In 2020, European Capital of Culture status was awarded jointly to Galway in the West of Ireland and to Rijeka in Croatia. While the actual ECOC for both cities have not been totally cancelled, their offer has been much reduced by the nature and impact of the global pandemic.
In place of the annual conference, we are instead inviting interdisciplinary contributions to an online Special Issue of the University Network of European Capitals of Culture.
This Special Issue is an opportunity for us to learn more about how Capitals of Culture in Ireland and Croatia have adapted their programmes and to understand better the pan-European responses to the impact on artists, cultural workers, local communities and universities.
Our aim is to define and examine how the global pandemic effected European cities, culture and education. What future for our cities and our lives can we collectively envisage in this creative November Special Issue?
The European Union founded the initiative in part to help generate a collectively binding cultural understanding and artistic set of networks and practices across the European union. The designation comes with significant funding and investment that can act as an incentive for regional development and urban infrastructural transformation. In Ireland, the ECOC was to be a celebration of ‘language, landscape and migration’: so much of the West as a designated Gaeltacht is devoted to the preservation of the Irish language; the west coast’s intricate waterways connect Ireland to the rest of Europe making the landscape a major historical and contemporary site for migration and the translation of culture.
Taking its lead from these themes, this special issue explores the interconnected ecosystems that make up each Capital of Culture: Europe, Cities and Education. The following set of questions are meant to engage creative responses from contributors but also to inspire other new questions from an interdisciplinary pan-European range of academics, artists, cultural workers, university administrators, postgraduate students, and community activists in fields including languages, arts, humanities, architecture, medicine, social sciences, business, politics, administration and technology.
We gladly invite the following forms of multimedia and multi-lingual (with accompanying English translation) submissions: