Practices of Display

The project explores the significance of visual political communication in Europe on the example of three recent challenges for European integration: the U.K. leaving the European Union (EU),; the ongoing armed conflict in Ukraine at the Eastern  border of the EU,; and refugees from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA region) trying to reach the EU. The peculiarity of these challenges resides in the fact that the EU attempts to externalisze their aftereffects yet cannot control the conditions under which they unfold. Thus, the consequences of Brexit for the EU will largely depend on the U.K.; the conflict in Ukraine is driven by international dynamics outside the EU that might not allow it to remain in its present bystander position; and the EU, although attempting to bar refugees from access to its territory, is not infull control of the instruments to accomplish this. The project renders these challenges the ‘entangled externalities of European integration’, and investigates the ways in which political positioning toward those challenges unfolds in the area of their public visual depictions. It takes an analytical perspective on political communication in Europe that highlights the role of visuals and the ways they are publicly displayed, circulated, and interpreted.