Vision: Envisioning Convivial Europe

Integration Department

Project head: Prof. Dr. Magdalena Nowicka

Project team members: Maksymilian AwuahDr. Piotr Goldstein

Running time January 2022 until December 2025
Status Current project

With its results, the project wants to contribute to understanding phenomena that hinder the shaping of Europe as a convivial space. In the first step, the team wants to ethnographically explore the living conditions and lifeworlds in Europe's shrinking regions, the "inner peripheries", and in particular the socio-spatial disintegration processes (objective 1) as well as the connection of these processes to the transnational regime of mobile temporary work (objective 2). In this context, gender and generational affiliation will be explicitly addressed. In the second step, convivial spaces and relations in Europe will be conceptualised in order to sketch a vision of the European convivial society (Objective 3).

With the concept of conviviality, the project aims to propose a new narrative around transformations in Europe. Inspired by convivialism as a research method, the project focuses on the knowledge of people in the "inner peripheries" of Europe, which is otherwise systematically marginalised. We therefore consider the inhabitants and mobile workers from selected regions in Germany (Brandenburg), Poland and Romania not only as informants, but feel committed to an active dialogue with them.

In doing so, we do not see the "inner peripheries" through a "logic of absence", but consider the people and places as a resource for convivial Europe. The project strategically uses visual ethnography as a new lens alternative to old vocabularies of dichotomy between growth and decline, or winners and losers. By exploring the interconnections between Europe's "inner peripheries", we aim to develop a new perspective for research that goes beyond the transfer between rich and poor regions.

Project website: https://visionproject.net/

Social Media:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/convivialEurope/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/convivialEurope
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/visionproject

Funding: Volkswagen Foundation (Third-party funding)

Cooperation partner:

University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and Paris Lodron University Salzburg (Austria)