Eu centers proposal submission guidelines

3. Law and Media
Globalization is doing more than simply eroding physical borders. It is also dissolving the boundaries that separate nations and cultures and the norms and morals that bind them. Ideas now traverse political borders with the touch of a button on a computer. Meanwhile, all people, from the poorest migrants to the wealthiest hedge-fund managers, cross borders in ever growing numbers looking for opportunity. These varied people bring different views and attitudes to their new homes, while technology allows them (if they so choose) to remain emotionally and culturally connected to their old homes.
The movement of ideas and people stimulates creativity and innovation. It also challenges traditional notions of group identity. Do (and should) citizens of Denmark think of themselves primarily as Danes or as Europeans? Will Muslim immigrants in Rotterdam and, Hamburg and Paris come to see themselves as part of Europe or as separate from it? Do Poles, Bulgarians, and citizens from other new entrants to the EU see the European project in the same way that citizens in Western Europe do?
The Center will examine these questions of identity and citizenship. Identity politics (defined broadly), aided by the trans-border nature of information technology, is of great importance to a frontier state like Texas, which has the second largest foreign-born population in the US. The University of Texas is home to some of the world’s leading researchers on the formation, expression, and evolution of identity. The Center will provide UT students, faculty, and staff—as well as the wider Central Texas community of business people, policymakers, and not-for-profit leaders—with a forum through which to learn about Europe’s experience with identity politics and to share their own experience and knowledge. The US and Europe can learn much from each other about different migrant experiences, and Austin is an ideal vantage point from which to explore changing group identities in a comparative manner.
In exploring culture, citizenship, and identity, the Center will place particular emphasis on the role played by journalists and the media. We will provide a conduit through which practitioners, industry leaders, students, researchers, and faculty at UT’s professional school of Journalism as well as Radio, Television and Film can access and discuss the academic scholarship and practices in Europe. The Center will encourage and support student exchanges and cooperation with universities in the EU. In short, we will provide UT students, faculty, and researchers, as well as European visitors in Austin, with a trans-national platform for the study of new mediums in radio, television, film, and journalism.
The Center will also emphasize how legal practices in Europe and the US are comparable and how the two models can learn from one another. Adhering to the theme of identity politics, we will examine law and sexual citizenship and how these are perceived in Europe and the US. We will also emphasize the European perception of humanitarian and international law, particularly in the context of the post-global war on terror.
Finally, the Center will provide the UT community specifically and Central Texas as a whole with information about exhibitions and performances that will highlight the incredible depth and volume of European art and culture. The Center will work with the world-famous Blanton Museum of Art and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center to attract European artists and art works to the UT campus to add to the already significant European art exhibitions and performances these institutions currently offer.