Good Evening Europe!

Welcome to the Eurovisionaries Project

I had forgotten until recently how much my first Eurovision shaped my first encounters with Europe. My housemates and I gathered on the couch in our freezing loungeroom in 2012 to watch the event we had heard of but never seen in full. As we watched Iceland – Never Forget by Greta Salóme and Jónsi – in the first semi-final, one housemate casually mentioned he had been to Iceland once on a family holiday.

“Really?!” we asked, “what was it like?”

He told us about whale sightings and hot springs and hákarl and that was that. When I went to Europe for the first time at the end of uni that year, Iceland was one of the first countries on my itinerary. 

My other Eurovision-induced encounter is more embarrassing. Back on the couch for semi-final two, I fell madly, obscenely in lust with the lead singer from Belarus, Dmitry Karyakin of Litesound. I made plans to learn everything I possibly could about Belarus, read Wikipedia until I ran out of blue links, googled university exchange programmes in Minsk. I didn’t go in the end (what did I think I was going to do? Wander around Minsk singing We Are The Heroes until he heard me, like we’re Ariel and Prince Eric in the Little Mermaid?!). But I learnt about the politics and history of a country I could barely point to on a map the day before – because a Eurovision artist was hot.

So many of us have stories like this. We make plans to visit places we see in gorgeous postcards, we hold grudges that rival diplomatic incidents when our favourites don’t win, we apologise on behalf of our country if our song is cringe, we learn the languages of songs that moved us before we even knew what the lyrics meant. These are the encounters I want to learn about through The Eurovisionaries.

I want to understand how fans think about and practice cultural diplomacy. We know that countries and national broadcasters often go to great lengths to present particular versions of their national stories and ‘brands’ on the Eurovision stage (and the football field and Olympic stadiums and so on), but what do fans and audiences make of these efforts? And, most importantly, what efforts do fans make to represent our own countries and reach out to others?

In other words, I am interested in how fans think about and value the language, symbols, gestures, and practices that shape their interactions with the Contest, its participating countries, and each other – and what this all means for how we think about who can participate in diplomacy in and beyond Europe.

Over the course of this four-year project, I’ll be talking to and collaborating with many different kinds of fans. The Eurovision fandom is a broad church, and I understand the term ‘fan’ as inclusively as possible. Whether you are lucky enough to have seen the contest in the arena several times or watch it from home; whether you’ve watched the contest your whole life or are a newcomer; follow the national selections year-round or join in for the Grand Final; live in a participating country or elsewhere – if you describe yourself as a fan, I am interested in your thoughts and experiences.

My first taste of Europe, the Icelandic pony’s millionth taste of grass

This website will be a hub for the project. I’ll share information about interview recruitment and research publications, but it will also be a place where participants in the research and other Eurofans and researchers can contribute reflections, analysis, stories, art, and photos. The first contributions to a guest blog series on researching (as) fans will be ready soon, so stay tuned!

Academically, the aim of the project is to unsettle the way conventional studies of soft power and cultural diplomacy tend to think of audiences as passive recipients of content. Instead, I want to reorient where international relations looks to understand the nature and scope of cultural diplomacy, and to highlight fans as an empowered community with agency and clout. Since the project draws on the work of many talented researchers from the fields of fan studies, Eurovision studies, and cultural diplomacy, I also hope the project can contribute to new interdisciplinary connections between fan studies and international relations.

Ultimately, this project is about the ways Eurovision fans contribute to discussions about the connections between politics and culture, and the ways these connections shape how we imagine Europe and the world – hence the name, The Eurovisionaries. Eurovision is integral to the (satin) fabric of modern Europe, and fandom – the ways we show our love, discuss what the contest is about, share parts of ourselves with each other across continents and timezones – is integral to Eurovision. On the couch with my friends watching this spectacle and community in 2012, I couldn’t wait to be part of it, and I can’t wait to learn and share more about it through the project now.

Wouldn’t you move to Belarus for him?