Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe
Apr 21, 2022 | 6:30pm (ET)
Lecture at GHI Washington | Speaker: Richard Ivan Jobs (Pacific University Oregon)
2022 Spring Lecture Series: Not the Usual Suspects: Everyday Agents of Globalization in the Twentieth Century
Richard Ivan Jobs' lecture will tell the story of backpacking in Europe in its heyday, the decades after World War II, revealing that these footloose young people were doing more than just touring the continent. This history of cross-border mobility reconsiders European integration from a social and cultural standpoint rather than the typical political or economic perspective.
COVID-19 Policy: You will have to show proof of vaccination at the door. The GHI enforces a mask mandate throughout the building regardless of CDC guidelines.
About the Speaker
Richard Ivan Jobs (PhD, Rutgers University) is Professor of Modern European History at Pacific University in Oregon. His research and publications are the recipient of numerous awards, honors, and fellowships including the Grace Abbott Book Prize, Outstanding Academic Title from Choice, the Koren Prize for the best article in French history, the Arnold and Lois Graves Award, a Bourse Chateaubriand, an NEH grant, and the Fulbright-Schuman Fellowship in European Affairs. His scholarly interests have circled around European social and cultural histories of youth and young people, popular culture, travel and tourism, mobility, integration, and transnationality.
About the Lecture Series
Not the Usual Suspects: Everyday Agents of Globalization in the Twentieth Century
This lecture series reassesses globalization from a bottom-up perspective. Globalization processes have typically been associated with intergovernmental organizations, multinational corporations, and NGOs. Less known are the “everyday” agents of economic, cultural, and political globalization: historical actors who initiated and promoted connection and exchange (intentionally and unintentionally) across world regions through their day-to-day activities. Backpacking tourists in postwar Europe, for instance, redefined the very idea of Europe with their cross-border itineraries and the many interactions with their host communities. The lecture series shines a spotlight on these and other drivers of globalization at the micro-social level. The different lectures discuss the activities of individual and group actors since the 1920s, covering a truly global range of geographies including the Middle East, East Asia, and the Caribbean. By applying an actor-centered approach to the study of twentieth-century globalization, the lecture series highlights the significance of globalization agents not usually suspected of playing this role.
Organizers: Andreas Greiner, Mario Peters
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Robert Kramm (LMU Munich)
Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe
April 21, 2022 | 6:30pm (in person)
Richard Ivan Jobs (Pacific University Oregon)
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