The American University of Paris welcomes Prof. Sandra Seubert, Goethe University Frankfurt, for a talk entitled "Constituting European Citizenship." This talk is part of the Contemporary European Democratic Theory theme of the DEMOS21 event series organized by the Center for Critical Democracy Studies.
This paper ask how pro-European activism relates to the idea of European citizenship. Its ambition is to evaluate recent mobilisations in light of an activist understanding of citizenship and relate them to a broader dynamic of reframing political space. Despite its ambivalent founding in market integration, EU citizenship as a legal status has a political potential which has hardly been sufficiently discussed. Exploring the performative as well as polity-constituting dimension of enactments of European citizenship, the paper elaborates on the role of narratives and imaginaries of democratic founding that are the basis for political mobilisation. Reflecting on recent attempts to transfer the idea of constituent power to a transnational setting, it suggests a reinterpretation which incorporates the inherent paradoxical dimension of enactment and representation. ‘Constitutive moments’ are sequences of rupture rather than single events, creating narratives of shared past and future, which reach out to construct new commonalities.
Sandra Seubert
Sandra Seubert is Professor of Political Theory at Goethe University, Frankfurt and ‘Goethe Fellow’ at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften (Institute for Advanced Studies). During the academic year 2019/20 she was Alfred Grosser Visiting professor at Sciences Po Paris. She holds a PhD in Political Theory from Free University Berlin, and got her ‘Habilitation’ from the University of Potsdam. From 2013-2017 she was PI and member of the Executive Board in the EU funded project Barriers towards EU Citizenship (bEUcitizen). Her research focuses on theories of transnational democracy and European citizenship, and blurring boundaries of public and private under conditions of digitalization of communication.
Registrants will receive an email, including the event details and the link to join the event, 24 hours prior to the event start time. For late registrations, please email Julian Culp at jculpaup.edu.
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