Esperanto and Internationalism, 1880s-1920

Research Area 3 : Objects, Traces, Mapping: Everyday experience of spaces

Contact: bernhard.struck(@)cefres.cz

Dr Bernhard Struck, Reader / Associate Professor in Modern European History, School of History, University of St Andrews, Founding Director of the Institute for Transnational & Spatial History. His research focuses on German, French, Polish History, the history of travel, borderlands, cartography and space. He is author of Nicht West – nicht Ost. Frankreich und Polen in der Wahrnehmung deutscher Reisender, 1750-1850 (2006) and Revolution, Krieg und Verflechtung.Deutsch-Französische Geschichte 1789-1815 (2008) (with Claire Gantet). He is co-editor of Shaping the Transnational Sphere. Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s (2015).

Link to its current research

Strangers in a Strange Land. The Returns of Orphans in Czech Literature of the 2000’s.

Research Area 3 – Objects, Traces, Mapping: Everyday experience of spaces

Contact: astridgrevek(@)gmail.com

The main objective of this project is to bring forth a new understanding of the orphan as a literary and cultural figure as it is presented in contemporary historical fiction. The focus lies on fiction that in particular tells the story of orphans in the Czech lands after 1945, encompassing the two dominating isms of the 20th century, Fascism and Socialism. I work with contemporary (post-2000) novels by authors such as Jáchym Topol, Radka Denemarková and Bianca Bellová, in addition to German W.G. Sebald. By comparing texts that differ significantly in their approach to representing trauma and loss, I believe the orphan narrative generates a variety of voices. My theoretical approach is of interdisciplinary scope, and combines both classical literary theory and narratology, memory studies and historical approaches to literature. I am in particular interested in questions of genre, archetypes and myths.
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Non-hierarchical Model of Project Governance

Research Area 2: Norms & Transgressions

Contact: lukas.kotyk(@)cefres.cz

In my dissertation, I study non-hierarchical models of project governance within the context of social movement studies. I focus on projects that, with the help of engaging in prefigurative politics, re-evaluate the possibilities of the arrangement of interpersonal relationships, aiming to achieve a horizontal distribution of power. A notable example is squatting in the form of autonomous social centers. I interpret these projects as a radical social movement organization, whose inner structure is created as an experiment. Its aim is to overcome incorporated inequalities by giving individuals the possibility of experience in a community based on decentralized network structures.

I analyze this following research question:  how is horizontality constructed in everyday life, within concrete cases?  Following this question, I’m studying the tension between this declared goal of horizontality and the difficulty of its achievement. I’m focusing on the methods and mechanisms that are used to underlie non-formal hierarchies constructed in order to reach equality. Assuming that, as a repertoire of contention, these methods and mechanisms represent a shared knowledge of a wider movement, I presuppose them as basic to the experience of ordinary movement members. To describe this praxis and its actual forms, I use an ethnographic field of research. This paper’s focus, on projects that are non-hierarchical, systematically investigates alternative forms of coexistence and analyzes shared knowledge about how to govern complicated and complex projects without a hierarchical form of leadership.

Transnational Governance of Displacement, Sexuality and Gender Identity: UNHCR as the Main Actor in Creating a Legal Basis for Asylum-Seeking for LGBT Refugees in Turkey

Research Area 1: Displacements, “Dépaysement” and Discrepencies: People, Knowledge and Practices

Contact: mert.kocak(@)cefres.cz

My research focuses on the following question: how can LGBT refugees ‘legally’ register with migration authorities within a legal framework that does not recognize their very reason for seeking asylum? I study the case of LGBT refugees’ legal presence in Turkey. Demanding a refugee status in Global North countries (such as the USA, the UK, Canada and Germany), where sexuality and gender identity have been recognized as legitimate criteria for asylum-seeking, they have to be registered by Turkish migration authorities, a country where no such recognition has been granted.

Family Stories. Sociability, Rituals and Everyday Life among the Mongolian Buryat Herders

Research Area 1: Displacements, “Dépaysement” and Discrepencies: People, Knowledge and Practices

Contact : veronique.gruca(@)cefres.cz

My research focuses on Mongolian Buryat herders’ sociability, shamanic and funeral rituals and daily family affairs. I explore the particular texture of social relations specific to the pastoral way of life, as well as the perpetuation of solidarity bonds between people, the spirits and the dead in contemporary Mongolia. This research is based on 20 months of extended fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2020 among Buryat herding families of north-eastern Mongolia. It encompasses the study of several aspects of social life: shamanic rituals, funeral rites, nomadic pastoralism and the way people relate to their “homeland” (nutag). The ethnographic data has been collected from several households (ail) that are all related to each other as they belong to one large extended family (hamaatan) whose members are dispersed throughout the territory. Continue reading véronique gruca: research & cv →

Roma as an Object of Science and State Polices. Knowledge and Citizens in the Making in Post-war Czechoslovakia, 1945–1989

Research area 2: Norms & Transgressions

Contact : nikola.ludlova(@)cefres.cz

My dissertation project traces the history of the knowledge production on Roma in Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1989. This history is inextricably linked with the so-called ‘Gypsy Question’ as it was primarily the interest of the state in knowledge on Roma what initiated and stimulated research and knowledge production and led to the institutionalization of Roma as an object of science. In line with the socialist ethos of new man, the state social engineering project targeting Roma applied state planning in its effort to assimilate and later integrate these “citizens-in-training” into the society. Various scientific disciplines thus became instrumental to the state employing the scientific management approach to social questions. However, this knowledge production was not solely a state-commissioned enterprise, there were also actors whose interest and academic production on Roma was motivated by individual research interests and who secured the continuity of research regardless of the state interest in this knowledge. Some of these actors despite participating in state commissioned projects became during the period of political thaw in the 1960s open critics of the state assimilatory policies and supporters of and co-activists in the ethno-emancipatory efforts of Roma intellectuals. Knowledge therefore served simultaneously too opposing goals: to legitimize assimilation or ethnoemancipation.

My research is thus a contribution to the scholarship on the larger historiographical question in the history of science, i.e. the mutual interaction between political and scientific realms. Apart from the mentioned instrumentalization of knowledge, I am interested to find out how the establishment of Roma as an object of science enhanced development in these disciplines. In conclusion, I aim to situate the knowledge production in socialist Czechoslovakia within the longer history of knowledge production on Roma and specifically to position it in respect to the field of knowledge termed as Gypsy studies or gypsiology.

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