Founded in 1992, the Sussex European Institute (SEI) is an interdisciplinary research hub that brings together scholars and experts whose work engages with Europe’s political institutions, political economy, and its historical legacies.
SEI facilitates a dialogue between scholars based in various departments across and beyond the University of Sussex, including disciplines such as Anthropology, History, International Relations, Law, Sociology, Politics, Law, and Economics. Our community of scholars also works closely with practitioners, policy makers and the voluntary sector.
Europe is often seen as a realm - or even cradle of - democracy, freedom, and rights. Other times, European integration is viewed as in perpetual crisis. In our understanding, Europe not only takes shape through such projected self-images, but also constitutes itself through European states’ and institutions’ historic and contemporary actions – which have crafted internal power asymmetries and produced global inequalities.
Upcoming Events
Spring 2025
- Wednesday 26 February 2025, SEI Seminar, Racism as a flexible symbolic resource: The usefulness of the concepts 'symbolic violence' and 'undoing differences' for the analysis of racism
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SEI Seminar
Date: Wednesday 26 February 2025
Time: 3-4.30pm
Venue: Freeman F39
Title: Racism as a flexible symbolic resource:
The usefulness of the concepts ‘symbolic violence’ and ‘undoing differences’ for the analysis of racism
Karin Scherschel, Professor of Migration, Katholische Universitaet Eichstaett-Ingolstadt
The talk discusses sociological perspectives on the dynamics of racism. Specifically, I propose to study racism as a 'flexible symbolic resource'. This concept will be developed in three steps. The first part will provide an overview of the contemporary conceptual debate on racism in Germany. This debate has been influenced by debates in Britain but also has its own idiosyncratic features. These are related to the German historical context and the specific use of the term racism in German academic and public discourse over the past decades. Secondly, the talk will introduce the main contours of a conceptualisation of racism as a flexible symbolic resource. Hereby, I combine a conceptual understanding of racism that draws on Stuart Hall with Pierre Bourdieu´s notion of 'symbolic violence' and Stefan Hirschauer’s thinking about 'undoing differences'. The third part will provide some empirical findings from two of my studies of racism as a flexible symbolic resource in different social contexts.
- Wednesday 12 March 2025, SEI Book Launch: Law, Migration, and the Construction of Whiteness: Mobility Within the European Union (Routledge, 2024)
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SEI Book Launch:
Date: Wednesday 12 March 2025
Time: 3-4.30pm
Venue: Freeman F39
Title: Law, Migration, and the Construction of Whiteness: Mobility Within the European Union (Routledge, 2024)
Dagmar Rita Myslinska, Associate Professor, Creighton Law School
This monograph addresses the hidden dynamics of race within the European Union. Brexit supporters’ frequent targeting of European Union (EU) movers, especially those from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), has been popularly assumed as at odds with the EU project’s foundations based on equality and inclusion. This book dispels that notion. By interrogating the history, wording, omissions, assumptions and applications of laws, policies and discourses pertinent to mobility and equality, the argument developed throughout the book is that the parameters of CEE nationals’ status within the EU have been closely circumscribed, in line with the entrenched historical positioning of the west as superior to the east. The study shows how EU laws and regulations have systematically rendered CEE nationals precarious, vulnerable to labor exploitation, and subject to racialized discrimination. By engaging with current legal, economic, political and moral issues—against the backdrop of Brexit and contestations over EU integration and globalization—this work opens avenues of thought to better understand law’s role in producing and sustaining social stratifications. Europe is a postcolonial space, as this book demonstrates. By addressing fractures within the construct of whiteness that are based on intersection of ethnicity, class, and migrant status, and demonstrating how they shape lived reality of mobility, the book also provides a theoretically nuanced, and politically useful, understanding of contemporary European racisms. This book will appeal to scholars, students and others interested in migration, EU integration and EU citizenship, equality law, race and ethnicity, social policy, and postcolonialism.
- TBC SEI & Politics Research Seminar: Russell Foster, Brexit and Brex-Lit: British and European Identities in Popular Culture since 2016
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Date TBC
Title: SEI & Politics Research Seminar:
Russell Foster (Kings College London)
Brexit and Brex-Lit: British and European Identities in Popular Culture since 2016
Time: TBC
Venue:TBC
- TBC SEI and Poliitcs Research Seminar: Stavroula Chrona, Affective Democracy: The Political Affectivity of Grievance Politics and Democratic Change
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Date: TBC
Title: SEI & Politics Research Seminar:
Stavroula Chrona (LPS Sussex)
Affective Democracy: The Political Affectivity of Grievance Politics and Democratic Change
Time: TBC
Venue: TBC
- TBC, Migratization- The Ascription of Migration as Performative Practice
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Migratization - The Ascription of Migration as Performative Practice
Alyosxa Tudor (Reader in Gender Studies, SOAS)
Date: TBC
Venue: TBC
Abstract: To make sense of the overlapping racist, anti-immigration and anti-EU rhetoric that marks the pre- and post-Brexit moment in the UK, in my talk I suggest differentiating between racism/racialization and migratism/migratization in critical scholarship. The conceptualizations foreground a postcolonial understanding of racism and make it possible to analyze both migration-based discrimination and discrimination based on perceived migration in violence and hate crimes connected to the Brexit referendum. I first coined ‘migratization’ in the book chapter ‘Racism and Migratism: The Relevance of a Critical Differentiation’ (Tudor 2010): “Migration and migrants are not at the center of this article, but the power relations that construct migration. I call the process of construction ‘migratization’; the power relation that constructs ‘migratization’ is ‘migratism’’ (Tudor 2010, 396). Racialization and migratization are not symmetrical or oppositional but have a complicated interdependent relationship, are bound to each other and play a crucial role in organizing the Western nation state. To illustrate my arguments that intend to challenge and extend existing scholarship, I discuss exemplary snapshots from news articles, blog posts and social media sources. I suggest conceptualizing migratization (the ascription of migration) as performative practice (Tudor 2018) that repeatedly re-stages a sending-off to an elsewhere and that works in close interaction with racialization. I argue that the proposed differentiation can help us to disentangle the layers of ascriptions of migration and racialization we witness in the examples, without downplaying the role of white supremacy on one hand or ignoring the migration-based discrimination against East Europeans on the other.
- View our previous events