EUPECCOM is a three-year (2023-2026) project, supported by the Erasmus+ Jean Monnet Actions in the Field of Higher Education: Modules call, with a budget of EUR 25 500,- aimed at discussing current issues in Europe, including climate change, war, conflict and migration. The core of the project is a module of three courses on European topics (War and Terror in the Media, Climate-Conflict-Migration and The Big Questions of Europe) offered to students of the university, but also other activities for the wider public. The leader of the research team is David Levente Palatinus and the team members are Jan Hrkut, Iveta Kloptova and Eugen Zelenak. David Palatinus, the project leader, told us more about the new European project.

In the summer 2023, your project EUPECCOM was selected by the EACEA. It is one of Jean Monnet projects, which usually discuss and explore European issues. Could you tell us more about the main idea behind the project?

The purpose of this project is to tackle the interrelation of climate, conflict and migration, and the ways their pertaining ecological, political, and ethical complexities are construed and circulated via various cultural practices and ways of symbolization.

Forms of conflict, and in their wake, migration have become key players in the recent radicalization of global politics, and have frequently been construed via media outlets as well as in political discourse as threats to national security and to the perceived cultural values in Western societies. From Huntington’s highly controversial Clash of Civilizations (1996) to Derrida’s concept of ‘hostipitality’ (2000) to Zizek’s ideas about the militarization of society (2015) to Thomas Nail’s Theory of the Border (2016), conflict and migration have been mobilized as political capital as well as new critical idioms that thematize discourses on how we understand human subjectivity, and the ways we negotiate historical and cultural legacies of territory, identity, safety, economic interests and democratic liberties. On the other hand, a growing body of scholarship (see for instance Abel et al., 2019) suggests a correlation between climate change, violent conflicts and forced migration. At the same time, recent tendencies towards the radicalization of world politics and the emergence of populist agendas (in the US, the UK as well as in a number of EU countries – it’s enough to just think about the results of the recent elections in Slovakia) also necessitate a radical rethinking of issues ranging from politics of inclusion to social mobility to climate justice and violent borders.

In the light of the recent challenges and controversies migration policies have been facing in the US, UK and the EU, and the current administrations’ ambiguous attitudes towards the role environmental factors play in the proliferation of conflict and, consequently, migration, addressing the relation between these global factors is an urgent and topical issue.

Undoubtedly, the issues of climate, conflict and migration are very up-to-date not only in Europe but around the world. Could you please tell us more why did you choose these issues as key issues for your project and how you are going to address them in your teaching?

The correlation between conflict and migration has been in the focus of attention in critical discourses on the EU’s politics of crisis management, economic theory, and social geography. Research on global security, exacerbated by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic over the past year, established itself as one of the pivotal agendas to pursue in relation to the question of migration into and within the EU, too. Various disciplines offered insights into the multiple possible ways these factors are connected to one another, yet the order of causality and the nature of this relation remains unexplained.

The purpose of this project is to bridge the gap between current political discourses and pertaining scholarly takes on the construction and circulation of cultural ideas about the multi-faceted relations between conflict, climate, and migration. Our primary focus will fall on conceptualizations across various platforms of the cultural spectrum that map out the ways the relations between these factors are perceived and engaged with. The project lays special emphasis on the ways we negotiate awareness and agency in relation to media representations of migrants and migrations into and out of specific geographic locations.

Possible angles of approach will include but are by no means restricted to documentary realism (films for action); fiction (literary and moving image media from feature films, to television to video games); social media (with particular emphasis on Twitter and Instagram); political discourses, colonial theory, ethics and hospitality, climate studies, war studies, etc. We seek to focus on cultural narratives of the visibility as well as the invisibility (in fiction, art, media and critical discourse) of scarcity, changed ecological circumstances, practices of exclusion, systemic violence etc., and other forms of social and cultural anxieties related to conflict, climate and migration.

Students attending our project courses will be offered both theoretical and practical insights into possible ways to bridge the gap between current political discourses and pertaining scholarly takes on the construction and circulation of cultural ideas about the multi-faceted relations between conflict, climate, and migration.

In terms of methodology, courses touch upon issues that move between and across political geography, migration studies, philosophy and ethics, political theory, comparative literary and media studies, eco-criticism and climate studies, cultural ecology, theories of subjectivity and postcolonial studies.

I understand that over the years you have been teaching various courses from the area of media studies, social media etc. As part of your EUPECCOM project, you are going to offer three courses each academic year for the students of Catholic University in Ruzomberok. What do you plan to cover within these courses?

