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Athens General Strike, 19 October 2011’, by Verani Federico

This two-year research project (2014-2016) explores the impact of the 2007-onwards financial crisis on the interconnected spheres of media representation, everyday life and popular responses in different parts of Europe, with particular attention to North-West and South-East European countries. The project is structured around five workshops, in respectively Nicosia, London, Limerick, Athens and Plovdiv. It is funded by a Leverhulme Trust International Network Grant.

Central questions include: how do people experience the crisis? How are media representations handling these experiences? What innovative forms of social support or collective action are developing? How are these issues negotiated/translated across EU languages and cultures? A core group will meet in the workshops with invited participants to discuss these questions.

As project context, the financial crisis and protests against austerity measures in Europe and beyond since 2007 need no introduction. Academic attention to these have, so far, focused overwhelming on top-down questions: economic quantification/gauging, analysis of specific financial sectors and policy initiatives, crisis-alleviation and regulation of markets/enterprise, and economic jurisprudence. Departing from the above emphases, this project engages with the relatively neglected socio-cultural dimensions of the financial crisis in Europe – in other words, how the world looks from the bottom up.

Bank Debt Protest, 09 February 2013, by Fatin Al Tamimi

Here the following interconnected topics are centred: representations of financial crisis for public understanding in national and international domains (through media-frames, translations, rhetorical strategies); the experience of crisis in everyday life (within and across specific contexts); public responses to crisis (including forms of resistance and disaffection). The kinds of historical perspective, involving national memories and narrative identities, that bear upon all of these topics are also of special interest here. The NW and SE focus of the project enables particular attention to issues of translation. Approaches to the study of culture from a range of Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines will be used.

We are very grateful for the use of images by:
Header image: (1) 'Occupy St Paul's', 09 November 2011, © Kurtis Garbutt, (2) ‘Athens General Strike', 19 October 2011, © Verani Federico, and (3) Bank Debt Protest, 09 February 2013, © Fatin Al Tamimi
Main page: (1) ‘Athens General Strike', 19 October 2011, © Verani Federico, and (2) Bank Debt Protest, 09 February 2013, © Fatin Al Tamimi;

Contact Us

The project is administered by the Faculty of Arts at the Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK
tel +44 (0)1908-655244.  

For general enquiries or to be added to our contact list, please e-mail us at: crisis-and-protest-project@open.ac.uk

For individual Coordinators please contact: