Social Transformations in Processes of European Integration: A Multidisciplinary Approach

The project will include research in several areas: the relationship between migration and understanding of democracy in Serbia, analysis of theoretical models and approaches in understanding political cultures, transformation of institutions and research areas and their comparison to the existing practices in the EU, transformation of the media, as well as applicability of different practices of various EU welfare state models. This will be done through a combination of field and theoretical research, and results will be presented in several conferences and a number of publications (including monographs). Besides participants of the project, which come from a range of scholarly disciplines (from political science and economics, to social psychology and sociology), some of the research will also be conducted together with foreign scholars, affiliated with institutions including University of Vienna and University of Hawaii. In doing so, we hope to present a practical overview of a series of issues dealing with the processes of European integration, pointing to specific areas where Serbia's institutions can use (or already do use) models applied in different EU countries. We believe that the research will point to the key areas that need improvement, as well as to the examples where integrations processes are going relatively smoothly, so that they could be used as models for other areas.