What is your role at the European Institute, and how does your role relate to the Beyond Eurocentrism programme?
I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hellenic Observatory. Previously, I completed an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship and my PhD in the European Institute. My role relates to the Beyond Eurocentrism programme principally through my research. I focus on local development and the political economy of place in European regions that can be considered semi-peripheral: they do not belong to the global core or the periphery in terms of their production and trade profiles, but they fall somewhere in between. Those include rural areas in Greece and Southern Italy, the geographical focus of my PhD project on “Cooperation against the odds”, but also post-industrial towns in the UK, the subject of my publications on Brexit. Time and again in my research, I have found that improving our understanding of semi-peripheral places in Europe can greatly benefit from a process of non-hegemonic knowledge exchange between different areas of the world. After all, many regions around the globe have faced similar challenges as those currently faced by left-behind areas in Europe. By often trying to address the challenges of the European semi-periphery through theories that are based on the experiences of the most advanced European regions, we unnecessarily truncate our vision. In this sense, understanding Europe also requires studying the world.
What do you think about the EI's commitment to going beyond Eurocentrism?
The Beyond Eurocentrism programme promises to broaden the research and teaching horizons across all the fields the European Institute specialises in, contributing to the vibrant and open intellectual environment that has long made the department so special. For political economy scholarship particularly, it will offer a welcome opportunity not only to further reflect on Europe’s role in the perpetuation of global economic inequalities, but also to more frequently draw on arguments and theories based on empirical research outside the most advanced European regions when studying Europe.
Do you have any highlights from your time at the EI that relate to the focus of the Beyond Eurocentrism programme?
In addition to many events and conversations that relate to the focus of the Beyond Eurocentrism programme in the past, I look forward to a Special Issue workshop that I am co-organising at the European Institute with Sonja Avlijaš, an EI PhD alumna who is now based at the University of Belgrade, on “Firm-centred, multi-level approaches to overcoming semi-peripheral constraints”. The workshop will take place on 20 March 2023 and will bring together scholars studying semi-peripheral regions in different parts of the world, from Turkey to Argentina, Namibia, South Korea, Canada and back to Spain and Central and Eastern Europe. We are hoping that the workshop and resulting Special Issue, which will be published in Studies in Comparative International Development (SCID), will advance our knowledge about development agency in the semi-periphery by breaking traditional geographical silos.
What parts of the Beyond Eurocentrism programme do you find the most exciting?
I am very excited to participate in events about issues related to the European political economy, which will bring together scholars and stakeholders with expertise in diverse geographical regions, in Europe and elsewhere. Something that I love about the European Institute is the many opportunities it offers to engage in debates beyond one’s area of expertise, so I am also excited to follow conversations related to the Beyond Eurocentrism programme in the fields of migration policy, political theory, culture and conflict, decolonisation, and others.