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What is CEPIN?
The School of Multidisciplinary Research at the Faculty of Social Sciences:
CITIZENSHIP, ENCOUNTERS AND PLACE ENACTMENT IN THE NORTH (CEPIN)
The board of the University of Tromsø has 13.10.2005 decided to establish a centre of research at the Faculty of Social Science – a research school for studying globalisation- and modernisation processes in the north.
Senior researchers from various disciplines has developed the idea:
Associate Professor dr.polit. Anne Britt Flemmen (Department of Sociology),
Professor dr. philos. Willy Guneriussen (Department of Sociology),
Associate professor dr. polit. Hans-Kristian Hernes (Department of Political Science),
Research Leader dr.polit. Ann Therese Lotherington (NORUT Social Science Research Ltd.),
Professor dr.philos. Einar Niemi (Department of History),
Associate Professor dr.polit. Gry Paulgaard (Department of Education),
Professor dr.philos. Nils Aarsæther (Department of Planning an Local Community Research),
The faculty has for some time put money and personnel-resources into this. The research school will in addition to the senior researchers be staffed by a number of doctoral candidates, post-doc candidates and guest professors. These days we are about to evaluate applications for the first positions (doctoral candidates, post-doc candidates and guest professors).
CEPIN is an abbreviation for Citizenship, Encounters and Place Enactment in the North. Within the broader trends of globalisation and modernisation we want to focus particularly on the three connected fields:
- The questions and challenges of citizenship in an era of increasing mobilisation and multiculturalism. The rights and duties of citizenship have traditionally been tightly connected to well-defined nationality/ethnicity and nation-state borders. This has become problematic and is an important issue in the northern regions.
- The increasing mixing and meeting – encounters - of people, artefacts, symbols, organisations and institutions from various cultural, national, ethnic and linguistic background. Our northern regions have experienced various kinds of encounters in the past, so our research agenda will include historical perspectives.
- A typical trend within contemporary globalisation processes is an effort in many sites around the globe to appear unique, as especially attractive places with a striking and highly interesting identity. This phenomenon we call place enactment. It is particularly visible in tourism as efforts to promote and sell places and adventure. But it is also observable within more general public discourses on the identity and characteristics of places and is deeply connected to questions of who we are and what we will become.
We welcome any effort at cooperation – across disciplines, across institutions and across borders. We are not only trying to study globalisation but also to "enact” multicultural encounters and the globalisation of ideas. There are possibilities of short-term cooperation (like participation and contribution in courses, workshop and conferences), cooperation in arranging meetings, workshops etc., and more long-term cooperation through financing research grants (for example to stay for a period at the faculty) or to finance scholarship on particular fields within the broad frames of the program.
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