Jean Monnet work programme and UCL SSEES Library guides

The European Institute has been designated a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence by the European Commission in recognition of the Institute's reputation as a facilitator of high-quality research and information on the European Union. As part of the current Jean Monnet work programme, SSEES library staff, together with the help of Rasa Kamarauskaite and Zora Kostadinova, UCL SSEES PhD students,  have created three new resource guides. They focus on primary sources from governments, international organisations, NGOs, research institutions and the media, research materials, providing documentary evidence on issues which generate a great deal of secondary information, news reporting and opinion, but where facts are harder to find.

The first guide focuses on LGBTQ+ in Eastern Europe. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in sources of academic research engaging with the topics of queer histories, queer culture, geographies of sexualities, gender identity, homophobia, LGBTQ citizenship, migration and asylum. The UCL SSEES Library guide to resources on LGBTQ in Eastern Europe is supporting the strand on LGBTQ Migration and Asylum providing reliable resources evaluated by the library’s specialist staff. The content is curated by UCL SSEES Library and covers a wide range of resources including recent publications, academic repositories, reports, periodicals, oral histories archives, news portals, audio and video resources, as well as organisations.

Another guide, the EU Migration guide,  focuses on the recent migration from Central and East European countries (EU8, EU2 and Croatia) to the UK. It covers academic research and publications on the subject, literature, audio-visual material (film, TV, radio), statistical information, migrant media outlets and portals in the UK and cultural institutions. The guide is divided by country. The amount of information available for each country largely reflects both the size of the migrant community in the UK and the year in which the country joined the EU.

A third guide, UCL SSEES Library guide to TV news in Eastern Europe is not a thematic but a resource-focused guide and collates TV news channels and information programmes from the region. The content of the guide was carefully selected by specialist Library staff. The guide provides access to very extensive news channels, both to current news and an extensive online archive. The guide is an important and useful research tool for the analysis of news and of political narrative in the era of populism and fake news. Another aim of the guide is to provide a modern replacement for the service UCL SSEES Library was responsible for number of years when recording news from selected countries for teaching and research purposes.