Claske Vos completed her PhD at the Institute of History and Area Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark in 2011. This PhD project looked at the implementation of a European heritage programme carried out in Southeast Europe. It examined the functioning of this programme as a ‘project of Europeanisation’ and looked at the ways in which European, national and regional heritage politics intersected, and how particular groups of people variously embraced, rejected and negotiated this European project.

Before finishing her PhD, Claske Vos obtained an MA degree in Cultural Anthropology at the Radboud University Nijmegen in 2004 and she continued her studies in 2005 with an interdisciplinary master in Southeast European Studies at the School for Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) at University College London. During those years and her PhD she specialised herself in the anthropology of EU policy with a particular focus on European cultural policy, cultural heritage and the Western Balkans.

Previously to her move to the University of Amsterdam Claske Vos worked as a lecturer at Leiden University for the MA programme Archaeological Heritage Management in a World Context.

In her research Claske Vos focuses on the ways in which European institutions such as the European Commission and the CoE aim to employ cultural policy as a means to transcend national identifications in accession states in Southeast Europe (particularly Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Macedonia and Serbia). Typical for the current programmes in the field of culture is that the European institutions offer a general framework, but leave the further interpretation of the programmes to national, regional and local actors.  If these programmes ask for the involvement of citizens, what does this involvement entail? What kinds of identifications are brought about, how are these assembled and and which images of Europe emerge as a consequence of these policies?  By means of etnographic research Claske Vos aims to provide more insights in this.

Additionally Claske Vos is interested in the forms of governance the EU investments in culture produce. How is culture governed in Europe and what does that entail? What are the technologies of power that are at play that implicitly and explitly change dealing with culture on a European level? What are the consequences of these new forms of governance and to what forms of negotiation, exchange and friction does this lead?

More general research interests are the anthropology of EU policy, European cultural policy, cultural heritage, Southeast Europe, Serbia, EU enlargement policy in Southeast Europe, the idea of Europe, and European identity formation.

en/counter/points is a investigates how and why multiple heritages, memories, processes of attachment and belonging to and in cultural spaces and places, are being (re)negotiated during a time of European migration and identity ‘crises’. By analysing problematic notions of ‘integration’, examining participatory, dialogic cultural activities, activism and appropriations in (and of) public spaces we question their perceived and actual impacts on individuals, society, culture and on public space in return. Such (re)negotiations enable us to untangle the complexity of culture, integration and public space(s) on a transnational, European level.

In this research project Claske Vos will examine attempts by different actors in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Macedonia and Serbia to include the legacies of socialism into the European public space, including various grass-roots cultural platforms (activists, NGOs and community organisations) as well as institutions to make visible these sensitive and contested aspects of Europe’s past, and to achieve recognition within the history and memory of Europe. Claske Vos will focus on attempts by cultural workers in Southeast Europe to (re)inscribe themselves in a larger European cultural space by creating autonomous and transnational spaces of cooperation. Such cultural workers operate in an environment affected by the transition to post-socialist settings and have to manoeuvre in a field marked by centralization, a lack of autonomy, increasing privatization and re-nationalization. EU funding, independent European foundations and nationally based funding programmes enable them to inscribe themselves in a new European cultural space, counterbalancing official dealings with art, heritage and memory.

MA: Perspectives of European Integration ( ‘Cultures of Governance’).

MA: European Cultural Policy, MA Governing Europe.

MA: history of European Unity

MA: History of the Idea of Europe

BA III: Research Seminar: Crossing Borders: Europe’s History of Migration and Exchange

BA II: Historical Research Methods and Techniques

BAII: European Memory and Heritage, BA 2 en 3.

BA II: European Studies Workshop 3 – Europe@Work

BA I: European Integration