Ulrike Hanna Meinhof

Imagining Europe: everyday narratives in European border communities

This article examines the role of ‘Europe’ in our border narratives. One of the most striking parallels across our entire data set was the absence of Europe or ‘Europeanness’ as a self-chosen category of identification. In contrast to other categories, European references only appeared in response to direct questions by the interviewers. This article shows how people conceptualised Europe and the EU, once invited to do so by the interviewer. Both Westerners (all citizens of EU member-states) and Easterners (all citizens of ascendant EU member-states) anchored their views in distinctly local contexts. At the same time there were many narrative and discursive overlaps on either side: Westerners often construed a congruence between Europe and the EU and used this thematic field to define their own national and socio-economic identity. For many Easterners the links between Europe and the EU were much less clear and the topic provided a discursive field within which people articulated a sense of economic and political disempowerment. In both cases Europe generated the clearest sense of belonging only when it came into play as an out-grouping device against immigrants who are deemed non-Europeans.

Photography, Memory, and the Construction of Identities on the Former East—West German Border

This article discusses pilot data for a major research project into the discursive construction of identity in three-generation families living in (former) border communities where each generation has experienced fundamental changes in their socio-political environment. The oral data on which the analysis is based were triggered by photographs from the communities in question, and are being analysed with discourse-analytical procedures. The article demonstrates how an innovative method of using symbolically-charged photography as triggers for oral narratives can solve a major dilemma for discourse analysts interested in oral data. It also demonstrates the processes of identity construction under highly conflictual circumstances. Using examples mainly taken from the narratives of three individuals from three different generations, living in a town on the border between the former GDR and West Germany, the article discusses the discursive means of coming to terms with different kinds of difficulties encountered by each generation in constructing for themselves an identity in the new Germany.

Reconfiguring East-West identities: Cross-Generational discourses in German and Polish border communities

This article takes its data from one of two sets of communities studied as part of a British ESRC project into discursive constructions of identity. In this paper we argue three interrelated points. Firstly, we show the ways in which different elicitation formats of interviewee responses foreground variable aspects in peoples identification. Secondly, we show how similar elicitation methods produced different criss-crossings of identification which render summary generalisations about identities in these communities problematic. Thirdly, we highlight the fluid and often paradoxical nature of multiple identifications across the different layers with which people choose to engage.

Migrating borders: an introduction to European identity construction in process

This introduction to the edition provides the historical, geopolitical and methodological context for a programme of collaborative research conducted between 2000 and 2003 in sets of communities on the border between the EU and its south-)eastern ascendant nations. Our analysis is framed by interlinking comparative themes which form the cores of the different articles contained in this special issue. This opening article argues that the geopolitical dimension of the border needs to be understood both as an axis of past conflict and painful memories, and as an axis of contemporary socio-economic inequality. Only by understanding this double legacy and its effects on the communities along the border can ongoing conflicts between the people on either side of the border be fully understood.

Transcultural Europe: An Introduction to Cultural Policy in a Changing Europe

The debate concerning European cultural policy – or what we prefer to call cultural policy in a changing Europe – came very much on to the agenda in the 1990s, in the context of what we may regard as a significant cultural turn in EU discourses. There was the sense at that time that the project of European unification could only move forward on the basis of a new kind of European cultural imagination. There were two directions in which the debate was to move. The first was in terms of the construction of a pan-European cultural space, and the possibility of creating a common European culture and identity. This integrationist agenda was associated with the enlargement of European cultural markets and spaces, as, for example, in the media policy for ‘television without frontiers’. The other direction in which thinking moved was towards a new regionalist agenda, with the slogan of a ‘Europe of the regions’, with the emphasis being put on the idea of Europe as a rich cultural mosaic, and on the idea of ‘unity in diversity’. At the heart of the unfolding debates, along both of these lines of thinking, was the issue of national cultures, which have, of course, been the primary frame of reference in which cultural policy agendas have been elaborated in modern Europe. How, it was being asked, might cultural policy now be re-framed in a context in which national objectives were no longer self-evidently the ‘natural’ priority?

Negotiating Multicultural Europe

This book is about neighbourhoods and networks between the diverse people of contemporary Europe who live in a globalized and globalizing world and across different types of borders: physical and mental, geopolitical and symbolic. The books theme is set within the larger framework of globalization and geopolitical re-ordering on the European continent, processes in which the supra-national EU has played a highly significant role and where transnational relations increasingly become the norm. This collection is based on qualitative social research in a range of European locations. It explores community relations that are marked by boundaries whose primary local definitions are national, ethnic or racial, and it examines the local negotiations of those boundaries, including the attempts to overcome them. The book thus brings into comparative perspective the negotiations of national and historical identities that are often foregrounded by border studies, and concerns with ethnic and multicultural identities which tend to be the domain of migration studies.

