Online lecture by Professor Tuuli Lähdesmäki

Postmillennial Europe has faced various political, economic, social and humanitarian challenges and crises that influence how Europeans deal with the past, present and future of Europe. These challenges and crises have also shaken the foundations of the EU and strengthened criticism of its legitimacy and integration processes. Simultaneously, the ideas of European cultural roots, memory, history and heritage have gained a new role in European politics and policies.

The EU’s increased interest in the European past and shared cultural heritage can be perceived as the EU’s attempt to tackle some of these recent challenges and crises – including identity crises – in Europe.

How does the EU utilize the idea of shared cultural heritage as a political tool? How is the “European dimension” of cultural heritage constructed and governed in the EU’s heritage policies and initiatives? The lecture discusses these topics by using the most recent EU heritage action, the European Heritage Label, as a case study.

Tuuli Lähdesmäki (PhD in Art History; DSocSc in Sociology) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä (JYU), Finland. Lähdesmäki is currently leading the research project “EU Heritage Diplomacy and the Dynamics of Inter-Heritage Dialogue” (HERIDI), funded by the Academy of Finland, and works as the PI for JYU’s consortium partnership in the project “Dialogue and Argumentation for Cultural Literacy Learning in Schools” (DIALLS), funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme.

Sabine Volk is a doctoral candidate at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and a Marie Sklodowska- Curie Fellow in the EU-funded Horizon 2020 project “Delayed transformational fatigue in Central and Eastern Europe: Responding to the rise of illiberalism/populism” (FATIGUE). At the intersection of political science, memory studies, and social movement scholarship, her work draws from ethnographic methods to explore the political culture of the populist far right in post-socialist eastern Germany.