Charting the intangible on the edges of time

In our exploration of The Power of Knowledge, we asked EUI academics: What is the most powerful piece of knowledge you have encountered, and how has it transformed your research?

Here, the personal story of EUI alumna Cristina Blanco Sío-López:

My research transformative experience was not that much based on a piece of knowledge, rather on the experience of an observation that is inherent to a personal and deeply-rooted love for historical studies: the intimate relation of humans with ways of living and feeling time.

I recognised that time, as both a background and as an active subject of history, had three main conventionally highlighted dimensions: astronomical, biological, and geological manifestations. However, its perception management intimacy features seemed unexplored, especially in relation to the instilment of time perceptions in political communication during historical turning points. Discerning a pivotal point of no return in time could feel like a gate but its immanence can be either co-opted, as are bridges between distinct eras, or cherished as a tool to transform new barriers into potential societal steps forward. In short, the arcane traces of time appeared to be asking to be translated, not merely into languages of liberty or power, but also into a full consciousness of existence that could trigger decisive exercises of free will.

Turning points as the moments of change that happen when a pattern is broken constitute discernible anchors that could help us chart the intangible. In this respect, they offer a sense of societal hope since we are, by default, thrown in a world full of pre-existing scaffoldings of meaning with just narrow spaces to carve differing pathways while attempting to nudge forms of perpetual openness.

From that perspective, focusing on studying turning points in history, including the attempts to determine them, the failures to pre-design them, and the humility of recognising them reminded me of Tagore’s verses:

“Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf”.

Historians are, indeed, dancers on all edges: At some point in your life, you can clearly distinguish a nameless passion that you can start associating with the study of successive waves of becoming. Then you crave a focus on movements, on directions, on memories, and on that precipice feeling of a pure potentiality of instants when you could have been, but never were. It is at that point when you start to perceive the past as a moving vehicle, possibly catchable as it circles back. Those moments invite you to sense a permanent capacity to imagine and propose what could occur while you are, and also when you will no longer be. In the purest sense of the word, you are alone in a nameless void aiming to chart the intangible and you intuit that turning points could perhaps be your anchors and your ports.

At that time, I remember starting to examine European contemporary history as a history of interactions and European integration as one of Europe’s major attempts to save itself from itself (as well as from wider and increasingly tight entanglements). Against this backdrop, I developed my personal motto on ‘looking back to see beyond’ to conjure the smallness of human societies and to glimpse traces of (punctually) shared dreams to move beyond senseless strife towards a common pursuit of understanding. Maybe this could well be the very definition of research and an open invitation to a sense of purpose capable of superseding each mute beginning.

Amidst this search for anchors in an ocean of time, a primary object in the underpinning of turning points (those visible and those invisible, the hidden, the overwritten and the hoped), I looked into the future that once was, epitomised in the study of 1989 and the EU's Eastward enlargement communication strategy as an expression of democracy’s missed chances. Moving from the outcomes of the past to the causes of the future, I investigated the decade of the nineties as a bridge between eras, not as a new beginning: a slippery ground beneath our feet in which to observe how principles, norms, and values were co-opted, while the opposite of those get growingly translated in seemingly unquestionable implementation agendas. Meanwhile, the missing link to which we are always invited to return could well be the evergreen potentiality of recovering the notion of 'community' itself.

This deep dive into turning points brought me also the vector of a new transformative chapter: the temporalities of spatial becoming that came attached to a deep need to navigate ‘Schengen’ through the historical challenges and potentialities of the EU’s free movement of persons, which brought together the fundamental questions of: What have we forgotten? How did we talk about it? And what have we lost of whom we once wished to become? Indeed, a history of human mobility rights entails rising hardships on all fronts, but charting its backwards temporal shifts helps us see the ductility of any age of disruption: a sort of quantum malleability where historical ideas and experiences of fundamental rights and freedoms can always re-enter with clarity in any muddled scene.

Most recently, the analysis of a peace-solidarity connection in the temporalities of spatial becoming helped me discern the salience of the meaning of peace as forever more than the presence of an all-justifying security (beyond ethics) or as just the absence of conflict since it entails a much-neglected element: that of inescapable community building.

In this sense, searching for spaces not just within, but beyond, as well as seeking patterns and reflections and conversations beyond echoes brought me to the inquiry of sustainable peace in European integration through the languages of the arts. Here, a time perspective helped me launch new questions: Can an Art-Policy Nexus reveal overlapping folds of reality cloaked by our perceptions as in a systematic illustration of covert realms? Can intangible languages unveil approaches to peace that remain otherwise elusive?

Today, whenever I approach common European landscapes of peace through the lens of time, I do that frontally through historical sources, but also obliquely through the filtered fluidity of digital history and, thus, I became used to the exploration of a hyperspace with no centre and no boundaries. In this pursuit, the search for a centre illustrates a much-needed discerning of agency and the lack of a clear edge engages us in the search for possible scopes: a spark that grows into an embrace. Indeed, this hyperspace angle is ever enticing as it also constitutes a warped geometry where time becomes space and, hence, the Platonic year ends with the primal next chapter of enacting A Cosmology of History.

EUI alumna Dr. Cristina Blanco Sío-López is Tenured Associate Professor in Sociology and Contemporary History at the University of La Coruña in Spain. She is also Affiliate at Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH) and Life Member at the Clare Hall College of the University of Cambridge.

She received the ‘Colin Bell’ Award 2026 by the Churchill College and Archives at the University of Cambridge and the 2024 ‘María Moliner’ Spanish National Research Award in the Humanities by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Her research and publications focus on European Integration History, with an accent on: The European Union’s enlargement historical and policy narrative temporalities; Philosophy of Time and temporal perception management analysed through historical studies; the Schengen Area fundamental rights; a (po)ethical-practical critique of AI concepts from the Digital Humanities; quantum ‘norms’ from a historical perspective; a ‘Cosmology of History’ and ‘warped geometries’ as diachronic futures of opportunity; 1989 intersections between history and technology on the eve of radical societal change and on the search sustainable factors of peace via regional (e.g. European) integration studied though intuitive and innovative insights expressed from the Arts (e.g. through poetry and the visual arts) and shared via Digital Humanities conceptual maps.

She was the Principal Investigator of the NextGenerationEU projects ‘FREEMOVEU’ and ‘FUNDEU’ on the History of Human Mobility Rights in the EU and was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Senior Global Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, where she directed the EU H-2020 project ‘Navigating Schengen (NAVSCHEN)’ as PI.

She previously was Assistant Professor in European Culture and Politics at the University of Groningen and ‘Santander’ Senior Fellow in Iberian and European Studies at the European Studies Centre – St. Antony’s College of the University of Oxford.

She obtained her PhD in History and Civilisation, with a specialisation in European Integration History, at the EUI.

Notable recent publications include:

Blanco Sío-López, Cristina (2026) ‘Unfolding Peace via Integration and ‘Europe’ as Freedom in Madariaga’s Intellectual Legacy from the Interwar Period’. History of European Ideas, Routledge – Taylor & Francis, 1–21.

Blanco Sío-López, Cristina (2026) ‘Western Responses to 1989: Launching the EU’s Eastward Enlargement Amidst Inner Complexity and Outer Fragmentation’, in book: The Routledge Handbook of 1989 and the Great Transformation, London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 69–79.

This EUIdeas essay is a contribution to the conversations launched at the EUIdeas flagship event themed The Power of Knowledge, held on the occasion of the EUI’s 50^th anniversary. The initiative is aimed at reimagining Europe by showing how universities can deploy knowledge to illuminate challenges, inform public debate, and contribute intellectually to the future of our societies.