Yearly Archives: 2025

Calls for Papers

CFP | Gender and Mediation

⇒ In German below ⇐

Translational and Editorial Practices in the Reception of Belgian Literature in Czech- and Germanophone Cultural Spaces during Modernism (1870–1940)

 Workshop is organised by Petra James, Hubert Roland, Quintus Immisch di Padua and Martina Mecco, MODERNITAS (MSH – Université Libre de Bruxelles) – UCLouvain and CEFRES – French Research Centre in Humanities and Social Sciences in collaboration with Department of Czech and Comparative Literature, Charles University, Institute of Czech Literature, CAS, Institut of Slovak Literature, SAV.

Deadline for submissions: December 30, 2025
Date: April 15 – 17, 2026
Location: CEFRES, Prague
Languages: English, French, Czech, German
Send an abstract of 300 words to: martina.mecco@ulb.be

(See German below)

The conference is organised as part of the FNRS (Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique, Belgium) project entitled “Belgium ‘Read’ in German and Czech” (2024-2027), directed by Petra James (Université libre de Bruxelles) and Hubert Roland (UCLouvain). Continue reading CFP | Gender and Mediation →

CEFRES Team

Garance Fromont – Research & CV

“Too loud a freedom: emergence of a Cinematographic New Wave in communist Czechoslovakia (1956-1968)”

CEFRES Research Area 1: Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices

My thesis focuses on the Czechoslovak New Wave and its relationship with the historical and political context of the sixties in Czechoslovakia. I intend to analyse the factors which led to the emergence of inventive ‘auteur films’, often critical of or offering a counter-point view to the ideal image of the society promoted by the regime in a studio-system, while the production was controlled and ideologically censored by multiple institutions. The film industry was nationalised in 1945 in Czechoslovakia, a decision which facilitated the control of the cinematography by the Communist Party after the coup d’état of 1948. Not only did the cinema become an ideological tool but it was also the theatre of political fights between influential members of the Party. After a decade of control, where the ‘socialist realism’ doctrine was established into all artistic fields, leading to a standardisation of the production, a discreet Thaw started at the end of the 1950s when the powerful (and Stalinist) Minister of Culture Václav Kopecký was ousted. But the true artistic rupture in the film aesthetic appeared at the of the 1960s, when a new generation of directors, inspired by the post-war Neorealism aesthetic and Direct Cinema techniques, started to film the society of its time. Czechoslovakia began to be recognised at international film festivals, in Mannheim Festival in 1963 where Věra Chytilová won the main prize for Something Different (O něčem jiném) and in Locarno Festival in 1964 where Miloš Forman won the Golden Leopard for Black Peter (Černý Petr).

My thesis project offers a detailed and informed study of the cinematographic movement known as the Czechoslovak New Wave in a historiographical, sociocultural, and aesthetic perspective. I expect to build an economic, technical, and aesthetic modelling of this movement, in line with what was elaborated for the French New Wave in particular by Michel Marie, by digging into the context and the interaction, during the production and the exhibition between the films and the society where they were produced in.

I rely on the methods of the historical field, in particular the collection and criticism of documents (film or non-film), as well as on the tools of cultural history, which invites us to place cultural objects in a social history. I study films of my corpus with a contextual analysis, reconstituted with various archives: press of the time (general or specialised), production documents from the studios, personal archives from witnesses (directors, writers, actors, politicians…), institutional documents and documents from the

aftermaths (memoirs, press report…). Inspired by other works and by a lecture taught at Université Paris Cité for bachelor degrees on ‘Cinema and sociology’, I extended my approach to sociology of culture, with an interest for the film workers ecosystem, especially in the framework of the Filmové Studio Barrandov, and how it influenced the production of films.

CEFRES Team, Non classé

Sabina Vassileva – Research & CV

“Gender of metabolism: enacting sexed bodies at the intersection of metabolic and sex hormones”

Research Area 2 – Norms and Transgressions

Contact: sabina.vassileva@soc.cas.cz

Sabina Vassileva is a doctoral candidate at Charles University, Prague. Her PhD dissertation, entitled Gender of metabolism: enacting sexed bodies at the intersection of metabolic and sex hormones contributes to CEFRES research area 2.

My dissertation project draws on the growing recognition that the increasing prevalence of metabolic conditions such as diabetes and obesity is shaped by a complex interplay of biosocial factors. These include (epi)genetics, contemporary food environments saturated with ultra-processed foods, socioeconomic precarity, psychosocial distress, and as I argue gender norms, roles, and relations, including gendered reproductive labor. I am particularly interested in how bodies undergoing hormonal fluctuations face heightened risks of metabolic complications due to the intra-actions between declining estrogen and testosterone levels, glucose metabolism, insulin resistance, insulin sensitivity, microbiome shifts, and gendered norms of care. These dynamics remain underexplored, as biomedical research has historically privileged stabilized (male) bodies in clinical trials and research design.

