The Foreign Language & Area Studies Fellowship: An Alum's Perspective

This blog post is by Audrey Dombro, a 2020 graduate of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a 2019-20 FLAS fellow. Please see here for a March 2020 blog post by Audrey reflecting on her experience studying in Jordan.

I entered the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences as an undergraduate student with a burgeoning interest in economics and development. My studies introduced a theoretical perspective on economic methods used in trade and development but I wanted to explore global communities more intimately to understand how these theories are applied on a micro level. I began to study the Arabic language and culture and applied for the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship through the European Union (EU) Center. Through promotion of events and speakers across campus, the EU Center provided a constant reminder of the multitude of potential directions and focuses of international engagement and helped me feel connected to a larger academic community.

My EU Center advisor encouraged me to examine the connection between European studies and my Arabic coursework— so I embarked on a study of imperialism. In my history courses, I became critically engaged with the Ottoman Empire, the empire in the Middle East prior to European interference via the Sykes-Picot Agreement and subsequent colonization. To understand the consequences, I wrote research papers on the status of judicial freedom within Ottoman religious minority communities and attitudes towards sexuality prior to European influence. Through a social sciences study, I gained an understanding of the complex cultural and historical factors that can be involved in economic development. My appreciation for the unique perspective I have attained from my Arabic studies with the EU Center propelled me to begin learning Urdu, a language of South Asia.

Although I graduated in 2020, my journey as a FLAS scholar has extended well beyond the duration of my fellowship. Despite originally pursuing professional work in social services to serve immigrant communities, I found myself confronting the flaws of our social safety net more broadly. At first glance, my continued work in public welfare felt far removed from my previous studies, but because the EU Center’s multidisciplinary approach has taught me to examine global connections, I recognized that public welfare itself was closely aligned with international studies. I now intend to pursue a graduate degree to build a foundation for exploring dynamic solutions to global issues of poverty and inequality, and examine how policy can rectify historical and ongoing damage to marginalized communities internationally. Thanks to the EU Center, my Arabic and Urdu language and cultural studies have broadened my understanding of social policy in these regions and in my home country. Although my academic and professional journey will continue to unfold, I am grounded with a constant reminder of global awareness that the FLAS fellowship has instilled in me.

Please see here to learn more about applying for a FLAS fellowship through the EU Center. Applications for Summer 2022 and Academic Year 2022-23 FLAS fellowships are due January 28, 2022.

The Foreign Language & Area Studies Fellowship: An Alum's Perspective

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The 2020 Schuman Challenge, One Year Later

By Lucas Henry, EUC Academic Programs Coordinator

November 2021

The University of Illinois Schuman Challenge team (Hannah Buzil, Angitha Bright, and Alicja Szczepkowska), with judges Ian Brzezinski, Peter Fatelnig, and Mercedes Garcia Perez.
Photo courtesy of the European Union Center.

Last fall, the University of Illinois sent its first student team to compete in the Schuman Challenge, a transatlantic foreign policy competition hosted by the Delegation of the European Union to the United States in Washington, DC.  The Schuman Challenge, named after EU founding father Robert Schuman, is quite new--its first edition was held in 2017 and featured only a small group of participating universities.  Previous winners include American University (2017), West Virginia University (2018) and William & Mary (2019).  While the event is typically co-hosted in Washington DC by the EU Delegation and George Washington University, the fourth edition was held virtually on October 28-30, 2020 and featured 29 universities from 16 states, making it the largest edition to date.

In the Schuman Challenge, teams are asked to draw up a policy proposal based on a common question asked by the EU delegation.  For the 2020 competition, the question was: "How should the EU and the US respond to China's alternative models of governance? Address a specific example or case study."  After submitting a short position paper to the Delegation outlining the proposal's terms and rationale, teams are asked to present their policy proposal to a panel of judges with expertise in the transatlantic relationship between the United States and the European Union.  The teams are then judged on their written proposal's detail, salience, and practicality; on their oral presentation's development of the proposal and its clarity; and the team's performances during the Q&A session with the panel of experts.  Following the first round of presentations, three teams are chosen to advance to the final round, where the finalists re-present their proposals to a new set of judges, and an overall winner is chosen.

The University of Illinois's Schuman Challenge team consisted of three undergraduates from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences: Angitha Bright, a junior majoring in Philosophy and Political Science; Hannah Buzil, a senior majoring in Political Science and Statistics; and Alicja Szczepkowska, a senior majoring in Global Studies and Sociology who has since continued into the MA in EU Studies through the European Union Center.  The team was coached by Professor Kostas Kourtikakis (Political Science), with support from the EU Center's Academic Programs Coordinator Lucas Henry.  After forming in early September, the team spent six weeks studying the transatlantic relationship and EU-US-China relations to craft their proposal and prepare their presentation.  The team spent considerable time examining China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and various approaches that the EU and the United States have taken in interaction with China during the 21st Century.

The team concluded that current European and American strategies were somewhat incompatible, and ultimately decided to craft a policy proposal that would leverage the EU's market power, which is perhaps its greatest asset in foreign affairs.  It proposed that the EU should directly engage China in the form of a strategic partnership through the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) to increase the EU's influence in the region, which in turn would facilitate its promotion of European norms on democracy and human rights.  The team also hoped that this action by the EU would encourage the US to soften its recent hardline approach to relations with China.

The judges in the opening round of the Schuman Challenge were quite impressed with the Illinois team's attention to detail in both the proposal and presentation, and the team performed quite well in the Q&A session.  However, the judges felt the proposal did not privilege the transatlantic relationship, and thus did not send the team to the finals.  On Friday afternoon, teams from Berkeley, Michigan, and George Washington competed in the final round; George Washington, who proposed a new global joint infrastructure clearinghouse between the US and the EU that was open to China as a participant, was declared the winner.

