Conference: New Trends in Political Representation in the EU

Please visit the Conference website.

Representation has been at the centre of renewed theoretical and empirical attention during the last few years, and this also applies to studies of political representation in the EU. Because of its configuration, the EU is a good example of the way in which the forms of political representation have tended to change in the more internationalised panorama of current politics. These changes have taken the form of both new agents of representation (informal as well as formal) and of new areas of representation (representation of discourses as well as of interests and identities). As the title of the conference suggests, there are new trends in political representation, which are reflected in new discourses of representation. The conference is meant to assess such new trends within the EU context, and the kind of experiences, empirical studies and theoretical perspectives that can help us to understand them. One of the aims of the conference is to bring together both academics that are interested in the subject and some of the policy makers and representatives of organised civil society that operate within the field of social and political representation in the EU. Some of the most prominent scholars in the field have already confirmed their participation. The conference will take place across three days, starting with a few key speakers setting the scene of formal and informal representation in Europe. This will be followed by 4 sessions of parallel workshops, each of them devoted to a particular aspect of representation in the EU. The final part of conference will bring the results of the different workshops together, and in the final two sessions will discuss how to assess these developments from both a theoretical and more general political perspective. The conference is by invitation, and will comprise around 50 participants, so that everyone will be actively involved in some discussion and/or presentation.