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The Languages of Europeanization: Political and Cultural Geographies of Multilingualism in the European Union

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Speaker: 
Virginie Mamadouh
Organizer: 
Building: 
Nador u. 9, Faculty Tower
Room: 
309
Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 2:00pm
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Date: 
Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 2:00pm to 4:00pm

The lecture addresses the linguistic predicament of the EU. The EU has currently 23 official and working languages and actively promotes institutional and individual multilingualism. The linguistic situation of the EU and its promotion of multilingualism will be discussed from a political geographical perspective, contrasting this experience with the monolingual norm of the heyday of the modern territorial nation state. To discuss the matter more in debt, the presentation will examine how EU institutions perform multilingualism online and how these performances of multilingualism can be experienced from different (geographically and linguistically defined) localities in the European Union. The contradictions of the policies and the online practices of the main European institutions and their implications for the construction of a multilingual, transnational communication setting in the EU and of a geopolitical imagination of the European Union as a political community will be evaluated.

Virginie Mamadouh is an Associate Professor of Political and Cultural Geography at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She published on multilingualism, transnationalism, geopolitics and European integration (more details )