(En)countering Europe as Global, Othered & Transperipheral Voices
We are an independent research network for graduate and early career researchers working on EU/Europe outside the main disciplinary currents of European Studies. EUROGLOT suggests ‘speaking’ about Europe, albeit differently: by amplifying global, othered, and peripheralised voices.
To this end, we gesture to ongoing conversations around decentring, decolonising, and diversifying how we come to speak about Europe and its many entanglements in the social and political world. As such, we welcome all researchers interested in anti/de/neo/post-colonial, critical, feminist, indigenous, interpretive, Global East, Global South, non-Eurocentric, intersectional, queer, and other heterodox perspectives on Europe, broadly understood.
As immigrant, racialised, othered, and historically marginalised academics, we know too well how (en)countering Europe from the outskirts, both in a spatial and geopolitical sense, often proves to be an alienating endeavour. Through EUROGLOT, we aim to create a kind of transperipheral* opening where we can learn from each other across peripheries and jointly, among others:
- discuss our projects together as peers
- question what counts as canon
- share our lived experiences in the academe and beyond
- co-organise conference panels, lectures, methodological workshops, reading groups, and so on.
This initiative is co-convened by Szilvia Nagy and Antonio Salvador M. Alcazar III. We have worked closely with Anissa Bougrea, Alvaro Oleart, Izabella Wódzka, Jan Orbie, and Rahel Weldeab Sebhatu as co-organisers. If you are interested in joining this network, please sign up here.
OUR READING GROUP USUALLY RUNS ON THE LAST WEDNESDAY EVENING EACH MONTH (CET).
OUR ACTIVITIES
* When initially building the space that is now Euroglot, we resonated with Zoltán Ginelli’s use of ‘transperiphery‘ because of its specific understanding of locating the shared historical colonial encounters between the Global South and Eastern Europe. For us (Szilvi and Antonio), this concept is appealing given our marginalised positionalities and embodied experiences as doctoral researchers from these geographies navigating European Studies as a field and a Euro-American university in Central Europe.
That said, considering how our difficult conversations over this past year have taken shape, we now seem to be taking a more expansive view and praxis of the ‘T’ in Euroglot. For us, our emergent interpretation of ‘transperipheral’ is as simple (but no less potent) as dialoguing and speaking across different peripheries — in a geographical sense, in an ontological/epistemological sense, in a social/political location sense. This understanding encompasses decolonial/anticolonial thinking and praxis as well as other marginalised modes of doing things in the global academy, including critical/interpretive ways of knowledge-making. In this sense, the idea of ‘transperipherality’ seems more aligned with our emergent discourse as something that speaks to the different conditions of being peripheral(ised) across different contexts. We remain in conversation with texts on the plural meanings of ‘transperipheral’ without suggesting any interpretive closure.