Eurovision Song Contest and the 'New' Europe

This project aims to advance critical thinking about the contemporary Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), focusing on the ways in which the Contest has reflected, and perhaps driven, changing perceptions and realities of Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The socio-political and economic realities of Europe as well as larger conceptual frameworks about what 'Europe' means are shifting rapidly in our times. Europe is becoming the site of multi-directional flows of power, finance, ideas, and bodies. The ESC, with its own unique imaginative and aesthetic modality, has been since its founding in 1956 a symbolic contact zone between European cultures, an arena for European identification in which both national solidarity and participation in a European identity are confirmed. It is also a site where cultural struggles over the meanings, frontiers and limits of Europe, as well as similarities and differences existing within Europe, are enacted.

Since the 1990s the ESC has itself been changing rapidly in response to the continent's shifting political, social, and economic realities. The number of competing countries has nearly doubled (from 22 participants in 1990 to 42 in 2009), and new entrant countries have come to dominate the Contest: from 2000-2008 every winner was an Eastern or Southern European nation. This has prompted anxiety amongst some Western European media and contest insiders, who have portrayed this as invasion or wrongful domination. These anxieties echoed, and were fuelled by, larger tensions within Europe about Westward migration, and perceived differing levels of economic and cultural development between Western and non-Western European nations. The ESC has thus become a stage on which the changing realities of Europe are being played out.

Participants in this project come from a wide variety of disciplinary approaches: theatre and performance studies, ethnomusicology and popular music studies, media studies, queer and gender studies, sociology, and European studies. The inclusion of scholars from non-Western European backgrounds is a high priority. We intend for our research to participate in and contribute to the ways in which key stakeholders understand the Contest and its meanings, and are therefore inviting the participation, in some of our events, of broadcasters, participants, journalists, and fans.
The project involves three theme-based workshops: 'European Margins and Multiple Modernities' (to be held at the University of Warwick's teaching facility in Venice, Italy, in November 2010) considers the persistence of the binary of barbarian East/civilised West in current European public life, and the ways in which the ESC may challenge or uphold this binary. 'Queering Europe' (at Royal Holloway, University of London, February 2011) extends recent research on the queer and camp appeal of Eurovision towards wider readings of the ways in which gender and sexuality are performed and problematised on the Eurovision stage. The final workshop, 'Feeling European: The Eurovision Song Contest and the European Public Sphere' will take place at the Eurovision Song Contest in May 2011, and will have two parts. An academic workshop will consider the ways in which the ESC enacts an ideal vision of Europe, and the role that affect plays in viewers' various affiliations to the ESC; while a panel made up of Contest stakeholders will consider the network's preliminary findings, in a discussion open to the public.

The project will result in a co-edited volume; chapters will be expanded versions of selected workshop presentations. We will also include material reflecting the contributions of non-academic participants, such as transcripts of interviews and panel discussions. Other dissemination points, including the Eurovision Research Network website and a collaboration with the EUScreen European television heritage project, are discussed in our Impact documents.

The Eurovision and the 'New' Europe project (ENE) and its partner, the Eurovision Research Network (ERN, www.eurovisionresearch.net) are co-organising a two-day symposium at the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) in Oslo (28-29th May). Half of the symposium events will take place in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Oslo, our local academic partner, and the other half will be held at the Contest venue itself. The symposium will include a panel debate comprised of high-profile Eurovision scholars, broadcasters, journalists/commentators, and fans, which will be free and open to the public. This will create public awareness of and momentum towards our proposed AHRC-funded workshops and other activities.

The first two of these workshops, 'European Margins and Multiple Modernities' and 'Queering Europe', are tightly focussed on dialogue between network members and will not be open to the public. However, we will make a selected component of each of these workshops (such as a keynote speech) available as a podcast on the ERN website, and will offer written digests of the workshops on the site. The workshop at the 2011 ESC will be comprised of two parts, one the academically-focussed network discussion on 'Feeling European'; the second a panel discussion, open to ESC national delegations, journalists/broadcasetrs, local academic community, fans, and the general public, in which network members will discuss the preliminary findings of the ENE project with key ESC stakeholders. This will include, ideally, Svante Stockselisus (Executive Supervisor of the ESC for the European Broadcasting Union); a leading figure in the fan community; a high-profile journalist and/or commentator; and a public intellectual from the host nation. This discussion will provide valuable critical feedback about our findings thus far, and inform our ongoing research and the formulation of the co-edited book project.

As in Oslo, we will work with a local academic partner in the ESC host city, who will provide support, facilities, ideally funding, and contact to students and the local academic community. As with the Oslo event, we will promote this event via ERN, fan, and official EBU channels; publicise the event locally and at the arena; record the panel discussion as a podcast for the ERN website; and monitor responses and feedback via a questionnaire.

Another important public dissemination point for our research will be EUScreen, a European Commission-funded network which provides open online access to Europe's televisual heritage. This collaboration will provide invaluable access to ESC footage for ERN members, and will be a pilot project for EUScreen in working with scholars interested in a specific area of European television broadcasting. Several ENE members will shape presentations for workshops (and potential chapters for the resulting edited volume) around footage accessed through EUScreen. We will curate an online exhibition for EUScreen of selected ESC footage with written commentary by network members, crediting this as part of the ENE project.

Our main published outlet will be a co-edited volume, including chapters drawn from workshop presentations as well as selected non-academic content, including transcripts of panel discussions from the Oslo and ESC 2011 workshops; and interviews with and testimonies and personal reflections by key figures in recent 'New European' ESC activity. While our target readers are academics, this mixture of scholarly and popular content will increase the appeal of the book to a variety of readerships and will underline our understanding of the ESC as an event with popular cultural appeal and interest as well as academic value.