All posts by Cefres

Calls for Applications

CfA: Two Post-Doctoral Positions at CEFRES – Charles University

TWO POST-DOCTORAL POSITIONS AT CEFRES COFUNDED BY THE CHARLES UNIVERSITY AND CEFRES WITHIN THE FRAME OF SPECIFIC RESEARCH PROJECTS

Deadline for submission: 23 August 2017
Period: 1 January 2018—31 December 2019
Application Language: English only
Address for submission: clararoyer@cefres.cz

Selected post-doctoral researchers will be informed on 2 October 2017. 

Two post-doctoral researchers will be recruited from 1 January 2018 at CEFRES with the support of the Charles University. They will be both affiliated to CEFRES and to a relevant department at Charles University. Each one will work on their individual research and in cooperation with a senior researcher of the center within the frame of a collective research project. Applicants must select one of the projects below.
Both post-doctoral researchers will be recruited on the basis of the quality of the research they conduct and their befitting the research programs they intend to join.
Research project 1: “Archives and Interculturality”
This research project will associate one post-doctoral researcher with CNRS researcher Benedetta Zaccarello.
Description: Candidates should be trained on and familiar with research on autograph manuscripts, notably on archives relevant to philosophy and the history of thought. We encourage applicants whose approach emphasizes the historical, textual and intercultural value of those documents, focusing on multilingual corpus inspired by or dealing with different traditions, both in space and time. An interdisciplinary approach is preferred, as well as some experience in the field of the edition of unpublished texts and in the methodology of genetic criticism.
Applicants may contact Mrs Zaccarello before applying for any relevant questions on their application. Please write at: benedetta.zaccarello@cefres.cz
Research project 2. TANDEM post-doctoral position

A specific competition to recruit a second post-doctoral researcher is open for competition on one out of three possible topics listed below. He/She will work in association with a researcher from the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) within the frame of the TANDEM program.

Topic 1: “Cosmopolitics of Hunt: Bringing Europe into Perspective”

This research project will associate one post-doctoral researcher with CAS researcher Luděk Brož.
Description: Candidates across social sciences and humanities are invited to explore how “wild species” have featured in human lives, and vice versa, in dynamically changing socio-environmental contexts. Successful applicants are expected to develop their own niche of empirical inquiry and, using methodology aligned with their respective disciplines, focus on “wild species” – human relationships as both a topic in its own right, and a strategic viewpoint on other issues of social and academic relevance. The supported candidate should be ready to engage in reflexive interdisciplinary collaboration.
Applicants may contact Mr Brož before applying for any relevant questions on their application. Please write at: broz@eu.cas.cz 

Topic 2: “Denaturalisation and refugees in Europe in the first half of the 20th century”
This research project will associate one post-doctoral researcher with CAS researcher Michal Frankl.
Description: The project aims to develop a comparative perspective on large-scale denaturalisations in Europe in the first half of the 20th century and to probe the intrinsic connection between the status of the citizen and the position of the refugee. The applicant will show interest into research on citizenship, statelessness and/or refugees and should have background in historical and archival research (but an interdisciplinary combination with related disciplines is also possible and encouraged). Within the project s/he will be tasked with assessing existing body of research, working with the PI to develop the project methodology and conducting original research on mass revocations of citizenship and refugee policies. S/he should demonstrate interest in comparative history and explain his/her ability to contribute to a European comparative project (for instance, but not limited to, knowledge of the French and/or other national/regional contexts and languages).
Applicants may contact Mr. Frankl at frankl@mua.cas.cz with questions pertaining to the research project and the application.

Topic 3: “Islamic Activists in Exile: Europe, Middle East and South-Asia”

This research project will associate one post-doctoral researcher with CAS researcher Giedre Sabaseviciute.
Description: Candidates will be expected to contribute to the project on the contemporary exiled Islamic activists in European, Middle Eastern and South-Asian cities. The project aims to research the ways in which the experience of exile affect the trajectories of activism, focusing on how different national context influence their career choices, which vary between the continuation of activism, involvement into different causes, or disengagement. Possible research topics include but are not restricted to 1- circulation of ideas, norms and activism through human networks; 2- patterns of activist network formation; 3- relationship between the exiled activists and their host countries; 4- continuities and ruptures in individual trajectories of activism. Candidates are expected to have conducted their doctoral research in one of the regions covered by the project (The Gulf, Turkey, South-Asia), to be proficient of one of its languages (Turkish, Arabic, Malay), and have an important knowledge of the fieldwork. Interdisciplinary approach is preferred, as well as some experience in ethnographic and biographical research, media studies, and discourse analysis.
Applicants may contact Giedre Sabaseviciute before applying for any relevant questions on their application. Please write to: saba@orient.cas.cz

