Reading notes

Courageous Citizens: How culture contributes to social change
Valiz, 2018

Introduction to Hall's and Braidotti's contribution
Addressing the challenges of diversity and equality remains unfortunately, an urgency, The workings of a desocialized economic paradigm have resulted in extreme inequalities, and confront us with a Europe marked by polarized outlooks on life, values, or beliefs that fuel isolation and radicalization of its inhabitants, Actively striving to enact diversity and equality across institutions and societies throughout Europe is a significant means to make democracy inclusive to everyone; in this process, culture's faculty to imagine—and enact—the world differently plays a pivotal role in reconfiguring the social fabric, but also serves as a means to achieve a richer intellectual, emotional, ethical, and spiritual existence.
In this part of the book we look at how the principle of inclusivity cannot even be contemplated without equal opportunity and a political say for those excluded from the circles of power through race, gender, and class.

JULIET
ULEHAKE

Informed by the influential intellectual work of the late Stuart Hall, this section traces the changing discourse and (political) imaginaries on diversity and equality, and how this has been addressed by several thinkers and practitioners in Europe over the last decade, In 2008, Hall received the ECF Princes Margriet Award for Culture for his exceptional lifework on the practice and ideas of cultural diversity and on bringing about a constructive understanding of what diversity is and may become in society today. He has actively engaged with the political debate, especially with regard to issues of culture and identity. Here we couple his Laudation Speech on 'Cultural Diversity' (2008) —in which Hall stresses the value of institution-building in support of sustainable change—with 'Minimal Selves' (1987), which examines the impossibility of a fully resolved identity from a migrant's perspective. Relating to that, we asked philosopher Rosi Braidotti to reflect further on the question of Europe today as a site of possible resistance against political nationalism and the p economy of our time, We were interested in her take on 'politics of location' and the question of how European identity is constructed and with whom. In her essay, 'Becoming-World: A New Perspective on European

Citizenship', Braidotti argues that it is time to re-invent cosmopolitan citizenship in a manner that moves beyond both an a-historical Eurocentrism and a flat repetition of universalism. In order to construct this new kind of cosmopolitan relation, according to Braidotti, the feminist method of politics of location as well as situated knowledge provide the analytical tools to explore our respective locations—including class, gender, ethnicity, et cetera—and confront our differences critically. And, as creative tools they facilitate the mediation of tensions and conflicts and thus support the construction of sharable discourses and practices. This offers an alternative to a sacralized notion of nationalism and allows to shift the question of European citizenship to a matter of shared values and active participation, while dislodging a Eurocentric or any other kind of essentialized identity. In courageously embracing complexity, accountability, and solidarity with both human and non-human 'others', new kinds of transformative European citizenship can be developed in which 'we'—although not one and the same—will be able to 'become-world' together. This image of Europe provides horizons of hope and the possibility of a

future that is alive to the positivity of difference and the wealth of diversity. Widely known in Britain and the larger Anglo-Saxon world, where Stuart Hall's work on culture has actually shaped the very discourse of cultural diversity, we were interested to see if and how cultural studies tools have informed the discussion in other parts of Europe.