In my dissertation, I explore how biosocial gendered relations shape metabolic health and diagnoses such as diabetes and obesity. I examine how gender is enacted in metabolic health along three axes: self-care practices, clinical care, and biomedical research. My focus is on the hormonal intra-actions between metabolic and sex steroid hormones. I draw on a Baradian material-semiotic framework and build on critical feminist anthropology of hormones, which has foregrounded how hormones not only carry gendered imaginaries but also function as technoscientific tools of sex regulation and bodily governance. While sex hormones such as estrogen and testosterone are often studied in isolation, their intra-actions with metabolic hormones like insulin or glucagon-like peptides remain largely sidelined in sociological research. To address this gap my work combines feminist anthropology of hormones with the notion of postindustrial metabolism that enables me to trace the mutual constitutions of gender and metabolism.

Methodologically, my PhD adopts a mixed-methods approach. I combine qualitative ethnography (semi-structured interviews and participant observation)—exploring embodied experiences and everyday practices of “doing metabolism” and “doing gender”—with critical discourse analysis of biomedical research on metabolism. My ethnographic partners include people with diabetes or obesity who undergo synthetic hormonal therapies: individuals navigating menopause, andropause, or gender-affirming hormone treatments. These bodily transitions are critical sites where gendered and metabolic regulation is negotiated. Through this research, I investigate how gendered metabolic norms are not only discursively repeated but also materially metabolized—becoming embedded in the design of metabolic technologies and medications used in care. For this purpose I use visual ethnography tools like hormonal mapping.

By tracing how gender is materially metabolized in bodies, care practices, and biomedical knowledge, my project offers a feminist rethinking of metabolism as a deeply gendered and politically regulated process. By focusing on hormonal intra-actions, the project foregrounds fluid and dynamic bodily processes and gives voice to bodies that are marginalized in biomedical research on metabolism and whose mutual shaping of sexed embodiments and living in gendered social relations is not sufficiently considered.

CV

Education

  • from 2024 till present: PhD student, Sociology, Prague.
  • 2021-2024: MA, Anthropology, Charles University, Prague
  • 2017-2021: BA, Philosophy, Charles University, Prague.

Participation in research projects

  • Since 2024: PhD-participant Technocultures of extended metabolism, [GA24-12497S], project based at the Czech Academy of Sciences.
  • Since 2025: Junior researcher, Strategie AV21: Umělá inteligence pro vědu a společnost, Využití AI při managementu diabetu 1. typu, project based at the Czech Academy of Sciences.
  • Since 2025: Junior researcher, Platform workers on the czech labour market, project based at the Czech Academy of Sciences

Recent academic activities (selected)

  • June 2025: “Looped in within algorithms: A biosocial case study of a diabetic living with artificial pancreas,” paper presented at STS nordic conference, Stockholm, Sweden
  • June 2025: “Unwriting design injustice: hormonal-algorithmic tinkering
  • with open-source diabetes care technology,” paper presented at SIEF conference, Aberdeen, UK
  • May, 2025: “Attending to risky attachments: a study of a DIY loop for diabetes care, paper presented at an academic workshop “STS concepts for the life as aftermath”, Munich, Germany
  • March, 2025: “Queer metabolism: de/stabilizations of sex and gender binaries in biomedical research on gender affirming care and metabolism”, paper presented at STS HUB conference, Berlin, Germany
  • November, 2024: “Opening the black box of algorithms,” invited lecture within undergraduate course “Společnost, technologie, tělenost,” Faculty of humanities, Charles University, Prague
  • July, 2024: “Digital interfaces, real inequalities: exploring algorhitmic opacity in the platformised Czech delivery sector,” paper presented at EASA conference, Barcelona, Spain.
  • July, 2024: “Chrononormativita z perspektivy genderu a politiky těla, “ invited lecture at Woods sympozium “Time at the tips of conifers”, Orlické mountains, Czech republic
  • June, 2024: “More than Numbers: Health, Digitalization, and Bioethnography,” paper presented at the 15th MAYS Annual Meeting, Bologna, Italy.