Application Package

Applicants should provide the following documents:

  • The application form duly filled in: download HERE. The application form includes the description of a research project. The research project must:
    • specify the name of the research project you want to apply to (for ex. “Archives and Intertextuality”) and explain how your research befits it.
    • include an explanation on the methodology and inputs of your own research, as well as a selected bibliography (max. 1 page-long)
    • include outcomes (publications, conferences, and so forth).
  • A letter of reference from the PhD supervisor: download HERE. The letter must include a statement from the PhD supervisor (mentionning topic of the PhD and whether candidate was successful with it, and so forth)
  • A detailed CV
  • A list of publications
  • A copy of the PhD diploma

Application packages must be submitted by 23 August 2017 electronically in an email entitled “YOUR LAST NAME_CEFRES-UK” at: clararoyer@cefres.cz. Please send the application form in both PDF and as a Word-document. Applicants are welcome to contact the PIs of the research projects they apply to.

Eligibility Criteria

  • be high-level researchers from abroad, who defended their PhD no more than 10 years prior to the application deadline in a university outside the Czech Republic
  • conducting a research befitting one of the research projects described above
  • good command of English is mandatory

Framework of the Charles University and CEFRES post-doctoral position

As a partner of CEFRES Platform, Charles University recruits two high-quality post-doctoral research fellows from abroad, to become researchers at CEFRES, within the frame of the Charles University’s International Post-Doc Research Fund. The gross monthly salary is 32 000 CZK and a fixed-term contract will be signed between each post-doctoral researcher and CEFRES. UK-CEFRES post-doctoral researchers will be affiliated to both CEFRES and a relevant department of one of the faculties in social sciences and humanities of the Charles University according to their main discipline.
They are expected to:
  • contribute through their own research to the research project they apply to
  • take part in the scientific life of CEFRES
  • submit a yearly report on their research to the director of CEFRES
  • come to live in Prague from 1 January 2018.

Calls for applications will be published on Charles University’s website on 1 July 2017. CEFRES will be amongst the hosting institutions of the University Post-Doc Research Fund.

 

Other Activities

2017 WINNERS OF CEFRES PLATFORM AWARD and DERRIDA AWARD

We are happy to announce the names of the winners of the first CEFRES Platform Award for best article in social sciences and humanities in an international peer-reviewed journal (see the cfa here):

  • Slavomíra Ferenčuhová (FSS MUNI Brno – sociology), for her article “Accounts from Behind the Curtains: History and Geography in the Critical Analysis of Urban Theory”, published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2016/40 (1): 113-131
  • Filip Herza (FHS UK Prague – historical anthropology), for his article “Anthropologists And Their Monsters: Ethnicity, Body, And Ab/normality in Early Czech Anthropology”, published in East Central Europe, Leiden/Brill, 2016/43(1-2): 64-98
  • Tomáš Jirsa (FF UPOL Olomouc – literary theory), for his article “Reading Kafka Visually: Gothic Ornament and the Motion of Writing in Kafka’s Der Proceß”, published in Central Europe, 2015/13(1-2): 36-50.

The first Derrida Social and Human Sciences Prizes rewarded the PhD research on cities of:

  1. Jana Kočková (FSS MUNI Brno – sociology): The transformation of the post-socialist large housing estate: comparative study
  2. Václav Walach (FSS MUNI Brno – political science): The Meaning of Security in a Socially Excluded Locality 

The award ceremony took place on 16 June 2017 at the French Embassy in Prague in the presence of H. E. Roland Galharague and Nobel Prize Jean-Marie Lehn. The prizes were supported by Mgr. Karel Janeček, PhD., MBA.

