AXIS 3 : Ideas, collective actions, knowledge and patterns in constructing European society

Coordinators : Anne FORNEROD (DRES), Magali GRAMMARE (BETA), Wiebke KEIM (SAGE)

The research carried out within Axis 3 is concerned with the processes through which Europe has been constructed through ideas, knowledge and patternes, collective action and organisations. They question the categories and the concepts that underpin the construction of European thought and contribute to its supposed singularity (public reason and its philosophical foundations; the liberal thought that presided over the construction of Europe; the cultural heritage that refers to the sacred/profane relations; the concepts of pluralism and diversity).

They study the national and European organisations, perceived as traditional (trade unions, NGOs, political parties, multinational companies) or claimed to be new ('civil society', networks and social networks, think tanks and intellectual circles, etc.), the transformations of their repertoires of action (European social dialogue in mutation; electoral experimentations, political devices, etc.) and their contributions or resistance to the logics of benchmarking and scoring, of competition and competitiveness of societies. These devices are organisational or institutional, national, transnational or international, and are the subject of various appropriations, diversions and criticisms.

As for the circulation of models and knowledge, two complementary scales are considered: an intra-European circulation contributing to a phenomenon of Europeanisation and a circulation beyond the institutional borders of Europe in order to grasp, on the one hand, the relationships between epistemic and scientific communities in Europe and the so-called southern continents, and on the other hand, the circulation of ideas promoted by international or extra-European organisations.