Everyday Europeanization in EUrope's peripheries. Towards a Performative Turn in EU Studies (FWOTM898)

So far, research in EU studies has prioritised structures, institutions, actors; and has relied primarily on positivist methods, ignoring everyday routines and performance habits that are integral to making the EU what it is. To remedy this gap, this project proposes a performative turn to understand how Europeanization functions as an everyday project. It takes the notion of performativity and argues that it is in the way everyday practices are performed that can get us to the bottom of how EUrope is performed, how is Europeanness, as opposed to non-Europeanness normalised and justified in different peripheries. In other words, how EUrope features in
mundane and banal practices like street performance, music festivals, school curricula, fashion and the like. To do this, the project takes the existing research on the case of Kosovo (Western Balkans) as a starting point to map out and problematize EUrope and Europeanization as performative exercises in different peripheries, namely Ukraine (Eastern European Partnership) and Peru (Latin America). The project has three primary objectives: one, identify the formation of EUropean subjectivities in each case; two, explore how these subjectivities explain, shape and create EUrope in its peripheries; and three, identify the policy implications of these subjectivities for the EU and
its external relations with these cases.

Keywords:social sciences, EU studies, ethnography

Disciplines:Other social sciences not elsewhere classified