Erasmus University Rotterdam
Erasmus University Rotterdam

Erasmus Institute for Public Knowledge

Event: Humanities for Erasmians
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Erasmus University College

Erasmus Institute for Public Knowledge (EIPK) is an interdisciplinary research institute that seeks to foster and coordinate research on public issues and to forge links with extra-academic publics on these issues.

It brings together scientists from the social sciences and the humanities and offers them a platform for exchange with other disciplines. EIPK regularly organizes seminars, public events, and conferences.

EPIK's three main goals

  • To stimulate and coordinate interdisciplinary investigation into the contemporary articulations of issues of public concern.
  • To actively connect with various areas of the public, thereby furthering the production of public knowledge.
  • To establish and maintain an interdisciplinary knowledge infrastructure within Erasmus University Rotterdam by crafting and strengthening connections within the university, and by attracting and facilitating both internationally renowned fellows and young talent.
Public issues protest
Jerry Kiesewetter

Working groups

The Erasmus Institute for Public Knowledge consists of several working groups that focus on specific public issues. These working groups regularly convene in discussion meetings. EIPK regularly organises seminars, public events, and conferences. EPIK currently has four working groups. To find out more, click on each of them. 

Smart Imaginaries

This working group studies the political aspects of forms of ubiquitous algorithmic monitoring by focusing on the implicit answers to public issues embedded in them. It does so by investigating smart imaginaries and their infrastructural correlates in environments of algorithmic monitoring on two scales: the private (ambient) home and the (smart) city. Its activities centre on the following questions: How do algorithmic, digital services enact public interests and choices? And how are the political aspects of these interests and choices simultaneously made invisible?
City at night with skyscrapers and a highway.
Joey Kyber

Desire and Capital

The austerity measures raken in Europe in recent years reveal how, in public discourse, the depoliticisation of political economy takes the form of an intricate blend of economics and moralism, e.g., the framing of Greece as the 'villain' and the European Union as the 'saviour'. This working group focuses on the politics of debt. It seeks to analyse these processes of financialisation and moralisation by which debt as public issue is depoliticised, as well as to investigate means by which the issue can be reclaimed by all its stakeholders.
Dollar bill in the sea.
Joia de Jong

Regulatory Depoliticisation

This project focuses on processes of depoliticisation in regulatory infrastructures. It does so by mapping the sites of technocratic governance and depoliticisation embedded in the future TTIP and/or CETA regime complex and, contextually, to identify existing and potential space for repoliticisation. These so-called 'megaregionals' establish regulatory institutions, which can profoundly shape domestic regulatory system and further contribute to the ongoing process of technocratisation.

This project aims at better understanding what are the sites and legal techniques through which this process is realised and what are the interests privileged and those marginalised. At the same time, the project aims at studying the space for repoliticisating public issues. In that regard, the value and potential of participatory rights are investigated among other avenues for repoliticisation or (re-)juridification. Standards on participation may pose different questions to trade and economic growth development like TTIP including:

  1. Can it be argued that, through the ways these developments come about, participatory rights have been breached (and if so what does that imply for future globalisation-driven regulatory infrastructures)?
  2. Do regimes like TTIP/CETA allow for a remedial function for participatory rights either (within or outside the regime)?
  3. How would participatory rights need to be conceptualised (within or outside the regime) in order to be effective?

Hence, included in the objectives of this project is to formulate novel approaches to public participation that exploit those same technological and regulatory infrastructure that foreclose traditional forms of public participation, and to reflect on the legal basis of such remedies from an international law perspective.

Row of statues with a bookshelf behind them.
Giammarco Boscaro

The Politics of Academia

This working group foregrounds reflection and debate on the public tasks of the university. Too often have the goals of those working at universities have been formulated in privatised terms. This has estranged academics both from the historical roots of the university, and from assuming a democratic role beyond academia. In this era of changing demands on universities, a vital questions is how to shape and reshape the public tasks of the university. This question touches on research and the degree to which it has relevance for public beyond the university, and it is crucial in conceptualising a relationship with students within university communities beyond treating them as consumers of knowledge.
library on EUC campus

Partners

We collaborate with a number of institutions for our events and research. Find out more about them:

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