Annotation
The full title: Reading Europe from Its East: re-framing the poly-crisis from the Eastern European perspective The course examines the project of united Europe through its underlying, and at times dueling, social and political imaginaries. The suggested optics goes beyond the focus on the EU institutions and procedures, on the one hand, and counter to “nichification” of East European studies, on the other. Bringing East European takes on European integration into the general discussion aims to expose how the inclusion of former Soviet countries changed and challenged the European project. Several nodal points define the architecture of the course:
1) symbolic geography and persistent internal othering, where the European East stands as the major internal Other;
2) complex imperial/colonial legacy that plays out when the former maritime metropoles and the wrecks of former land empires are unified under the common EU umbrella;
3) socioeconomic inequality between people, nations, and polities, and symbolic hierarchies deriving from it;
4) the cascade of the EU crises – how they reverberated on the West – East cleavage and on the fragile European unity, where the turmoil in Ukraine, the refugee crisis, the rise of populism, and the recent pandemic are the main foci of attention. Sessions will be held in Zoom: https://cuni-cz.zoom.us/j/91351806736 The course materials are available on Moodle: https://dl1.cuni.cz/course/view.php?id=13321