On not going to Eurovision

The Eurovisionaries Project will not be going to Malmö. I have cancelled my accommodation and travel, turned down an invitation to speak at a conference that runs parallel to Eurovision, and am currently in the process of changing the research design of the project to respect the boycott that is being called for by the global Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

I am boycotting Eurovision because it is the only way to materially disrupt the financial and political interests that keep Israel in the contest despite clear violations of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU)’s rules, and because I cannot abide being part of an event that provides cultural cover to a state that perpetrates genocide. It is impossible to do the interviews and ethnography in the Eurovision Village I originally planned without contributing financially to the EBU and City of Malmö, and without being counted among the numbers of attendees who will be used to demonstrate the success of the event. I will not build the Eurovisionaries Project or my career on a foundation of complicity in genocide and artwashing.

There is also an additional personal reason why it is imperative that I boycott Eurovision now: I didn’t boycott when Israel hosted the Contest in 2019. That decision haunts me. I put my enjoyment ahead of suffering of Palestinians. I knew little then about the scope of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and the nature of their endless brutality against Palestinians, but I knew enough, and I watched it anyway. I told myself I ‘needed’ to watch it, because I am a scholar of Eurovision, and have to be able to watch it objectively. It’s true that I have been doing Eurovision research since 2016, but I wasn’t working on anything Eurovision-related in 2019, and I never did anything with the apparently objective observations I insisted I needed to make. I share this now in the hope that it is useful for anyone who is unsure about or thinks it is too late to join the boycott. It is not too late. I can’t change my past actions, but I can commit to the boycott now.  

Since cancelling the trip, I have been thinking a lot about Anna Guasco’s (2022) article, ‘On an ethic of not going there.’ A geographer by trade, Gausco reflects on the expectations in her discipline that doing research automatically and necessarily means doing fieldwork – going to and immersing oneself in the place and community one studies. The act of ‘going there’ and ‘getting your boots muddy’, she writes, is widely assumed to be how researchers prove that they have the authority and expertise – and therefore supposedly the right – to speak and publish on a topic.

In addition to fieldwork being unevenly (in)accessible for scholars along class, gendered, racialised, and ableist lines, Gausco argues that the expectation that researchers have greater claim to authority over knowledge because they have done fieldwork creates expectations that researchers are entitled to access whatever sites are necessary for us to execute our research plans. Max Liboiron (2021) rightly points out that the entitlement Global North researchers exhibit in assuming they can and should be able to access and exploit Indigenous land, resources and knowledge are inherently intertwined with the entitlement of settler-colonialism: “I cannot overemphasise enough how assumed access to land is foundational to so many settler relations.” These expectations of access configure and fetishise fieldwork sites as exotic, rugged frontiers ready to be explored and ‘discovered.’ As Gausco notes, this means that ‘the ways in which fieldwork is conducted and the very image of where the field is, and of it being a remote, “muddy”, and challenging place, often in the Global South, are deeply colonial.’

Eurovision host cities as fields are certainly not muddy or rugged, but they bear the hallmarks of European coloniality and power all the same. The very idea that Eurovision ‘takes over’ a city for the duration of the contest is colonial, both for the locals whose homes are destroyed to build stadiums, and for those who want to but cannot travel because of the border and visa regimes that fortify so-called ‘free movement’ Europe.

But what occupies my thoughts most of all is the way that ‘going there’ condones and reinforces colonial relations even when the ‘there’ we go to seems far away from the violence and injustices that are happening elsewhere. I think most researchers are capable of thinking through the ethical implications of their work for the communities and places they directly embed themselves in – and if not, the bureaucratic checklists that most university ethical review boards make us fill out at least ensure we pay lip service to whatever normative standards of human research prevail at our particular institutions.

In the case of Eurovision, the place that researchers and fans from the Global North assume we are entitled to access – Malmö – is not the place that is affected by Israeli settler colonialism and genocide in a strictly geographical sense. But it is nonetheless profoundly implicated in endorsing and encouraging genocide by allowing Israel to present itself as a peaceful and inclusive state that enjoys normal diplomatic and cultural ties with the international community. This dynamic is obviously not unique to Eurovision – our decisions to travel and embed ourselves in places in the name of research (or any other reason for that matter) affect communities beyond our specific destination through contributing to climate crisis, pandemics, crossing pickets, and colonial assumptions about which destinations and types of travel are ‘desirable’, ‘exotic’, ‘dangerous’ or ‘non-political.’

Scholars who are serious about conducting ethical research have a duty to consider the more far-flung implications of our choices – not just the implications right in front of us. We must interrogate whether we really need to or should do our research, and hold ourselves accountable when taking an ethical standpoint means changing or cancelling our original research plans, no matter how personally disappointing those changes may be. As Gausco puts it: ‘It is not enough to think about whether one is being reflective and then stay the course with the exact same type of traditional fieldwork one had originally planned.’

What does my decision to boycott mean for the Eurovisionaries Project? The research will continue, just in a different form. I am still interested in Eurovision fans’ ideas about the relationships between culture and international politics – a topic that is clearly more important than ever – but I will be asking about them in different ways, and outside of the annual ‘Eurovision season’. I am still in the process of changing the research design, and will provide updates when they are ready. In the meantime I will continue to critique the EBU’s handling of the 2024 Contest, and continue to advocate for the boycott and for a free Palestine.

Eurovision is undeniably political. It always has been. The EBU makes it so by insisting on allowing a genocidal state to participate while repeatedly violating the rules and stated values of the Contest. The EBU also makes it political by insisting that ‘we advocate for constructive dialogue’ while shutting down public debate, chastising protestors for ‘vandalism’ and ‘harassment’, turning off social media replies, and ignoring the letters, petitions and pleas of artists and fans. These stances and actions are not neutral or non-political, so our responses to them must not be neutral or non-political either. If Eurovision is a place where speaking critically about the Contest’s role in facilitating genocide is considered contrary to the supposed goal of being ‘united by music’, then the only ethical standpoint I can take – as a researcher and as a person – is to refuse to go there.

References

Guasco, Anna. 2022. ‘On An Ethic of Not Going There’, The Geographical Journal, 188(3), pp.468-475.

Liboiron, Max. 2021. Pollution is Colonialism, Durham: Duke University Press, p.68.