Recent publications

  • Borisova V., Vassileva S. 2025. „Caring for more-than-human metabolic health: Self-tracking technologies as tools of calculation and communication in obesity and type 1 diabetes care“. Archivio antropologico mediterraneo. 27 (1). http://journals.openedition.org/aam/10112

Canovas O, Conan L, Gille P, Martinez A, Miranda CK, Palmea K, Roubi T, Suarez M, Vassileva S & Aline Wiame, 2024. « La nature en guerre contre la vie. Une expérimentation d’écriture cyborg entre Guattari et Haraway », Sextant, 41. http://journals.openedition.org/sextant/11409

Non classé

Markus Pollak – Research & CV

“Evaluating Democracies: International Election Observers and the Contestation of Liberal Ordering”

Axes de recherche 1 : Déplacements, dépaysements et décalages : hommes, savoirs et pratiques & 2 : Normes et transgressions

I am a Ph.D. candidate in International Relations at Central European University and a DOC-Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. My research focuses on international election observers in the post-Cold War era. Specifically, I examine practices of contestation facing observation missions sent out by regional organizations. As a key pillar of democracy promotion and liberal international ordering, election observation provides an entry point for understanding contemporary endogenous and exogenous challenges to liberal international ordering.

My project is embedded in the subfield of international political sociology. To collect data, I combine interviews with election observation practitioners and intergovernmental organization staff with archival research, particularly at the OSCE archives in Prague. In line with a Bourdieu-inspired research methodology, my project emphasizes participant observation. I have worked as a OSCE and EU election observer in Bolivia, the United States, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Serbia. I am also a research associate at the NGO Election-Watch.EU.

Currently I work on a research project investigating OSCE election observer careers and the recruitment practices of OSCE missions. Previously, I conducted research on parallel election observation missions and published an article on the election observation missions of the Commonwealth of Independent States in the OSCE region.

Education

  • PhD in International Relations, Central European University (ongoing)
  • MA in International Relations, Central European University
  • Certificate of Social Sciences and Humanities, Sciences Po Paris
  • BA and MA in Political Science, University of Vienna

Selected Publications

Pollak, M. (2025). Mimicking Election Observation: The Politics of Parallel Election Monitoring. Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy.

Teaching experience

2025-2026: Lecturer at the University of Vienna for the course “Politics of Democratization and Autocratization”

2025: Teaching Assistant at Central European University for the courses “International Intervention and Statebuilding” and “Introduction to International Relations”, Vienna

Conferences and Public Presentations

  • European International Studies Association (EISA) – 2025 Pan-European Conference on International Relations (“It´s a small world! For 20 years it´s often been the same people”)
  • Electoral Integrity Conference (EIP) – 2023 (“Mimicking Election Observation”) + 2025 (“It´s a small world! For 20 years it´s often been the same people”)
  • University of Vienna – “The Subversion of Liberal Election Observation?”, presentation at the Marie Jahoda Summer School 2024 (July 2024).
  • University of Oxford – “Mimicking Election Observation”, presentation was a part of the programme of the Europaeum Oxford Spring School 2024, St Antony´s college (April 2024).
  • Sciences Po Paris – “Mimicking Election Observation”, guest speaker at an event of the CERI VERELECT research group (November 2024)
  • Central European University – Pollak, M.“´Being an observer is not a profession – although everyone thinks it is”, guest speaker at the Conflict and Security Research group (March 2025)
CEFRES Team

Michaela Rumpíková – Research & CV

“Young Women in Transition: A Phenomenological Reading of First-Person Coming of Age Stories”

Contact : michaela.rumpikova@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr

Research Area 2 – Norms & Transgressions

My doctoral research proposes a phenomenological reading of contemporary French coming-of-age fiction centred around the figure of the young girl. By perceiving the young girl as a body in the state of becoming, I take up the concept of “becoming a woman” (Beauvoir, then Deleuze and Guattari) in order to extend it to a broader understanding of becoming as a directed process, that is, one influenced by gender, class, race, and sexuality norms. In 2001, Tiqqun wrote “Like so many of our unfortunate contemporaries, the Young Girl took Western metaphysics at the foot of its aporias”. Integrated into late capitalism, feminine subjectivity is formed through the norms of seduction, performance and consumption, and their internal contradictions. Nevertheless, it cannot be reduced to a simple embodiment of this ideology. Far from being a passive symptom, it also constitutes a reaction to the impasses of the system: it is a question of adapting to it, negotiating a space within it, and of becoming in a world which has already frozen into an artificial image of it. All while attempting to break free from the narrow confines of this representation, her story attempts to sketch the outlines of her own subjectivity.

