2025 Oxford Spring School Reflection

Resistance and resilience are key facets of the manner in which societies, communities and individuals have survived in the face of adverse pressures throughout history. How they relate to each other and manifest in social action was at the heart of the 2025 Europaeum Spring School in Oxford. In this article, Chris Chen and Jan-Malte Schulz reflect on their recent spring school exploring the two concepts and on their experiences during the event.

Chris Chen, Jan-Malte Schulz

How can hammams be spaces of resilience in the face of patriarchal oppression? What is the role of museums and archives as communal tools to contest narratives? Where do culture and resistance intersect, and how does resilience make itself known in the shared spaces of urban environments? And, perhaps most importantly, why should sailors not talk about rabbits while at sea?

It was this cast of pressing and eclectic questions that the Europaeum’s 2025 Spring School on Resistance and Resilience sought to explore and answer. Over the course of four days, a multidisciplinary cohort of 35 scholars from the network’s universities met at St. Peter’s College in Oxford to present their research, listen to a cast of distinguished speakers, and, crucially, explore the overarching themes of this year’s spring school. The multifaceted nature of resistance and resilience became more and more apparent as the conference progressed, and it was at the heart of spirited debates that took place throughout spring school. The EPS program was represented by 10 students of the 2023 cohort, 5 of whom also presented their original research.

Through both the engaging, thought-provoking, and, at times, emotionally challenging panels, as well as the discussions outside of the academic programme, the Spring School proved to be the kind of intellectual and social event that drives academia. In this article, the two authors use the opportunity provided by the conference and the European Waves to reflect on the experiences they had and the three broad themes that drove the discussions in Oxford. This article reflects the personal experiences and findings of the authors and is, therefore, inevitably subjective. Moreover, given the wide variety of insightful research focuses and presentations, this article is subject to omissions.

Heartfelt thanks are once again extended to the Europaeum team for organising this Spring School and to every participant for making this conference such an unforgettable experience!

Resilience, Culture and Resistance

The intimate relationship between culture and resilience and resistance was a red thread connecting presentations on a range of highly diverse topics. These included, but were not limited to, the changing depiction of Susanna in paintings and theatre, the contested nature of murals in public spaces in Lisbon, or the reflections on 19th-century Jewish emancipation in novels. Highlighting the role of any form of culture as both a reservoir and source of resilience, but also as an active expression of resistance, the presenters engaged the audience and each other in lively discussions. Whether against patriarchal oppression, anti-semitism and neoliberal reorganisations of public spaces, just to name a few, resistance was explored in all its facets. The Spring School’s opening lecture on the German resistance group, the White Rose, also drew attention to the fact that culture has the potential to be the cause and starting point for active resistance. At the same time, a presentation on the socio-cultural practices of sailors, spinning their (in)famous yarn, presented it as an act of resistance against both hierarchical structures and against the elements. Out of all these panels, presentations, and discussions emerged an understanding of the relationship between culture and resistance that goes beyond the instrumental while keeping the intimately human and creative nature of both concepts in mind.

Publics and Spaces of Resistance

What are the roles of spaces and publicity in resistance? Space seems to be a crucial element for various forms of resistance. Their relations were addressed throughout the panel on institutions and publics of resistance. We saw that both the case of integral museums and counter archives served as a resistance to the dominant narratives. In the presentation of the narrative security machine, the French Revolution was examined as to how it institutionalised the public discourses through memorials, exhibitions, and newspapers to construct collective memory, protecting itself from alternatives. By retrieving its access to publicity, the marginalised voices are heard. Such is the case of public arts in Lisbon’s NOVA FSCH, which showcased the disruptive nature of mural paintings. It shows the dynamic relations between public art and hegemony: discursive contestation, restriction, or commission by the institutions. Walls are turned into an arena between the state and the outlaw. We have also seen that public baths and salons in Egypt have become sites of resistance through which women find emotional support and exchange ideas with each other. It serves as a defiance against the male-dominated public spaces and provides a comfort zone. The publicity of feminism in 20th-century Britain, on the other hand, reminded us of the complexity of resistance. The intersectionality between class, ethnicity and gender, for instance, highlights that resistance could oftentimes ignore other forms of oppression.

Panel Highlights

The keynote speeches commenced with Dr Alex Lloyd’s research of White Rose, a student movement in Munich defying Nazi Germany’s war discourses. Dr. Lloyd showed an in-depth portrait of not only the movement as such but also the actors whose lives were intertwined with each other’s friendship. The pamphlets they distributed at the campus were a call for the German nation to wake up against the prolonging of war, as compliance to Hitler was deemed devoid of humanity. Uneasiness is the core of social movements, as White Rose demonstrated. It aimed at provoking distress and dissonance in the hegemonic public sphere.

One of the core themes shaping the discussions was how spaces can enable and shape both resistance and resilience. However, no presentation managed to convey the often paradoxical nature of spaces in the way that Yasmeen Elsayed’s presentation, on the role of hammams as a tool against Arab Patriarchy, did. While exploring the manner in which hammams serve as meeting rooms for women and as social spaces that enable exchange and mutual support, thus fostering resilience, the scholar also highlighted the manner in which the bodily expectations shaping practices still make patriarchal assumptions present in these female-only rooms. Hammams provide room for often sensitive conversations and expressions of solidarity, but also represent places conforming to the physical expectations of a patriarchal society and its images of the female body. Thus, while providing the much-needed safe spaces for female solidarity, these hammams cannot simultaneously escape the male gaze. Overall, this presentation was insightful and extremely educational, driving home the physicality of resistance and resilience through their spatial location while also raising awareness of their often contested nature.

Conclusions

Resistance and resilience are seemingly separate and sometimes even contradictory concepts. However, the multidisciplinary dialogues in the Oxford school showed that these concepts are, in fact, highly interrelated. For example, to foster the resilience of democracy, we need resistance against certain illiberal discourses and parties; to resist discursive hegemony, alternative storytelling is a means to ensure agency for marginalised groups throughout time. While the Spring School offered a plethora of insights and hosted discussions that brought together scholars from diverse backgrounds, its most important contribution was starting a conversation about the cases, concepts, and insights developed that is still ongoing. Even while writing this article, our heads are still spinning with the experiences made in Oxford. Both the intellectual exchange taking place in the course of those four days and the opportunity to engage with an impressive cast of scholars working all over Europe made this Spring School an inestimably fulfilling experience that can only be recommended further.