School of Social Sciences

Bangor sociologists are partners in a new EU 7th Framework Programme Collaborative Project

The project The Evolution of European Identity: Using biographical methods to study the development of European identity will investigate the question: how far do individuals identify themselves with Europe on an everyday level? Reactions to enlargement of the community, the European constitution and citizenship ‘tests’ all point to uncertainty about loyalty and belonging. A serious lack of positive identification with the ‘European project’ by ordinary citizens would undermine the long-term economic and political success of the European Union. Until now, research into European identity has been almost exclusively from a ‘top down’ elitist perspective that focuses upon the development of identification with the idea of ‘Europe’ reflected in centrally-driven policies.

The Euroidentities project will use advanced methods of qualitative biographical interviewing and analysis to gain insights into European and other identities from the ‘bottom up’, the perspective of the individual. The research strategy will be to target people whose life experience will have caused them to confront questions of their own identity within Europe. They are:

‘transnational’ workers in a wide range of occupations;
mature adults who experienced cross-border educational exchanges earlier in their lives;
farmers who are subject to Europe-wide markets and systems of regulation;
‘cultural contact’ workers;
participants in civil society organizations.

The three year project, starting in March 2008, is coordinated by Professor Robert Miller from Queen’s University, Belfast. The Bangor team, including a post-doctoral Research Fellow and a researcher assistant is led by Professor Howard Davis from the School of Social Sciences. The other partners are from the Institute of Sociology, Magdeburg, Germany; the Department of European Culture Studies, University of Lodz, Poland; the School of Economics and Business Administration, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia; the Institute of Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria; and the Department of Sociology, ‘Frederico II’ University, Naples, Italy.