Gjesteforelesning holdes kl. 1215 – 1400 på rom 217 i Sørhove på Høgskolen i Lillehammer. Dr. Olivier Kramsch er tilknyttet Centre for Border Research ved University of Nijmegen i Nederland

Dr. Kramsch om tema "Re-envisioning Euregional Space"
As self-confessed 'laboratories of European integration', the European Union's cross-border regions have been burdened with several, often competing, objectives: the construction of a pan-European regional economic space capable of generating globally competitive economies of scale; the protection and nurturing of locally defined cultural identities capable of resisting the standardizing effects of globalization; the creation of an INTERREG 'cash-cow' for local politicians and businesses; and the birthing of a cosmopolitan European citizen of the future.

The oft-noted 'democratic deficit' in the euregios can thus be partially traced to the contradictory nature of the discrepant rationales underlying euregional governance, as different geo-strategic 'visions' compete within euregional space, often to the detriment of local and/or popular interests.

In this lecture I argue that the problem of euregional governance today may be usefully posed in terms of how to adequately 'see' euregional space. By focusing on strategies of cartographic representation, I show how the map of the Maas-Rhein euregion works to open up certain spatial imaginaries for governing the euregio in terms of a specific set of cultural, economic and political flows, while foreclosing other visions which might trigger a re-thinking of the euregional domain beyond the sphere of currently institutionalized politics.

Towards this end, I draw on a montage of 'counter-maps' that might help us to re-make Maas-Rhein space 'political' in the sense of an expanding frontier in which the borders between those included and excluded, visible and invisible, remain an open-ended geometry resistant to closure.