Here's a question for you. Is the Eurovision Song Contest (a) a garish exhibition of musical naffness that nobody in their right mind would take seriously or (b) "a stage on which the realities of the new Europe are being played out"?

Dr Milija Gluhovic, assistant professor of theatre and performance at Warwick University, inclines towards b. Gluhovic is co-organiser of a group of academics from all over the world who have been gathering since 2009 to discuss aspects of the contest that may have passed many of us by as Terry Wogan drolly summed up another eye-popping performance by an Israeli cross-dresser or Finnish heavy metal monsters.

The contest, it seems, is a social barometer revealing fascinating insights into national identity. The academic project, says Gluhovic, aims to examine how the contest has forged cultural interconnections that cut across political divisions between nations and shape the contours of a cosmopolitan European identity.

Wogan has handed over the BBC baton to Graham Norton for this year's final on 14 May in Dusseldorf. But it's safe to say the BBC coverage will probably not focus too much on academic inquiry.

Gluhovic understands the majority attitude of British audiences – ironic detachment underscored by dark mutterings about conspiracies against us for reasons other than music. "Many British viewers will look on and laugh," he concedes. "But Eurovision attracts 125 million television viewers across Europe. How many events do that, apart from the World Cup?"

The project, financed by a grant of £35,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, began with a workshop at Warwick two years ago bringing together sociologists, musicologists and experts on gender studies, as well as theatre studies. "Every discipline had something to bring to the table," Gluhovic says, "and we mapped out a wide field of interests, all connected to the contest. Eurovision gives an indication of what's going on in terms of aesthetics across the continent. But we're also looking at how nationhood expresses itself through the contest; how gender is represented; how historical alliances are still in place and new affiliations are being forged."

Although the contest has been around since 1956, it is the post-89 expansion to over 40 countries and the dominance of the east in recent years that particularly fascinates the researchers. Hence the project's title: Eurovision Song Contest and the New Europe. There have been two workshops since that initial gathering. One was at Royal Holloway, University of London, looking at the persistence of the notion of what Gluhovic calls "the barbarian east and civilised west" in current European public life – "the fear of widespread immigration from the east since the fall of the Berlin Wall". The other, held last month at Warwick's teaching facility in Venice, investigated the camp appeal of Eurovision under the title Queering Europe.

There has not been much clear agreement on how to interpret certain acts, Gluhovic admits. "Take Maria from Serbia, who won the 2007 contest in Helsinki with a song called Molitva, which means Prayer. Some commentators read it as a prayer for Serbia just after UN sanctions and the fall of [Slobodan] Milosevic. Others saw it as a coded lesbian performance with a butch-femme aesthetic. After all, she was in a suit, with short, cropped hair and glasses, while a chorus of very feminine women cavorted behind her."

And how did Gluhovic, who is originally from Sarajevo, see it?

"Like many academics, I was fascinated that a country like Serbia could have a representative of an ethnic minority – Maria has a mixed Roma and Serbian heritage – singing about same-sex love. Afterwards I talked to the distinguished theatre director from Serbia who had choreographed the performance and he conceded that he was playing with those aesthetics because he knew there was a strong gay following for Eurovision in the west."

That in turn is a measure of just how seriously the contest is taken by former members of the Soviet bloc, Gluhovic maintains. "From the early '90s onwards, countries from eastern Europe were very conscious of the PR value of sending good quality acts – or at least what they saw as good quality acts."

The Estonian and Ukrainian governments invested heavily in sending their acts on tours of Europe before going on to win in 2001 and 2004 respectively, he points out. "And the Russian government put on a lavish production in Moscow in 2009 to reassert its dominance and prestige. Beneath the shimmering glitz, however, academics picked out all sorts of coded and not-so-coded messages of defiance from former satellite states such as Georgia."

Gluhovic will be in Dusseldorf for this year's final, where there will be a third and final workshop under the title Feeling European. Together with Dr Karen Fricker from Royal Holloway, he will be co-editing for Palgrave-Macmillan a selection of essays inspired by the workshops.

"Eurovision is a night when Europe comes together and we start to think about how we see each other," he says. "To me that's very meaningful."