Category Archives: Calls for Papers

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.

Calls for Papers

CFP: Tracing the Legacies of the Roma Genocide: Families as Transmitters of Experience and Memory

First international conference of the Prague
Forum for Romani Histories

When: 20–22 September 2017
Where: Czech Academy of Sciences, Villa Lanna, Prague
Deadline for submission: 31 March 2017

More on the Prague Forum for Romani Histories here

More on the board here

The conference is a joint event bringing together two recent academic initiatives focusing on the research on the history of the Roma and supporting new approaches in the field: the Prague Forum for Romani Histories and the Research network on ‘Legacies of the Roma Genocide in Europe since 1945’, which is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC, United Kingdom). Both initiatives aim at fostering a debate on the history of Roma as part of European history and contemporary European society.

The AHRC-funded Research network on ‘Legacies of the Roma Genocide in Europe since 1945’ is an international group of historians, social scientists, and scholars of language and culture, working with representatives of Romani communities to explore how the genocidal policies pursued in Europe between the mid-1930s and 1945 have shaped the social, political, and cultural history of Roma since 1945. It is led by Celia Donert and Eve Rosenhaft at the University of Liverpool in partnership with the MigRom project at the University of Manchester and the Romani Studies Seminar, Charles University, Prague. The conference is closely linked to its other activities planned for 2017 (workshops for researchers on conceptual approaches and state practices, as well as other events for the general public).

The Prague Forum for Romani Histories is an international academic initiative to promote interdisciplinary, intersectional, and transnational scholarship and dialogue on the study of the Roma as an integral part of European societies and an integral component of the historic research in and of Europe. Supporting methodological approaches that concentrate on processes of social differentiation and acknowledging the problematic role of disciplinary knowledge in reifying unequal power relations, the Forum seeks to contribute to decentring hegemonic national and identity-based narratives in European history. By doing so it seeks to promote reflexive, self-critical work which foregrounds Roma as historical co-actors, without downplaying discrimination and persecution histories. The Forum is institutionally based at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague. The partners in establishing the Forum are CEFRES, Prague, and the Romani Studies Seminar at Charles University, Prague. The planned conference is the inaugural event of the Forum.

The conference will be complemented by a workshop for Ph.D./MA students whose final theses are based on a historically informed approach to the study of the Roma. The workshop will be organized by the Prague Forum for Romani Histories in cooperation with the NAIRS (Network of Academic Institutions on Romani Studies) Summer School and announced in a separate call. For further information, please visit the website of the Prague Forum for Romani Histories and/or NAIRS.

Understanding the genocide of the Roma during World War II seems crucial for understanding the post-war history of Romani families and communities across Europe. At least 130,000 Roma were killed as a direct result of racial policies pursued by the German state, its allies, and other European states between 1933 and 1945. Some activists and scholars claim that as many as half a million Roma were killed. Yet although the mechanisms and scope of the Roma Holocaust are now partly understood, the legacies of mass killing, ghettoization, sterilization, and slave labour for first-, second- and third-generation survivors are still unknown. It appears likely, however, that understanding the trauma of the mid-twentieth-century genocide, as well as its contested recognition by majority societies, is of paramount importance for understanding the persistent discrimination against European Roma today.

The purpose of the conference is accordingly to map current research and guide a developing research agenda, investigating the ways in which past experiences and memories of persecution and violence have influenced family histories, political and social identities, and state-society relations amongst the Roma in different parts of Europe since 1945. Such investigations necessarily have a broad geographical focus, going beyond the more familiar sites of memory like the Auschwitz Gypsy camp to consider topics such as the legacies of the wartime deportation of Romanian Roma to Transnistria. We also welcome critical longer-term approaches to periodization, which might shed light on the specificity (or otherwise) of the events that took place between the mid-1930s and 1945. Our hope is thus to promote much-needed comparative and transnational perspectives on the history of Roma in post-war Europe, and also to connect scholarship in the field of Romani Studies to broader debates about the legacies of genocide in contemporary European history.

We invite papers from scholars in all disciplines, including historians, ethnographers, and cultural studies scholars, and particularly welcome cross-disciplinary, comparative, and transnational approaches. Our aim is not to reify an image of the Roma as homogeneous victims of genocide. Rather, we invite contributions that explore and contest narratives of victimhood, for example, by investigating the various ways in which individuals and families have responded to the experience of discrimination in everyday life, interactions with public authorities, politics, economic activities, or activism.

Papers might explore the following questions:

  • How might we search for the traces of genocide in the subjective and material experiences of Romani families since the end of the Second World War?
  • How can scholars trace and narrate the legacies of the Roma genocide within families of first-, second- and third-generation survivors?
  • To what extent can we compare the memories of persecution amongst Roma in different places, and in different migration contexts and with other population groups?
  •  To what extent have continuities in discriminatory practices within local and national welfare agencies, police, health and education authorities in post-1945 Europe influenced experiences and memories of persecution among Roma communities and families?
  • In the light of an emerging agenda of memorialization among Roma advocacy groups, how can we contribute to contextualizing policies and practices of commemoration and memorialization in different local, national, and transnational sites since 1945?
  • How has the legacy of genocide shaped the political construction of Romani identities, for example, through social activism or political movements?
  • What are the ethical and political dilemmas for historians who seek to explore these histories of trauma and violence?

We expect to be able to pay full travel and accommodation costs.

Abstracts of up to 500 words and a short biography should be emailed to legacies2017@gmail.com by 31 March 2017.

