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Center Profile

Center Profile

Donatella della Porta and Dario Gaggio, March 2009

The Center for European Studies-European Union Center (CES-EUC) is a multi-disciplinary research, education, and outreach program that strengthens the understanding of modern, integrated Europe at U-M and in the United States. CES-EUC partners across the U-M, and with universities and scholarly institutions in the European Union to research, teach, and engage publics around European and EU affairs. Research initiatives, fellowships, lectures, conferences and teaching structure this project.

The challenge of any area center focusing on Europe is to move beyond the “West and the rest” approach which undergirded, more or less explicitly, the early movement towards the internationalization of research and education in this country. This movement, by making Europe the norm and the paragon of processes of modernization, paradoxically impeded the concrete study of Europe’s diversity, conflicts, and contradictions, relegating the continent to little more than a foil to which American modernity could be likened or contrasted. The process of decolonization, the end of the Cold War, and the rapid integration of many political and economic functions across national boundaries have all, in different ways, dethroned Europe (and especially western Europe) from its old position of privileged irrelevance, thereby allowing Americans to look at the continent in novel, less instrumental, ways.

This productive normalization and problematization of Europe, now perceivable in its enormously diverse external linkages and internal articulations, have made European studies newly relevant to other parts of the world—this time, however, not in a hierarchical and normative fashion but by reconfiguring Europe as a world region struggling to build its future and re-imagine its role in the world. Thus, the European Union does not represent a lesson to the rest of the world but an experiment, at once exciting and poignant, in the ongoing redefinition of sovereignty and democratic control in the age of globalization. By the same token, European cultural traditions are being rediscovered in all their too often denied hybridity and nonlinear complexity. In this spirit, CES-EUC has set out to encourage a novel appreciation of Europe’s internal diversity in dialogue with other parts of the world. This goal can only be achieved through a genuinely interdisciplinary exchange. Therefore, CES-EUC has branched out of a predominantly institutional and policy-oriented focus by opening up to all the human and social sciences represented on campus.

RESEARCH

2008-11

  • Pathways for Women in Leadership Positions. Partners: U-M Stephen M. Ross School of Business; Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research and Poe Center for Business Ethics, University of Florida; Office for Women's Affairs and Kelley School of Business, Indiana University
  • Towards a European Higher Education Area: Bologna Process and Beyond. U-M School of Education, Center for the Study of Higher  and Postsecondary Education; University of Oslo: ARENA-Centre for European Studies, Higher Education Development Association (HEDDA)
  • Attitudes of Poles towards the EU. U-M Department of Political Science and Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences and Collegium Civitas.
  • The Sacralization of Politics in the EU. U-M Department of Political Science
  • Muslim Minorities in Europe. U-M Institute for Social Research and Department of Political Science

 

2005-08

  • Religion and Politics in the Modern Europe. Partners: Department of Political Science, International Institute
  • Pathways for Women in Leadership Positions. Partners: U-M Stephen M. Ross School of Business; Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research and Poe Center for Business Ethics, University of Florida; Office for Women's Affairs and Kelley School of Business, Indiana University
  • Does Islam Create a New Glass Ceiling? Partners: U-M Department of Sociology; Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey; Iris Women Watch of Turkey
  • The Cultural Politics of European Union Energy Security. Partners: University of Helsinki and Aleksanteri Institute, U-M Department of Sociology
  • Faculty Collaboration with Science Po. Partners: Ford School of Public Policy, Science Po
  • The Development of Laws and Policies Related to the Dissemination of Public Opinion Data in Central and Eastern Europe. Partners: U-M Institute for Social Research, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary(CEU)

FELLOWSHIPS

LECTURES

CONFERENCES

2008-11

2005-08

TEACHING

VISITING SCHOLARS