Freedom through movement? The promise of EU citizenship and the limits of a transnational life

European Union rhetoric and scholarly debate have made ambitious claims about the promises of European citizenship. Based on group discussions with ‘mobile Europeans’, this thesis aims to confront those promises with the lived experiences of EU citizens. The thesis complements normative and legal accounts of EU citizenship with a sociological approach that analyses how Europeans’ ways of talking about mobility relate to their expectations of the social, economic, and political possibilities in the countries they move between. Of particular interest is how mobile Europeans develop personal agency and construct a sense of political belonging when moving between contexts. The empirical part of the thesis engages with these concerns through an analysis of group discussions held with Europeans who live and work in another EU member state. Under investigation is the nature of the ‘emancipation’ and enhanced sense of agency offered by free movement rights; how that agency is related to mobile Europeans’ political expectations; and, finally, what mobile Europeans’ future plans reveal about their ability to sustain an integrated political identity while living across borders. The thesis finds that EU citizenship is at an impasse. While free movement has indeed become intrinsic to Europeans’ broader horizon of self-realisation, ‘mobility’ is often discussed not only in terms of aspiration, but of constraint and individual adaptation. Likewise, the promise of emancipation unbounded by nationality is undercut when Europeans find their social, political and economic attachments fragmented across contexts. Realising EU citizenship’s more ambitious transformative promise will require confronting this fragmentation by more radically fostering relations of democratic equality between EU citizens who share a social space

Continental breakfast 9: can Brexit only mean exit? European foreign policy and security co-ordination

The EU has recently ramped up its Common Security and Defence Policy. Will the UK be able to maintain similar partnerships with the EU after Brexit? Sean M Deel (LSE) reports on an LSE Continental Breakfast discussion at Sciences Po, Paris on 28 March between leading thinkers in international relations and European politics, with contributions from policy makers and civil servants

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7