Workshop EHESS-UMIFRE-EFA

Organizující instituce: EHESS, EURETES « Faire société », CEFRES (Praha), CRFJ (Jeruzalém), IFA SHS (Frankfurt nad Mohanem), EFA (Atény), University of Cyprus (Nicosia)

Kdy: 29.–30. dubna 2026
Kde: 1 Panepistimiou Avenue, Aglantzia 2109, Kypr, http://library.ucy.ac.cy
Pracovní jazyky: angličtina, francouzština
Datum uzávěrky k podání přihlášek: 1. března 2026

Koordinátoři:

• Falk Bretschneider (EHESS / IFRA-SHS)
• Mateusz Chmurski (Sorbonne univerzita / CEFRES)
• Gilles de Rapper (EFA)

Program workshopu naleznete zde.

Rationale:

Borders are all these things at once: a seam stitching together two neighboring sovereignties; a line of demarcation punctuated by crossing points—par excellence, sites of identity verification—unless one plays with their rigidity to turn them into hinges, places of encounter; a horizon onto which hostility toward the other is projected, and the very edge of the self; a liminal space which therefore, or perhaps, partakes of something sacred. We know how to delimit, trace, adjust, control, and reinforce borders. But do we know how to abolish them, or does a hardened trace always remain? We also know, as in Europe, how to neutralize them, dematerialize them, euphemize them. But what does the wall erected at the border do to it? Whether it is merely one of its varieties or its very essence, what does it say about the border itself?

From the Great Wall of China—an emblematic case of a rampart that defines barbarians more than it protects against them—the world has never known as many walled borders as in the period following the Second World War: The Berlin Wall or the “Iron Curtain” dividing Europe in two; the Cypriot wall; the separation wall between the two Koreas. Today, there is the wall built by the American administration along the border with Mexico, and the wall constructed by the Israeli government along the border with the West Bank—or rather, along a nonexistent and unilateral border that plays upon the very denial of Palestine’s existence. What do these walls do to societies, and how—what diapositives do they constitute? What do we learn from their legal or illicit crossings, and what do the lived reality and the novelistic fantasy of the checkpoint reveal about them? What do walls seek to make difficult, risky, impossible? What kind of border does a wall dream of when it bars the welcome of the other as much as it confines us within? And of what kind of world is it the foundation? What narratives—literary or otherwise—tell the story of walls, and, conversely, how do walls survive in the collective memory, in identities, in behaviors, or in the spatial structures of societies?

Program:

Akce se skládá ze čtyř půldenních workshopů, během kterých bude probíhat diskuze o konceptech představených v prezentaci. Součástí programu bude také komentovaná prohlídka kyperské hranice. Účastníci a účastnice si nepřipravují příspěvky, ale aktivní zapojení vyžaduje předchozí četbu jednoho či více textů na každý workshop.

Náklady na ubytování a cestu účastníků budou hrazeny na základě paušální částky, která by měla pokrýt veškeré výdaje.

Přihlášky:

Motivační dopis (max. 1 stránka) a životopis (max. 2 stránky) zasílejte na adresy:  Falk Bretschneider (falk.bretschneider@ehess.fr), Mateusz Chmurski (mateusz.chmurski@cefres.cz) a Xenia von Tippelskirch (X.vonTippelskirch@em.uni-frankfurt.de).