In terms of methodology, I draw on the triad of orientations-objects-others (Sara Ahmed) to examine how formative trajectories are shaped by external forces that determine accessible and desirable directions and shape our relationship to the world, objects, and others. This allows me to rethink coming-of-age not as a linear or teleological route, but as an active movement, a form of navigation within a relational and dialogical field, where the body is affected without end, moved, and reconfigured in its way of being in the world. I thus reinterpret the Bildungsroman as a narrative journey, a dialectic movement of experience: a space of disadjustment, of friction, and sometimes even failure, understood not as an individual fault, but as a symptom of the norms which organise the social space.

This research draws on a corpus of coming-of-age fiction in the first person which I refer to as the ‘fourth generation’, characterised by social mobility, post-identity and the porosity of belonging (i.e. Nina Bourauoi, Faiza Guène, Wendy Delorme, Lolita Pille, Emmanuelle Richard, Blandine Rinkel, Fatima Daas). By examining the ways in which young girls negotiate their place in a world that guides them before they even have the opportunity to choose their own direction, I explore what becoming (a woman) means today, and what narrative forms and textual strategies enable us to express, reshape or invent this becoming.

CV

Education

  • 2022 – present: PhD. candidate jointly supervised by Charles University and Sorbonne Nouvelle University (programme: French and comparative literatures); Thesis: Young Women in Transition: A Phenomenological Reading of First-Person Coming of Age Stories, under the supervision of Eva Voldřichová Beránková and Alain Schaffner
  • 2019 – 2021: Master’s at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University (programme: French philology); Specialities: sexual identities and their representation in francophone literature, self-narrative, illness and auto-fiction; Dissertation: Hervé Guibert: the resurrection of the Author, under the supervision of Eva Voldřichová Beránková; Grade: excellent
  • 2015 – 2019: Bachelor’s at the Faculty of Education at Charles University (programme: French and English); Specialities: literary engagement, the literature of the Enlightenment and its emancipatory limits; Undergraduate dissertation: The emancipation of women in Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, under the supervision of Milena Fučíková; Grade: excellent

Exchange programmes

  • (2024) Vassar College (Department of modern literature)
  • (2022 – 2023) École Normale Supérieure (Department of literatures and language)
  • (2020 – 2021) Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Department of languages and literatures)
  • (2017 – 2018) Institut Catholique de Paris (Department of literature and language)

Publications

  • „Holky s bouchačkou: Odysea revolučního násilí v podání Virginie Despentes“, in: A2, 2025.
  • „Angažovat se od stolu“, in: Re:vize, 2025.
  • « Le chronotope de devenir-queer dans Arcadie (2018) d’Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam : le corps en Bildung », in : Silène, 2025. (publication to come)
  • « La vengeance au féminin : Civico et Burnier sous la tutelle de Despentes », collective volume under the supervision of Katarzyna Gadomska and Tomasz Kaczmarek, Lausanne : Peter Lang, 2024.
  • “Failing as a Literary Form of Queering”, collective volume codirected by Stefanie Mayer and Alex Lachkar, Vienna: Transcript, 2024.
  • « Floutage des frontières de genre : écrire le corps queer », collective volume under the supervision of Robert Karul and Andrea Turekova, Prague : Svet literatury 2024.
  • „Corporealita: tělo pod kapitálem“, in: Glosolalia, vol. 6, 2024.
  • „Co nenapíšu, to se nezavrší“, in: A2, 2024.
  • „Michel Houellebecq: islamofob a pornohvězda na poloviční úvazek“, in : Alarm, 2023.
  • « Hors centre et périphérie : La convergence littéraire dans l’univers de Vernon Subutex (2015 – 2017) de Virginie Despentes », in : Ostium, 2023.
  • „Marginalizace, patriarchát a emancipační boj u Virginie Despentes“, in : Alarm, 2023.
  • „Annie Ernaux: tělo a třídní boj”, in : Host, 2023.
  • „Marcel Proust a tajemství času”, in : Host, 2022.
  • „Emile Zola proti sociální slepotě“, in : H7O, 2022.

Conference(s), presentation(s), summer school(s)

  • (November 2025) International conference on the theme “Negotiating Safety. Literary and Cinematic Stagings of Tensions and Conflicts in Queer Spaces Since 1900” at the University of Vienna; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2025), “Queers at the Family Table: Negotiating the Self and the Family Through Space”.
  • (September 2025) Interdisciplinary workshop on “Rethinking the Emotions from a Historical Perspective” organised by Charles University; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2025), “Feelings of Class Shame in Contemporary Literature: Failing to Feel Right”.
  • (August 2025) Interdisciplinary summer school of the theme “Guerre-Conflit-Résilience” in Štěkeň, organised by par the Jan Hus Association; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2025), « Refuser la résilience : le récit du mal-être comme échec à résister à la négativité ». (publication to come)
  • (June 2025) International conference on the theme “Esthétiques queer et enjeux sociaux : décentrement”, organised by Clermont Auvergne University; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2025), « L’intimité éco-queer : « faire l’amour aux rochers, baiser les arbres ». (publication to come)
  • (May 2025) International conference on the theme “Colères féminines”, organised by the University of Amiens; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2025), « On se lève et on se casse : le concept de la colère féministe chez Virginie Despentes et Wendy Delorme ». (publication to come)
  • (October 2024) International conference on the theme “Bildungsroman à l’épreuve des identités sexuelles” organised by Paris Nanterre University; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2024), « Le chronotope de devenir-queer dans Arcadie (2018) d’Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam : le corps en Bildung », 24th October, Paris.
  • (August 2024) Interdisciplinary summer school on the theme “Déchets et fragments” in Kosice (University of Kosice) organised by the Jan Hus Association; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2024), « La poétique du fragment dans Le Corps lesbien de Monique Wittig », 5th July, Kosice.
  • (July 2024) Summer school in Poitiers (University of Poitiers), organised by OFFRES; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2024), « Lecture phénoménologique queer de la jeune fille dans les récits de formation : devenir dans le monde », 5th July, Poitiers.
  • (April 2024) Presentation of a thesis chapter at Vassar College; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2024), “The (Young) Girl as Contemporary Character: Becoming War Machine”, 22th April, New York.
  • (March 2024) Doctoral seminar on the theme “Écrire contre” organised by Sorbonne Nouvelle University; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2024), “Virginie Despentes and Literary Queering”, International conference “Queer/Feminist Relations in Fiction”, 15th March, Paris (online).
  • (October 2023) International conference on the theme “Queer Feminist Relations in Fiction” at the University of Vienna; Michaela RUMPIKOVA (2023), “Virginie Despentes and Literary Queering”, International conference “Queer/Feminist Relations in Fiction”, 28th October, Vienna.
  • (August 2023) Interdisciplinary summer school on the theme “Le Flou” in Krahule organised by the Jan Hus Association.
CEFRES Team

Sophie Raehme – Research & CV

“Visualizing Resistance: The Traveling Graffiti “Las Cuchas Tienen la Razón” and the Ghostly Presence of Forcibly Disappeared Colombians in Europe”

Research Area 3 – Objects, Traces, Mapping: Everyday Experience of Spaces

My research broadly examines how state and non-state actors, as well as victim-survivors themselves, negotiate concepts of collective reparation for gendered, intersectional, and relational harm. I focus in particular on the possibilities and limitations of collective reparations within official processes of victim subject recognition. Using a relational ontological lens, I explore how frameworks of collective victimization are constructed and contested within transitional justice discourses and beyond and in particularly in relation to territorial memory, art, and resistance in the context of Colombia’s urban territorial peace. My work is grounded in critical, decolonial, queer, and feminist approaches to transitional justice, reparations, gender, and human rights. Between 2022 and 2024, I collaborated closely on participatory documentary projects with a women’s searcher collective and an LGBT group in Medellín. One of these projects is currently being re-edited and is planned for submission to a human rights film festival.

During my fellowship at CEFRES, I will explore the transnational dimensions of memory activism through the traveling graffiti “Las cuchas tienen la razón”, originally created by youth graffiti artists and women searchers in Medellín, Colombia. The project investigates how this visual intervention, symbolizing territorial resistance and youth and women-led struggles for truth, justice, and reparations, has been reinterpreted within the Latin American diaspora in European cities such as Vienna, Berlin and London. To study these translocated territorial memories in traveling graffiti, I adopt an exploratory methodology using the metaphor of ghosts. “Ghost ethnography” offers a conceptual framework to examine how trauma and absence are inscribed on bodies and urban spaces, particularly through muralism and graffiti. These forms of street art function as living archives of resistance, often overlooked in mainstream historiography and ethnography, yet central to grassroots memory practices. I will complement this with semi-structured interviews conducted with graffiti artists and women searchers.

At CEFRES, I aim to contribute primarily to Research Area 3, “Objects, Traces, Mapping: Everyday Experience of Spaces.” During my stay, I will present findings from my PhD research and screen the upcoming participatory documentary “Women Walking for Truth – Transforming Voices and Territorial Resistance” (2025).

CV

I hold a Master’s in Philosophy (2019) from Goethe University (Frankfurt) and a Master’s in International Studies / Peace and Conflict Research (2020) from the Technical University of Darmstadt. In 2024, I taught courses on feminist theory, climate repair, and art-based methodologies as a Global Teaching Fellow at the Department of Political Science and Global Studies at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá). In 2025, I was a visiting PhD researcher at the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (Florence).