Crisis, Risks and New Regionalisms in Europe. Emergency Diasporas and Borderlands

Four years ago, when we started brainstorming about this workshop, pulling together the threads of engaging theoretical conversations and teaching activities in our Cultural Studies groups, we thought about the future of Cultural Studies in the specific German, Italian, and European contexts. We were interested in connecting the politics of Cultural Studies to our pedagogical practices in the academia. Some of the questions we wanted to address concerned how Cultural Studies in university teaching would cope with the widespread economic and social crisis; how Cultural Studies would resist the tendency towards assimilation within canonical subjects; how political involvement and participation in a wider and ethical sense could be supported and enhanced in Cultural Studies university courses; how the project of Cultural Studies could continue to be "done" in the contexts where we lived; how our pedagogy would continue to be collaborative, dialogic, and transdisciplinary; and how we, as practitioners of Cultural Studies, could help to read the present through the lens of the past for a better future. We did not have "perfect stories" nor exhaustive answers since, as Lawrence Grossberg claims, we "don't believe that there is a perfect story to be told" (De B'Béri/Audette-Longo: 3), so we opted for a conversation. The voices of intellectuals, teachers, artists, and students contributed to a dialogue that was purposely interdisciplinary, plural, and interactive – but also, at times, provocative and unstructured – and, above all, with experiences from outside the academia. It is our ambition to continue this open conversation on Europe and the Europeans both from global and local perspectives.