The Nijmegen Centre for Border Research, University of Nijmegen organises the international seminar
“NORFACE – B/ordering Europe: The Frontier ”
This workshop is part of a workshop-series organized by "NORFACE" (acronym of: New Opportunities for Research Funding Co-operation in Europe), a partnership between twelve research councils to increase co-operation in research and research policy in Europe. The twelve partners involved are the research councils for the social sciences from Estonia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Canada participates in NORFACE as an associate partner. This partnership is built on a history of less formal co-operation and joint activities between the Nordic and UK research councils. NORFACE formalises this existing working relationship and provides a framework and a vision for a durable multi-national strategic partnership in research funding and practice.
For more information please visit the website http://www.norface.org/
DATE
September 26-27, 2008, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
CONTENT
Following recent waves of eastward enlargement (10 new Central and European member states in May, 2004; Romania and Bulgaria, January, 2007), in tandem with the French and Dutch “No” votes on the Constitutional Treaty, the European Union now confronts the limits of territorial aggrandizement and has shifted focus towards the management of its newly contiguous “outside”. As embodied in new policy domains such as the European Neighborhood Initiative (ENPI), or “Wider Europe”, such a shift augurs an unprecedentedly vast and complex relationship with its external borderlands, as problems of migration and repatriation, drug- and people-trafficking, arms smuggling and other security risks must now be addressed across the length and breadth of the EU’s outer frontier rather than merely through bilateral agreement. This has provoked debate on the efficacy of ‘soft’ versus ‘hard’ borders. The term “frontier” is itself historically charged, both as space of opportunity and self-reinvention, as reflected classically in Jackson Turner’s America, but also in the experience of earlier rounds of overseas European imperial expansion. As such, the European frontier has also traditionally been a site of paradox and contradiction, a laboratory where the supposedly universal values of Enlightenment modernity and civilization founder and must be rethought anew. The impact of globalization on Europe’s borders is clearly manifested in the challenges for Europe awaiting it at its outer frontier, conceived not so much as a physical dividing line separating Europe from non-Europe but as a sinuous, undulating zone of contact, resistance and unplanned hybridity from where we may be able to capture the transformation of the EU as a political project from its margins.
KEYNOTES:
Confirmed Keynote speakers:
HOST
The Nijmegen Centre for Border Research (NCBR), University of Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
LOCATION
Huize Heyendaal
Geert Grooteplein Noord 9
Po Box 9103
6500 HD Nijmegen
Website of Huize Heyendaal