Research

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

Research in this area aims at further developing understandings of displacements that impact people, knowledge and practices by exploring the ways they are transformed as they pass through space and time. The term ‘displacement’ covers the whole scope of mobilities, flows and circulations related to people, material and cultural goods and ideas. Displacement entails renegotiating and reshaping the content it affects. Indeed, it involves crossing borders, whether symbolic or concrete, where interactions, exchanges, contacts and frictions can occur. Continue reading Research Area 1 – Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices →

Research

Research area 2 – Norms & Transgressions

Contemporary discourses on freedom of expression, multiculturality, emigration or sexuality persistently toy with the notion of transgression. Transgression can be viewed as a strategy adopted by various actors–religious, cultural, social–to claim and legitimate such norms they deem alternative to the established hierarchies, conventions, traditions, canons and laws. As a discourse, transgression contests the absolute authority of the existing norms, and questions their performative power with its own. As a practice though, it leans on a repertoire of actions (violence, humour, silence, and so forth), which do not necessarily imply any assertion nor self-awareness, for social practices of transgression cannot be reduced to their moral comment. Continue reading Research area 2 – Norms & Transgressions →

Research

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

This research focus is based on both an empirical and a symbolic definition of space (social, geographical, historiographical), considered as a construction prompted by practices and experiences.

Experiencing space is framed by the layout imposed by objects– architectural, instrumental, or common–as demonstrated by current research on the social life of objects, which grasps them in their interactions with individuals and groups. Such an everyday experience of objects is intertwined with a range of symbolical structures: mental mapping, through which space is both surveyed and imagined; traces of a presence/absence, which are open to the archaeology of events both gone and surviving; palimpsests, with their time layers; and boundaries, both concrete and symbolical, through which space is defined, classified, organized and made one’s own. Continue reading Research Area 3 – Objects, Traces, Mapping: Everyday Experience of Spaces →

Calls for Papers, workshops

CfP: (Trans)missions: Monasteries as Sites of Cultural Transfers

An International Workshop proposed by the Center for Ibero-American Studies of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University (SIAS FF UK), the French Institute for Research in Social Sciences (CEFRES) and the Institute of Art History of Czech Academy of Sciences (ÚDU AV ČR). The collaboration is realized within the Research project “Cataloging and study of the translations of Spanish and Ibero-American Dominicans”.

Deadline for proposals (250 words): 26 June 2017
Notification due: 31 July 2017
Time & Venue: 25(-26) September 2017, Prague
Scientific organizers: Monika Brenišínová (SIAS FF UK), Katalin Pataki (CEU/CEFRES) and Lenka Panušková (ÚDU AV ČR)

The aim of the workshop is to set into focus the monastic space as a multifaceted research theme from a global and interdisciplinary perspective. We invite papers that address the questions how monastic institutions contributed to the flow and exchanges of cultural practices and how their role as cultural mediators shaped their material culture and spatial politics. The scope of the workshop has no timely, geographical or confessional limitations as it intends to generate dialogue between researchers from various disciplinary backgrounds.

For centuries, monasteries served as centers of education and culture. Literary works, sermons, translations and artefacts were created among their walls that never served merely as an impenetrable isolation from the outer world, but rather represented a conscious politics of structuring both the physical and the mental space. They kept contact not only with their closer environment, but also formed part of greater intellectual, spiritual and economic networks and interacted with different stakeholders of worldly power. They could serve as strongholds of cultural and religious missions that penetrated into new territories, triggered intercultural and interconfessional interactions and facilitated knowledge transfers, while their long-lasting presence in a territory could also ensure continuity and enables the investigation of long durée changes, reforms and renewals. Their evolvements and transformations unavoidably shaped both their inner spaces (including material culture and architecture), and the landscape around them and thus, they also contributed to the formation of such notions as identity, borders and migration.

Against this background, we invite papers on the following thematic fields:

  • religious orders as stakeholders of social disciplining; confessionalization; colonization; cultural, religious and political missions; ecclesiastical and social reforms; etc.
  • monasteries as mediators in the flow of ideas; material goods (artefacts, relics, precious materials, medicinal drugs, etc.); devotional, educational, healing practices
  • spatial agenda of monastic institutions that shapes its closer environment materially (e.g. agricultural practices, setting up of parishes, chapels, shrines, etc.) and the perception the landscape in which they operate.

The workshop is designed primarily for young researchers— especially Ph.D. and postdoctoral students—aiming to explore the future perspectives of the aforementioned themes in an innovative way and to lay down the foundations of further cooperation beyond disciplinary and national boundaries. Simultaneously, it also aims to create a forum that features well-known scholars among its speakers and disseminates information about ongoing research projects, academic working groups and relevant publications. The Journal Ibero-Americana Pragensia also offers the opportunity to publish the presented papers. The language of the workshop is English, but abstracts submitted in other languages (German, Spanish, French) can be also accepted.

If you are interested in participating, please send your name, academic affiliation and an abstract of 250 words by 26 June to the following email address: workshopSIASCEFRES@gmail.com. Applicants will be informed about the selection of their papers by 31 July.