The constitutive power of outsiders: Theorizing new spaces, scales, and practices within and beyond Europe

Organizers: William Kutz (University of Cambridge), Ilaria Giglioli (New College of Florida)

 

We are looking for people interested in developing upon emerging research on the study of what Brown and Christou (2011) called “the constitutive power of outsiders.” This work has largely sought to explain the ways in which peripheral and extra-European agents influence the structure of European policy, identity, and borders (Delcour 2013). Doing so, the approach has advocated for embracing EU territoriality as more unsettled than has been generally accepted and to even imagine “what is left in the margins, i.e. what is not Europeanized, and how this exterior relates to the internal functioning of EU policies and institutions in even producing some sort of counter-Europeanization” (Celata and Coletti, 2016, 19). Research on the “power of outsiders” initially emerged from work undertaken on the Eastern Dimension of the European Neighborhood, with a particular focus on Ukraine, Russia and Turkey (Korosteleva, 2012; Bachmann and Muller, 2016; Morozov and Rumelili, 2012). A growing number of studies from the Mediterranean, including Tunisia (Cassarino, 2014) and Libya (Bialasiewicz, 2012) have explored similar sets of ideas. The majority of the debate, however, has approached the question from a decidedly macro-regional perspective regarding the relationship between the European Union and its margins.

 

Our proposed session aims to examine debate from a wider set of theoretical and empirical perspectives, and to imagine what these approaches might do for political geography more broadly. The themes include, but are not limited to:

 

·      The scalar politics of outsiderness;

·      The cultures and economies of outsiderness;

·      Outsiderness and performativity;

·      Subalterity and outsiderness;

·      Gender, ethnicity and outsider power

·      Case studies of outsiderness beyond the European Union;

 

Please send abstracts to William Kutz ([log in to unmask]) and Ilaria Giglioli ([log in to unmask]) by October 21, 2018. Depending on interest, we may also put together a panel on this topic. Feel free to also reach out if you would be interested in participating in a different capacity.