minnesota, Department of Geography, 1977, where his advisor was Prof. Yi-Fu Tuan, and where he also studied with Prof. David Lowenthal.  A combination of aesthetic, legal, literary and cultural geographical approaches characterize his approach to landscape and the relationship between society and nature.  His interests range from the effect of cultural perceptions of nature and landscape in regional development, to the role of ideas of law and justice in shaping the political landscape and its physical manifestations.  These issues are the topics of the two monographs: Nature's Ideological Landscape: A Literary and Geographic Perspective on its Development and Preservation on Denmark's Jutland Heath (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984 and Landscape, Nature and the Body
Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America's New World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).

Alexander G. Weheliye (Northwestern University, USA)
Alexander G. Weheliye is associate professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University where he teaches African American and Afro-Diasporic Literature and Culture, Critical Theory, and Popular Culture. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Duke University Press, 2005), which was awarded The Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature or Culture. Currently, he is working on two projects. The first, Technologies of Humanity concerns the vexed category of the human in modernity as it pertains to Afro-Diasporic culture. The second, Modernity Hesitant: The Civilizational Diagnostics of W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter Benjamin, tracks the different ways in which these thinkers imagine the ‘marginal’ as central to the workings of modern civilization. His work has been published and is forthcoming in American Literary History, boundary 2, CR: The New Centennial Review, The Journal of Visual Culture, Public Culture, Social Text, and the anthologies Black Europe and the African Diaspora and re/visionen: Postkoloniale Perspektiven von People of Color auf Rassismus, Kulturpolitik und Widerstand in Deutschland

Michelle M. Wright (University of Minnesota, USA)
Michelle M. Wright is an associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches courses in African Diasporic and African American literature and thought.  She received her B.A. from Oberlin College in Comparative Literature in 1992 and her doctorate in the same from the University of Michigan in 1997. She is the author of Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (Duke UP 2004); editor, with Antje Schuhmann, of Blackness and Sexualities (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007); editor, with Tina M. Campt of Reading the Black German Experience, a special issue of Callaloo (Spring 2003) and with Faith Wilding and Maria Fernandez, editor of Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices (Autonomedia/Semiotext 2003). She is currently at work on a new manuscript tentatively titled The Physics of Blackness: The African Diaspora in the Postwar Era. Her work has appeared in Nka: Journal of African Art, Frontiers: Journal of Feminist Studies, the award-winning anthology James Baldwin Now (NYU Press, 2000), and the anthology Der Black Atlantic (Haus der Kulturen der Welt Verlag, Berlin 2004) edited by Paul Gilroy, Fatima El-Tayeb and Tina M. Campt.

Chairs:

Veit Erlmann (School of Music, UT Austin)
John Hoberman (Department of Germanic Studies, UT Austin)
Steven Hoelscher (Department of American Studies, UT Austin)
Mary Neuburger (Department of History, UT Austin)
Jennifer Wilks (Department of English, UT Austin)