Project description
Research on the contemporary discursive (de- and re-)construction of the concept of Europe (which metonymically can embrace references to the EU itself or its specific institutions in political discourse) has traditionally focused on EU politicians, media and publics. However, the EU`s leadership capacity in the international arena and its enlargement prospects, on the one hand, and the risk of European disintegration following a series of recent crises hitting the EU both from within and from the outside, trigger the need to take into account external perceptions and representations of EU-rope in public debate.
This interdisciplinary and cross-cultural project focuses on conceptualizations of EU-rope in Ukraine and in the UK within the period between “the Ukraine crisis” caused by Russia’s invasion in 2014 and Ukraine’s current fight for survival in the large-scale war waged by Russia in 2022. This period is also marked by signing the EU – Ukraine Association Agreement in 2014 and Ukraine’s accession to the EU in 2022 as well as the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU, which was finalized in 2020.
Epistemologically and methodologically, the project draws on: 1) the cascading activation model, according to which interpretive frames activate and spread from the government to the elites, media, the public and then feed back from lower to higher levels; 2) corpus-assisted discourse studies from a modern diachronic perspective examining ways in which language is used in the construction of discourses across different moments of contemporary time; and 3) socio-constructivist approaches to European integration coupled with discourse studies and critical discourse analysis (especially, the discourse-historical approach), with an emphasis on the linguistic, rhetorical and pragmatic devices as well as argumentation schemes employed by social actors in the process of making meaning of and organizing Europe.
Objectives
1. The project will quantitatively and qualitatively analyze and compare the range of change and consistency of representations of EU-rope that have been constructed and spread in the parliamentary discourse and in the media in the countries of interest over the specified period.
2. The project will examine the role conceptualizations of EU-rope play in the discursive construction of “everyday” national identity. Specifically, the project will turn the spotlight on women over fifty, who are a significant demographic layer (particularly in Ukraine) and who lived at the time of historically important events, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the EU.
3. The project will investigate how conceptualizations of EU-rope are used in the local populist political discourses as well as pro-EU and anti-EU propaganda.
This project will create new empirically grounded knowledge on the dynamics of uses of language in conceptualizing and representing EU-rope. Beyond discourse studies, it will contribute to understanding the lines of argument of current and future debates on renegotiating Europe and the EU.
