SO/CU 370 - Urban Identities in Contemporary Europe

This course aims at analyzing shifts in modern identity formations in Europe with an emphasis on urban space through the lenses of memory representations and reconfigurations of social structures/migration. The focus will be on memory politics, ethnic conflicts and war, migration, as well as political and economic transformations. We will delineate collective (national, sub and supranational) identities in their historical and current development looking into the re-structuring of major national narratives after 1989, in the aftermath of the refugee crisis, and within the war in Ukraine. We will analyze conflict zones in Europe’s pluralist societies, the risks of disintegration and detect hybrid spaces related to identity between nation, ethnicity, race, religion, class, and gender. In the second part of the course, we investigate the interdependence between identity, language politics, food cultures and immigration. The focus of empirical reflection and research literature will be on the European city with special references to Berlin, and selected European cities.