Nico Carpentier holds keynote at Tuning into the Noise of Europe conference
On 19 January 2018, Uppsala University professor held the keynote speech at the Tuning into the Noise of Europe conference, at the The Hague University of Applied Science in the Netherlands.
The keynote, entitled 'European identity as political struggle', was grounded in a discourse-material theoretical framework, which emphasizes the contingent and struggled-over nature of identities. In this approach, communication plays a key role in making the multitude of signifying and material practices circulate, but also in sedimenting them into discourses. This perspective allows articulating the European identity as an unstable outcome of a series of political struggles, that relate to the fantasy of homogeneity to construct their particular articulation of the European identity as hegemonic and universal.
In the talk, the workings of the discursive-material knot and the European identity struggles were illustrated by a series of small case studies situated in the 1/academic (European public sphere and Erasmus), 2/popular (Eurovision Song Contest) and 3/artistic fields (David Černý's Entropa and Bernard Romain's Statue of Europe).
Nico Carpentier is professor in media and communication studies at the Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University.