Diskurslinguistik im Spannungsfeld von Deskription und Kritik

Im vorliegenden Band geht es darum, den in der Linguistik fruh etablierten Antagonismus zwischen Deskriptivismus und Kritik/Normativitat/Praskriptivismus aus unterschiedlichen innerdisziplinaren Blickwinkeln und Positionen zu reflektieren und zu hinterfragen. Ausgehend von der Beobachtung, dass Diskurse in den zur Diskussion stehenden Ansatzen einer linguistischen Diskursforschung semiotische Strukturen, Prozesse, Praktiken, Ereignisse oder Potentiale mit Wirklichkeit reprasentierender, wirklichkeitskonstitutiver und wirklichkeitsverandernder sowie aussagenregulativer Funktion sind, ist es das Ziel des Buches, die innerdisziplinar auseinanderlaufenden und (potentiell) konvergierenden Entwicklungen zur linguistischen Sprach-, Interaktions-, Wissens- und Machtanalyse vergleichend und gegebenenfalls auch integrativ aufeinander zu beziehen. Der vorliegende Band ist mithin als Forum fur die Betrachtung und Darstellung von tatsachlichen und moglichen Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschieden zwischen sogenannter „deskriptiver“ und sogenannter „kritischer“ Diskursanalyse konzipiert. Von Interesse sind in den Beitragen unter anderem Fragen zum Wissenschaftsverstandnis und Erkenntnisinteresse der jeweiligen Ansatze einer Diskursanalyse, zu ihrer moglichen normativen Fundierung, zur semiotischen Analyse der Multimodalitat von Diskursen, zur sozialen Stratifizierung „gesellschaftlicher Redeweisen“, zu Sprachideologien und Sprachidealen, zum Verhaltnis von Sprache, Diskurs und Handlung, zu diskursiv konstituierter Sozialsymbolik, zur diskursrelevanten Framestruktur von Wissen, zur Anwendungsperspektive von Diskursforschung und zu Fragen der praktischen Bedeutung diskursanalytisch gewonnener Erkenntnisse.

Perspectives on Cultural Diversity

In the European and British context, the much referred to concept of ‘cultural diversity’ and its equivalent in French and German is often evoked as complementary to, a synonym for, or an advance on, the similarly omnipresent term ‘multiculturalism’. This is mainly due to shifts in the perception of ethnically-marked difference in the postwar period. Particularly in the British context, these shifts were characterized by moving from a policy approach based on support for ‘ethnic minority’ cultures to multiculturalism, and then most recently to cultural diversity (Bennett, 2001: 58–9) In many different contexts, where metropolitan (as well as national and European) cultural policy engages with the relationship between people of different cultural backgrounds in European cities, cultural diversity seems to suggest a progressive, anti-discrimination agenda. However, when examined in more detail within the linguistic and pragmatic context of policy documentation and political debate, ‘cultural diversity’ becomes ambiguous, difficult to pin down, as well as contradictory. Whereas ‘multiculturalism’ discourses explicitly thematize questions of cultural coexistence or integration, and have been met with highly politicized support, critique or rejection, cultural diversity discourses are more fluid in their implications, and more in need of contextualizing within their respective political and cultural environments. Drawing upon key policy documents and political discussion produced at the European, national and metropolitan levels, we will explore in detail some of the linguistic and pragmatic contexts of cultural diversity and the semantic fields within which the term acquires its significance. Our aim is to examine the extent to which the multiple meanings of cultural diversity across the different levels and layers of policy and public debate in European nations, disguise or even potentially hinder and misdirect the discussion about greater transnational coexistence, which the earlier debates about multiculturalism had begun. Our critique is not intended as a defence of multiculturalism insofar as this has come to mean ‘a carnival of nations within nations’, but rather as a critique and clarification of the shifting term of ‘cultural diversity’.

Beyond the Diaspora

This chapter analyses three prevalent theoretical approaches to the study of migrant populations today which are often subsumed under the umbrella term of transnationalism: diaspora, (neo-)communitarianism and cosmopolitanism. Our aim is to clarify and narrow down the phenomena associated with migration discourses and experiences, so as to render the different connotations associated with these terms more explicit and empirically useful.

Globalized culture flows, transnational fields and transcultural capital

The chapter discusses globalised culture flows from a bottom-up, empirically grounded perspective of musicians moving and mixing in transnational fields. This privileges the mobilities of artists whilst not neglecting artistic form, creations and productions. The first section shows the ways in which migration of people and musical forms has given rise to many new musical creations. The second foregrounds musicians as a sub-section of people on the move, arguing the case for transnationalism as the most appropriate theoretical frame The chapter also underlines the need for combining research of internal migration within a country with research on international, cyclical and return migration between localised places and countries. It highlights the advantages of a transnational perspective on individual artists’ movements, arguing that movements and encounters of individual artists put into focus both the inequalities and barriers erected against migrants, as well as the possibility of a strategic activation of their transcultural capital.