Fast-forward eleven months.  In mid-September 2021, Australia agreed to purchase nuclear-powered submarines from the United States and the United Kindgom, which scuppered a previous $65-billion contract between France and Australia.  The primary purpose of the AUKUS agreement, as it is popularly known, furthers the recent hardline American approach by countering China's growing naval presence in the Pacific, and specifically shows that the US does not necessarily see Europe as a partner in the region.  It also shows the foresight of the University of Illinois Schuman Challenge team, who understood that the European Union cannot necessarily count on the support of the United States when it comes to East Asian relations.

The 2020 Schuman Challenge, One Year Later

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Institutions under Pressure, Identities in Conflict: Year 3 of a JMCE Grant in Review

Further Lessons from the EU Center’s 2018-21 JMCE Project

By Jonathan Larson, Associate Director of the EU Center

November 2021

 

As the Illinois EU Center entered the third and final year of its 2018-21 grant from the European Commission to serve as a Jean Monnet Center of Excellence, it directed attention somewhat from the second year’s discussions about EU enlargement and regional tensions toward questions of gender and populism that formed one of the other key axes of the original proposal. The year also offered the opportunity to dig a little deeper into historical bases for a common European identity and some of the race-based notions of difference and even exclusion at its core. The center took advantage of increased access to speakers in virtual events and leaned more deeply into an exploration of European legislative careers through a new course and speaker series. It also resumed with new touches its long-running EU Studies Conference, including a roundtable on new directions in EU studies. As the center closed out the year and entered a short two-month extension of the grant for September and October 2021, it opened new chapters in its engagements with different European countries and institutions. 

 

Political scientist Philip Ayoub helped us open the year with a keynote offered at our September 2020 fall reception, “When States Come Out: Transnational Movements & the Diffusion of LGBTI Rights in Europe.” Swedish Ambassador to the US Karin Olofsdotter spoke to us about "Rights, Representation, and Resources: Gender Equality in Sweden and the EU" (while also becoming the first woman to deliver an EU Day keynote address for the center). This work around populism and the roots of the social production of difference in European space informed updates to students’ resources on the topic available through the U of I library, as well as an innovative virtual book exhibit on populism and gender (to be formally launched in November 2021) — an adaptation of a U of I library tradition in response to the pandemic.

 

The center continued the historical turn that it began in April 2020 in looking for perspectives to make sense of a present disrupted unexpectedly by the COVID-19 pandemic. KU Leuven historian Patrick Pasture offered a broader historical view on dynamics of inclusion and exclusion with his talk, “‘Tolerance is the Soul of Europe’: Christendom, Religious (In)Tolerance and the Birth of Europe.” U of I Professor of English Andrea Stevens shared an insightful view on the history of performance and ideas of race with a brown bag lecture “Blackface Disguise at the Court of Queen Henrietta Maria, 1625-1649.” Several faculty in the humanities, including EU Center Director Emanuel Rota, joined together around a project on race in the Mediterranean, competing successfully for a Thomas Jefferson grant from the French Embassy to the US. JMCE grant key faculty Zsuzsanna Fagyal joined a virtual monthly panel series organized by our peer center at the University of Pittsburgh on “Cementing the Boundaries of Frenchness.” The center also organized, as a collaboration with two other universities with Jean Monnet grants, a March 2021 symposium “Race, Human Rights, and Populism in Poland.”

 

A further new initiative was a speaker series integrated into a pilot course, The Everyday Making of the European Parliament and Parliamentarians. The course was part of a larger move the EU Center is making to draw students to the study of the EU from disciplines outside the field’s historical core in political science. The course drew from a body of work by anthropologists and sociologists who have employed ethnographic methods to study institutions such as the European Parliament or European Commission. Informed by this literature, students met with five different Former Members of the European Parliament to learn about their experience of it as an institution, also in comparison with other professional experience. The course culminated in a three-week virtual exchange with a course from the University of Vienna on the politics of Austria and the European Union and a common meeting with Austrian journalist and Former Member Eugen Freund. Students on both sides found this common experience, and exposure to each side’s questions, to be a highlight of their respective courses’ explorations of aspects of the EU. MAEUS students wrote blog posts on Bulgarian Former MEP Georgi Pirinski and on British Former MEP Rory Palmer. 

 

Approaching the end of the academic year the EU Center hosted its renamed Illinois EU Studies Conference in a virtual format for the first time and gave it a theme: “Community, Immunity, and the Limits of Mobility.” The format encouraged wider advertising of this multi-day event as a contribution from the U of I to the field of EU Studies. Saving on travel costs allowed the EUC to feature two invited panels with scholars from different disciplines outside the US as well as a closing roundtable on next directions in EU Studies, featuring the 2020 winners of the Larry Neal Prize for the edited volume, The European Union and Beyond: Multi-Level Governance, Institutions, and Policy-Making.

 

Over the summer of 2021 the EU Center requested and received a two-month extension on its 2018-21 JMCE grant, in part to extend discussions about strategic collaborations with a small set of European partners, including the French, German, and Italian consulates in Chicago, as well as the Technical University of Vienna and University of Strasbourg. As we proceed further into a post-pandemic and potentially receding populist world, lessons from immobility (such as the necessity of virtual engagements) are informing how we collaborate (not to mention the essentially transnational nature of so many regional challenges and seeds for solutions). Among these regionally articulated common challenges are environmental and social sustainability. In what ways technologies can be adapted and adopted to face these challenges is a topic that the EU Center is looking forward to exploring as it wraps up its current JMCE grant and proceeds further into the 2021-22 academic year.

Institutions under Pressure, Identities in Conflict: Year 3 of a JMCE Grant in Review

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