Euro-monitoring in Greece

First seminar of the summer term brough Zivanna Mourmouri to the class to present her research on the Europeanisation of Greek public space. Instead of being on Monday the seminar has been shifted to Wednesday for this and next week. Consequently there was plenty of time lost as people wandered around, trying to find the right classroom, since we had relocated as well! Also, it was only one person this week, so a later start, at 11.

Zivanna aims to assess the extent to which Greece's media has become Europeanised through a content analysis of stories about the EU. A number of questions were raised, including what was meant by 'Europeanisation' (which was loosely defined but appeared to be a process of change by which European issues become discussed nationally - I think) and how a study of the media could identify changes in societal views and attitudes about Europe.

Added to this were methodological questions about the suitability of a one-country case study and an emphasis on periods where the EU was bound to be discussed (i.e. monetary union, etc). If Greece - which Zivanna claims has an instrumental view of the EU - was not going to be compared against a pro- or anti-EU state (e.g. France and the UK), then shouldn't 'controls' be placed in the analysis of media between periods where there was a lot of discussion about the EU against those which didn't?

Still, it has the makings of an interesting project and could provide an useful insight into how the EU is reported.