Research Networks

As part of its mission to strengthen interdisciplinary European Studies, CES hosts and supports a range of research networks. These networks (proposed and organized by scholars affiliated with the CES and its member institutions) work to promote European Studies and strengthen ties across disciplines, generations and national borders. A full list of research networks currently supported by the Council for European Studies appears below.

Steps to Joining a CES Research Network

  1. Please check the status of your CES Individual Membership. All Research Network members must be individual members in good standing.
  2. If your membership has lapsed or if you are not yet a member, please join here. Use this same form to pay the nominal fee for the corresponding Research Network.

To propose a new CES Research Network, read further instructions here.

Below is the full list of CES Research Networks. Keep scrolling to learn more about them:


Business in Politics and Society

This CES Network will bring together scholars from different disciplines who work on the activities and role of individual firms and business organizations in shaping economic, political and social development. The network aims to be broadly interdisciplinary and bring together scholars from academic fields that are traditionally well-represented at CES, such as political science and sociology, as well as from underrepresented fields such as (business) history, industrial relations, (corporate) law, economics, management, and business administration. These scholars follow a great variety of different methodological approaches and work in very different academic contexts. 

Co-Chairs:

Critical European Studies

This network has a two-fold mission. While it stimulates, supports, organizes, and enhances critical explorations into teaching and learning, it also fosters the emergence of an interdisciplinary community of scholars who examine education cultures, systems, and practices in European Studies—engaging with issues of equality and justice in learning environments. It seeks to motivate pedagogy research and innovative curriculum development, as well as provide a forum for dialogues between educators, students, and all who partake in higher education systems. By cultivating the next generation of scholars and educators in European Studies, this network works alongside other networks to bridge research and pedagogy and provide a space for shared reflection to effect positive change.

Co-Chairs: 

Follow the Critical European Studies Research Network on Twitter and Facebook!

Environment

This CES Network seeks to expand and intensify the research focus of CES related to major environmental challenges of the twenty-first century and their political and social consequences. We aim to focus initially on populism and environmental security; climate change, resilience, and infrastructure; energy transition and climate mitigation; food and water security; emerging technology and environmental sustainability; and new economic models and practices.

Co-Chairs:

European Culture

This network will gather scholars critically engaged with European culture broadly. It will offer a forum at the CES for academic interest in cultural production and policy, in researching genres, themes and histories, in studying the global impact of European culture, and in analyzing both present and past cultural configurations. Indeed, the network forms a home for research on the present and the past. The transformations of national relations call forth a re-thinking of common European histories that reaches across the Age of Empire, the colonial and neocolonial eras, the history of global migration, the dynamic of bourgeois revolutions, the Industrial Age, the Age of Enlightenment, etc.  

Co-chairs: 

European Integration and the Global Political Economy

This network has a dual focus. It analyzes the extent to which the EU impacts on-going reform dynamics in a post-crisis context, focusing on the ideational and strategic influence of the EU on key actors, and how they impact countries with different institutional legacies and contexts. It also focuses on governance and decision-making through the Lisbon Treaty in a broad range of policy areas, and how these relate to issues of popular legitimacy and contestation in the EU.

Co-Chairs: 

Gender and Sexuality

The Gender and Sexuality Research Network aims at bringing together scholars working on gender and sexuality and enhancing research around a vast range of topics regarding gender and sexuality, from agenda-setting, policy change and policy implementation, multi-level governance, gender equality, gender dynamics in elections and voting behavior to women’s and LGBT movements.While a strong regional emphasis is put on European countries and the European Union, the research group also encourages comparative research that situates Europe or European countries in a transatlantic or international context. The Gender and Sexuality Research Network strongly supports diversity in methods.

Co-Chairs

Health & Wellbeing

This network gathers scholars that are engaged in health research, broadly defined. Health is one of the major issues studied by academic disciplines already well represented in the CES, including sociology, political science, anthropology, and history. It also offers an opportunity for interdisciplinary engagement, including the large fields of demography and public health. Therefore, we view the network as an opportunity to build on existing strenghts and topics well covered by CES and to bring in new scholars who would not have viewed CES as an academic home. 

Co-Chairs: 

Historical Study of States and Regimes
(formerly History of Democratization)

This network brings together scholars working on democratization in different areas and time periods in Europe, as well as those interrogating similar questions with a range of different methods. 

Chair: 

Immigration

The Immigration Research Group of the Council for European Studies aims to draw together scholars and graduate students from a variety of countries and disciplines to foster research around themes of migration, immigrant integration, majority-minority relations, pluralism and multiculturalism, discrimination, equality, and the political, social, and individual responses to migration. 

Co-Chairs:

Law

The Law Research Network aims to pull together the best senior and junior scholars around the world working, and above all, doing research, in European law and in European Union-related matters. The network is open to those lawyers, legal academics, and legal practitioners who come from both the ambit of private and public law, but who have an interest in matters related to Europe and to European Union Law. Civil lawyers, commercial lawyers, administrative lawyers, penal lawyers, public and private international lawyers, en fin, lawyers from all the different quarters in which the legal discipline is composed of, are welcome to join the Law Network.

Chair:

Vice Chairs:

The Political Economy and Welfare Network
(formerly Industrial Relations, Skill Formation and Welfare State Policies)

This network seeks to be genuinely interdisciplinary in nature, sensitive to a variety of methodological approaches and to bringing together young as well as senior scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. 

The thematic focus of the network is to study the institutions, politics and policies of industrial relations, skill formation systems and welfare state regimes from a broad comparative perspective, combining historical with cross-national comparisons. The network will initially focus on three key issues, gradually expanding its remit over time. Those issues are: 1. the Origins and Trajectories of Education and Social Politices; 2. the Comparative Political Economy of Regime Formation and Change; and 3. Cross-border Connections, Internationalization and Europeanization.

Co-Chairs:

Political Parties, Party Systems and Elections

This Research Network has a simple purpose, to improve our understanding of political parties, party systems and elections by engaging scholars in sustained conversations that cut across geographical and disciplinary boundaries. We will use a combination of electronic networking tools and more traditional conference meetings to bring scholars together and assist them in working together to gather and disseminate better data and collaborate on joint projects.

Co-Chairs: 

Race and Racism in Europe

With the Race and Racism research network, we aim to clearly delineate our analytical work on race and racism from the social and political repertoires we study. Race is a social construct to be interrogated; the existence of racism in Europe is but the starting point for an analysis of its material and ideological structure, its social embeddedness, its various articulations, and its impact on lived experiences. The Research Network on Race and Racism in Europe has three main goals: to facilitate the transatlantic networking of scholars who study race and racism in Europe; to support graduate students and early-career scholars studying race and racism in Europe; and to host high impact roundtables and panels with mass appeal at annual conferences

Chair:

Tiffany Florvil, University of New Mexico, tflorvil@unm.edu

Radicalism and Violence
 

This research network brings together a range of disciplinary scholars who work on radicalism and violence in Europe and beyond. The network includes scholars from sociology, political science, history, media studies, public policy, education, geography and psychology, among others, using a range of methodological approaches and working in diverse national contexts. Thematic areas of focus include, but are not limited to: continuity and change across radical and “extremist” political parties, movements and subcultures; youth engagement in radicalism and violence; the relationship between “radicalism” and “violence;” radicalism and violence in comparative perspectives; media and violence; and state and non-state actor constructions of and responses to radicalism and violence.
 

Co-Chairs: 

Coordinator:

Social Movements

The European Social Movements Research Network aims to bring together scholars and graduate students, located around the world and working within a variety of disciplines, to study the themes of social movements, civil society, popular protest, active citizenship, NGOs, and contentious politics in Europe, as well as the ways in which social movements interact with spheres such as the media, culture and memory, democratic institutions and policing, etc. and the longer-term outcomes of social movements both positive and negative. While it welcomes scholars whose primary focus is national, regional or local, it also supports and encourages comparative and cross-national work, studies of transnational movements and those engaging with European institutions, as well as historical work on earlier generations of European social movements.

Co-Chairs: 

Territorial Politics and Federalism

The Territorial Politics and Federalism Research Network provides a platform for scholars interested in the broad themes of territory and federalism, within but also outside Europe and the European Union. Topics of interest range from multilevel governance and politics at multiple levels including cities (local or urban governance), regional, subnational, national, supranational, and global levels to the reform of government structures, borders, multilevel citizenship, electoral districts and territorial representation, political geography, paradiplomacy, confederalism, consociationalism, ethnic conflict, the effect of territory or federalism/decentralisation on government processes, outputs, and outcomes, substate nationalism, and broader issues surrounding participation, legitimacy, identity, efficiency, and democracy.

Chairs: 

Transnational Memory and Identity in Europe

The Research Network on Transnational Memory and Identity in Europe brings together scholars who analyse transnational politics and policies of memory, processes of memory entrepreneurship, cultures of remembrance and identity construction in the context of European integration. Its aim is to foster exchange between scholars from different disciplines who are working on related subjects – including heritage, public history, political culture, communication, trauma, migration, diversity, religion – and who use memory and identity as the baseline of their research.

Chair: