Bo Stråth

Here are listed the seminars and workshops from the autumn of 2007 to the end of 2008 at the Helsinki University that prepared the two projects Europe 1815-1914: Creating Community and Ordering the World and Conceptual History and Global Translations. The seminars and the projects dealt with fact-finding missions into the past with normative questions about the future in the back of the mind, questions about a better world, whatever that means. Here is also the last conclusing seminar of the Europe 1815-1914 project in 2013.

To connect Bo Stråth’s research interests with those of the PhD researchers working with him at the EUI, they organized several seminar series initiated by the researchers as a joint venture. The focus was on theory and methodology questions connected to the practices of historians. There were often invited guests to broaden their intellectual input.

Here are two seminar series in the framework of Bo Stråth's and Peter Wagner's project EUI Europe's Cultural Heritage Reconsidered: Rupture and Continuity in European Cultural Orientations.

At border checkpoints, political and military power merge and the state monopoly of violence is made evident to those who intend to pass and those just standing by. There, the territory is demarcated, and this demarcation is enforced; enlightenment ideas of universal freedom and equality are shattered, and there is little rational justification for why the jurisdiction of one state should end and another begin. Why not one or twenty meters to the right or left? The seminar series at EUI 2001-2002 organized by James Kaye, Willfried Spohn, Bo Stråth and Anna Triandafyllidou was a forum for the EU framework programme projects IAPASIS and EURONAT.

Here are seminars at the EUI 2001-2005 within the working group The Economy as a Polity established by Christian Joerges, Bo Stråth and Peter Wagner and the research project Modernity of Europe directed by Stråth and Wagner.

The seminar, centred on the debate of the time on the impact of the single currency in several fields of social policies, aimed to bring together experts from various fields. Professors Silvana Sciarra and Bo Stråth provided the theoretical framework in introductory seminars. They highlighted the historical background of the adoption of the single currency and the legal innovations linked to it.

The point of departure of this seminar organised by Kar Klare, Silvana Sciarra and Bo Stråth was the major shift in the view on work which has occurred since the 1970s. The language of flexibility, deregulation and globalisation tried to cope with this change but hardly did so exhaustively, as little as the continued invocation of full employment did.

Bo Stråth’s EUI seminar 1997-2001 drew on and fed back to the research work within the project The Cultural Construction of Communities in the Process of Modernisation in Comparison. During these years, the project prepared several edited volumes. The work on the volumes provided input for the seminars and vice versa. The most important seminars are listed here.