There’s two courses that I am the convenor of: War and Terror across Media is taught in the winter semester, and it examines popular screen media representations of global terrorism and the war on terror in particular in its contemporary framing. The course seeks to focus on the ways  media constructs and circulates iconographies of terrorism and the terrorist. Students will learn to critically assess and contextualize such representations and to comment on the ways they relate to and inform real-life public anxieties, agency, and policy making. They’ll gain familiarity with pertaining concepts in regards to global safety, conflict, territory, violence, and they’ll also gain insight into basic concepts and methods of screen studies.

The second course is Climate-Conflict-Migration, and it looks at the ways we negotiate awareness and agency in relation to media representations of migrants and migrations into and out of specific geographic locations within and outside the EU. Students will get hands-on experience with mapping out how the relations between these factors can be engaged with both at local and international levels. The realia studied and examined will include documentary realism (films for action); fiction (literary and moving image media from feature films to television); social media (with particular emphasis on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram).

In Europe over the last couple of years we are dealing not only with the issue of climate change and related issue of migration but recently also with the Russian war in Ukraine. Moreover, there is a new development in Israel. Does it mean the topic of conflict is going to have prominent place in your course/s?

Absolutely – I think that the contents of the course will continually have to be revised and updated in light of the unfolding events in both theatres. At the same time it’s also important to respect various sensitivities on the part of a very international student cohort. The military invasion of Ukraine by Russia on the 24^th of February is now understood to have constituted a turning point in 21^st century global history, not unlike the 9/11 terror attacks. It offset the already rather sensitive balance of power and the status quo globally, propelling the world into a new era of (not so-) Cold War, with threat levels at a constant new high. The collective response of the US, the G7, NATO, the EU and several other nations, both in terms of military, financial and humanitarian aid given to Ukraine, as well as in terms of using economic sanctions to put pressure on president Putin by gradually isolating Russia seem to have worked only to some extent, but could not accelerate the peace process.

Whilst these developments brought together EU member states and NATO to a previously unprecedented accord (it’s been shown that support of a closer EU integration has significantly increased, as did support of, and willingness to join NATO), they also reanimated some old reflexes that, at least in Europe, most people believed to have been out-evolved since the lifting of the Iron Curtain. This is not only restricted to the general opinion that a war in Europe in the 21^stcentury was unthinkable. Also, we’re witnessing a revival, and a new rehashing of the logic of ‘us vs them’ that dominated the Cold War era and defined the US’s ‘war on terror’ both locally in the Middle East, and globally, via an enhanced presence of digital surveillance and intelligence operations, which tied our sense of security to the predicament of having to relinquish chunks of our privacy to a global surveillance apparatus. In addition, the ways in which social media are used not only for information sharing, raising awareness, but also as a weaponised tool via data manipulation that will extend beyond state borders will have produced a curious and paradoxical forms of allegiances where trust and suspicion are constantly overwrite one another when it comes to media consumption – be it professional or citizen journalism, forms of activism, testimony, or forms of symbolic representations via screen narratives (films and television dramas) about the personal, subjective dimensions of conflict, from heroism and sacrifice, to devastation, victimization and suffering. This complex and dynamic media landscape poses new challenges and opportunities for understanding the causes, consequences and responses to contemporary conflicts, as well as the roles and responsibilities of different actors involved in them. How can we critically assess the impact of social media on conflict dynamics and resolution? How can we harness the potential of social media for peacebuilding and reconciliation? How can we ensure the ethical and responsible use of social media in conflict situations? These are some of the questions that this paragraph aims to address.

The main part of the project is a module of three courses. There are, however, also some other activities planned for the duration of the project. Could you please tell us briefly what other plans do you have within the project?

There will be several invited speakers both from ‘the industry’ (cultural and political diplomacy, think tanks, media professionals) who will offer insight into their expertise in the form of public lectures.

The project has a dedicated website (run by Eugen Zelenak) where we announce events, publish brief progress updates and brief opinion pieces addressing specific issues.

We plan to build a researchable archive of materials (blog entries, opinion pieces, media produced by the students in the courses, the purpose of which is to engage with specific aspects of the discussed phenomena at a local level, mostly in the form of case studies) to raise awareness and to disseminate knowledge generated within the project. This archive will be publicly available.

We also plan to implement film screenings and ‘in conversation’ sessions aimed at the general public of the university, which we plan to record and archive in our database.

In regards to outreach and mobilization, two colleagues from the Philosophy department (Jan Hrkut and Iveta Kloptova) will organize a Philosophy Olympiad the purpose of which is to engage high school students in a discussion of European issues. Philosophy Olympiad has been organized at the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the Catholic University in Ruzomberok for many years, and it has become very popular among high schools. This time critical philosophical essays students usually write will tackle some of the most urgent issues of Europe.

 And of course we seek to publish our research findings in the form of journal articles.