Is Europe made of stone... and data? Insights from an interdisciplinary summer school

By Adalgisa Martinelli, Anna Hoberg, Édouard Hargrove

From June 30^th to July 4^th, 2025, we had the privilege of attending the Interdisciplinary Summer School organized by ITI MAKErS in Strasbourg, in collaboration with GIS EURO-Lab. This week-long gathering brought together scholars, researchers, and doctoral students from different disciplines (law, sociology, political science, etc.) to present – but also historicise and critically examine – various ways of collecting and exploiting data on Europe as part of our research methods in European studies.

Set in the intellectually vibrant environment of the Université de Strasbourg, the program was as diverse as it was intensive. From lectures on the legal history of the EU to hands-on data workshops, the summer school provided a forum for ideas and debates on how Europe is methodologically studied, constructed, and experienced through data and its repositories.

Beyond data: socio-legal approaches, legal history and text analysis methods

The week opened with a keynote by Professor Antoine Vauchez, who challenged us to rethink the materiality of European integration. Far from being neutral, the data repositories and archives we often take for granted are, he argued, deeply political. In his talk, “Sources, données, acquis. Pour une socio-histoire des centres de calcul et de connaissance du projet européen”, Professor Vauchez dismantled the idea that data is simply "raw material" - passively available for researchers to mine. Instead, he sought to retrace the particular social logics and constellation of actors (bureaucrats, historians, economists) that underpinned the creation of these official statistics and curated sources. Doing so is a necessary step for us to grasp the specific nature, focus, and limitations of this publicized data.

This genealogic approach also reveals the political functions of this knowledge production. One striking example was the concept of the "cost of non-Europe", a calculative and rhetorical device mobilized to legitimize initiatives like the Euro. Such quantifications are not merely technical exercises, but they are acts of political design that determine what is measured, valued, and made visible. In doing so, they carve out boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. As early-career scholars, this perspective was a powerful reminder that European institutions do not merely react to data, but they co-produce the very facts and frameworks through which Europe is imagined, governed, and justified.

Another highlight of the week was Vincent Réveillère’s talk on the history of EU law as a discipline. He discussed both traditional approaches and contemporary methodological debates. The result was a comprehensive overview ranging from “The law of integration” to “Integration through law” and “Law in context”, as well as the resulting trends and controversies. He also provided an overview of key figures in these approaches, such as Pierre Pescatore and Mauro Cappelletti. Following that, Professor Marco Rocca led an atelier on building datasets using Eur-Lex, the EU’s vast legal text repository. His approach was particularly inspiring for those of us working at the intersection of law and the social sciences. By treating legal documents not just as normative texts but as empirical data, Professor Rocca demonstrated how interdisciplinary research can be grounded in methodologically rigorous and replicable datasets, paving the way for new forms of empirical legal analysis.

This spirit of cross-disciplinary innovation continued with the hands-on workshop with Professor Sébastien Michon and Eric Wiest, who introduced us to IRaMuTeQ, an open-source software for statistical text analysis. Through practical exercises, we learned how to transform parliamentary questions into analysable corpora, explore lexical patterns, and extract sociological insights from institutional language. These sessions equipped us not only with new tools, but also with new ways of thinking about texts as data.

Reflexive analyses of our own data-collection practices

While we spent the first day engaging with established scholars around different methodological questions, the subsequent days were centred around our own presentations. All of them sought to tease out different methodological aspects of our own insipient research as young scholars. The point was to reflect on the kind of data we are collecting, the difficulties we face in our data collection process, what our positionality is in relation to our data (especially when it is gathered through fieldwork), the techniques we use to sample and process our data, and the analytical methods we draw om to make sense of our data.

The presentations and subsequent discussions were all very enriching and highlighted both the variety and creativity of our approaches. In total, twelve research projects were discussed in a wide range of (inter)disciplinary fields spanning the social sciences and humanities, including socio-legal analysis, legal history, political sociology, empirical legal studies, doctrinal law, and interpretative political science. Reflecting this topical diversity, a number of data-collection methods were explored, including those centred on public archives (both physical and digital), public and proprietary data repositories (EUR-lex, LexisNexis, European Data Portal), ethnographic observations, field interviews, and web scrapping (LinkedIn profiles, electoral campaign platforms, institutional websites). This might not be the right place to elaborate on all of these presentations, but it is safe to say that the final results of their research projects are all highly anticipated!

An adventure into the cellar of European archives

One of the most enriching experiences of the week was our guided visit to the Council of Europe, where we were introduced to the work behind European archival construction. Through presentations by Philippe Reilhac, Christine Bech, and Eliza Botsoglou, we explored how archives contain not only speeches and official documents, but also visual and symbolic materials that contribute to the construction of European narratives. An especially compelling moment was learning about projects involving the European flag, which revealed how visual artefacts are curated, stored, and interpreted as part of the EU’s patrimony.

Quantifying injustice: conclusions by Olivier de Schutter

The summer school concluded with a deeply engaging and timely lecture by Olivier de Schutter, Professor of International Law, Special UN Rapporteur and newly appointed member of the European Committee of Social Rights. His talk, “Indicateurs de mesure de l’effectivité des droits sociaux”, addressed a critical and often overlooked issue in the European context: the non-take-up of rights - when individuals entitled to social services do not, or cannot, access them.

This phenomenon, De Schutter argued, lies at the heart of the crisis of social inclusion in Europe. Why do people fail to access the very rights meant to protect them? He offered several interconnected explanations:

• Complex and inaccessible procedures, especially digital-only forms that alienate those with low digital literacy.
• Humiliating or hostile treatment by administrative services, which discourages engagement.
• Excessively strict eligibility conditions function as a form of social control or deterrence.
• The complexity and rapid change of the legislative environment.

What do the numbers say? In France, 34% of those eligible for minimum income support don’t access it, whereas in Belgium, this figure rises to 46%. Often, it is precisely those in greatest need — the poorest and most marginalized members of society — who are most affected. De Schutter stressed that evaluating the effectiveness of rights requires more than checking if laws exist. It requires asking: are those rights being accessed? Are they being accessed equitably?

To tackle this, he introduced a framework of state obligations built on three pillars:

1. To respect: a negative obligation where the state refrains from interfering (e.g., not arbitrarily withdrawing rights).
2. To protect: a proactive stance where the state prevents third parties from violating rights.
3. To realize: a long-term commitment to facilitate, promote, and provide access to rights.

Moreover, he emphasized the importance of monitoring the actual use of social rights, rather than just their existence on paper. In this sense, indicators are not just technical tools, but they should be instruments of accountability. Indeed, they should ensure that access to rights is real, inclusive, and effective, particularly when long-term investment and multi-year policy planning are required to bring rights to life.

Finally, De Schutter linked these issues to the wider political struggle over narratives, noting how populist and far-right movements often exploit institutional opacity and bureaucratic failures to spread anti-EU sentiment. This was particularly resonant for Adalgisa, whose research investigates the narrative of food sovereignty in Europe, which is frequently co-opted by such actors to question the EU’s legitimacy and distort the very notion of (food) rights. De Schutter's long-standing work on food systems and social justice added a powerful lens through which to think about how the EU must not only legislate rights, but also communicate their meaning clearly, especially in an era of sovereignty claims and rising dissensus.

Looking back, the MAKErS Summer School offered more than a workshop on methods and data. It was a laboratory for rethinking Europe through data and empirical tools, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the extensive and interdisciplinary nature of Europe-related research. The recurring theme was the political work of research: what we measure, how we document, and which voices we amplify has important implications.