The essays gathered here, though disparate in topic and methodology, present a surprisingly unified theme. During our stay at the IWM during the first half of 2004, the Institute occupied itself with questions about the European Union, particularly in terms of the EU’s relationship to the world and the EU’s own complex internal identity politics. The Junior Fellows’ Conference in June, 2004, brought together a diverse array of individual talents and interests, many of which were not, at the outset, explicitly concerned with the nature of the EU. However, the work produced at the conference concerned two aspects of human experience that lay at the center of the body politic: memory and action. In their own ways, each essay collected here asks what it means to remember who we were but also what we want to be, both as individuals and as society on the whole. The numerous ways in which these questions are asked and answered illustrates the complex processes of public memory, action, and identity formation.
Introduction
JVF Conference Papers
