| Course Info | Class Number: 2000
The European Union is one of the most ambitious experiments in international cooperation ever attempted. Despite the EUs many successes, sources of conflict between and within European countries have persisted. With the recent Greek financial crisis ("Grexit"), the Syrian refugee crisis, Britain's departure ("Brexit"), and the rise of far-right nationalist parties in many member countries, the union is starting to look frayed around the edges. In fact, each move toward European unity has dropped barriers for some while raising them for others. In this course, we will explore European politics from the edges, from the borders separating the included from the excluded. These borders may be geographical, political, socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, or cultural in nature. Our focus will be on political initiatives from the bottom up and the outside in. From this perspective, we will try to make sense of the interactions that produce cross-cutting pressures toward European unification on the one hand and toward dissolution of the European experiment on the other. We will cover issue areas such as migrant labor, housing and urban quality of life, immigration and refugee policy, climate, pandemic response, education and collective memory, defense and security, and information politics.
Approach: Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC), Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ); Haverford: B: Analysis of the Social World (B), Social Science (SO)
Enrollment Cap: 25; 15 seats held for students in the 360 program.
This course is part of 360 and is available to non-360 students. This
course is Europe from the Margins: Established narratives of Europe
tend to be Western European and focused on high politics. This cluster
changes the focus from structures to stories, using an
interdisciplinary approach (incorporating political science, history,
and German studies) to critically examine Europes past and present
from the margins. What does Europe look like from the perspectives of
those whose voices are usually missing from mainstream narratives
the disempowered, queers, migrant laborers, artists, refugees, and
people from Europes eastern and southern peripheries? By inserting
and foregrounding perspectives of the historically marginalized along
with an examination of their theoretical, cultural, and political
contributions to European society, this 360 aims to provide critical
analytical tools to not only foster greater understanding of the
broader context of modern Europe but to rethink what Europe itself is.
The field trip to Berlin will provide an opportunity to examine
historical legacies as well as current cultural politics and
grassroots initiatives of the marginalized.. This 360 cluster includes
enrolling in GERM B217, and HIST B226. If the course exceeds the
enrollment cap the following criteria will be used for the lottery:
POLS Seniors, POLS Juniors, Sophomore, Freshmen. |
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