Calls for Papers

CfP: Acts of Justice, Public Events: World War II Criminals on Trial

Deadline for submission of proposals: 30 March 2017
Notification due: 1 June 2017
When and Where: 12-14 Octobre 2017, CEFRES, Prague
Language: English

This conference originates from the encounter of three projects: a Russian-French project on trials in the USSR (FMSH/RGNF), the micro-project of the Labex Création, Arts, Patrimoines ‘Images de la justice”, and the WW2CRIMESONTRIAL1943-1991 project supported by the French National Research Agency, whose first step it is.

Partners : CEFRES, March Bloch Center, CERCEC, CEFR, GDR “CEM” and CERHEC
Scientific Committee: D. Astashkin, A. Blum, A. Kichelewski, S. Lindeperg, F. Mayer, G. Mouralis, M. Steinle, I. Tcherneva

Please send by the 30 of March 2017 a 300 word proposal in English including a title, along with a selective bibliography and a short resume to: https://ww2justice.sciencesconf.org/submission/submit

Contacts:
Audrey Kichelewski : kichelewski@unistra.fr
Irina Tcherneva: irina.tcherneva@ehess.fr

Travel and accommodation costs will be covered by the organizers in priority for researchers without tenure.

Outline

The social history of trials of war crimes and of crimes against humanity,[1] which took place in the aftermath of WWII and its following decades, opens up two new investigation fields. First, taking into account the legal, political and social dimensions of these trials calls forth the inclusion of the various actors who co-produced the legal action. Recent historiography has indeed started to investigate the practices and discourses of the professionals working in the justice system, as well as of the political authorities and of the witnesses who somehow shaped the trials. Second, the diversity of the media mobilized to cover the trials, along with the diversity and temporalities of their hybrid usages, are still a brand new field of exploration. Therefore, the studies focusing on the platforms disseminating the information about these trials cast a new light on the frictions between the ‘legal dramaturgy’ and those provided by journalistic, literary, and visual narratives.

The aim of this conference is to join these two fields of investigation focusing on the trials which were designed as public events. By including the many professional and social actors who got involved and shaped such public, or publicized, trials, we endeavour to question the notion of publicization. The political and institutional choices not to have closed hearings had an impact on the ways such trials were made public. A specific policy accompanied the distribution of the information in order to channel their perception by the population as well as the interactions . On an epistemological level, putting at a distance the notions of communication and mediatization allows for a reappraisal of these actors, who were more than those implementing political decisions. It also enables to consider the press, written or filmed, the radio and the theatre, not only as sheer channels of political information through other media. Analysing the forms of involvement of these various actors (magistrates and police force, whistle-blowers, witnesses, defendants…) should therefore be crossed with a study of the part played by the media supports in the organization, the development and the reception of the trials. The conference will thus highlight the specificity of these publicized trials within the procedures conducted against criminals against humanity.

The tensions between the legal and historical nature of such trials shall not only be studied through the intents and practices of the political and legal authorities, but also through the part played by the other co-makers of the event. Special emphasis will be put for instance on the search for perpetrators by former victims who called on investigative bodies to bring them to justice, on the involvement of commemorative associations in organizing the trials, on the reactions of the public, on the media coverage of the trials. the readers of the newspapers which published such promotional materials, demanded heavier sentences and a large coverage of the prosecutions of war criminals. Was such public participation only organized from the top? Moreover, legal and media actors, witnesses and memory communities took part in the shaping of WWII narratives promoted in the public space in part by legal action.

If we consider these trials as social facts, another challenge must be met that concerns more specifically the trials taking place in the East of Europe, in the states undergoing Soviet satellization. An analytical method seeks to understand how public space was thought up in socialist regimes. Benefiting from the outcomes of the research led on the forms of autonomy of social actors under socialism, we strive to intertwine this perspective with a comparative approach as we investigate the trials taking place in Eastern and Western Europe. Such approach will enable to deal both with the political dimension of public trials and with the forms of mobilization of professional and social actors in the context of the Cold War.

The political time frame pertaining to each country will be taken into consideration. For instance, the legacy of the Soviet trials of the 1930s shall not be overlooked, although the transformations introduced in the after-war should not be underestimated. How were such trials of crimes against humanity employed in order to consolidate the internal legitimacy of the various regimes, to unfold political pedagogy and stir popular participation within the societal project aimed at? Did individual requests or popular unrest influence the choice to make these trials public or not? The proposed method should enable to position them in connection with the national narratives on WWII cast after the war and to give a sense of the responses according to the various types of political regimes.

[1]  The generic term ‘war crimes’ was commonly used in the texts and proceedings of this period referring to acts and violations of the rights and customs of war (definition of “war crimes” in the August Statute of the International Military Tribunal, 1945), and to ‘crimes against humanity’ (ibidem).

[2] Interrogation which continues the analyses on Western media transforming the information on such trials. A. Pinchevski & T. Liebes 2010, M. Steinle 2004, J. Maeck & M. Steinle 2016.

Topics

The conference will be built around three research topics. Which professional, institutional and individual actors got involved as these trials unfolded within the different historical and national contexts, and what was the extent of their autonomy? To what political and social aims did the publicization practices of these trials answer to? How did the arts and the press media shape the reception of these trials?

The first research topic of this conference shall be devoted to identifying of the involved actors, and to understanding the forms and extent of their involvement, and the mutual interactions of such actors with uneven political and symbolic assets. It shall follow the steps of the publicization of the trials: the mobilization of actors (broadly speaking, e.g. including close and distant audiences of the trials); the making of media (films, photography exhibitions, etc.); the reception.
Papers dealing with the following topics will be especially welcome: what relationships did political makers engage with the population? What could prompt new actors (institutional, associative…) to get involved as the trials were set up? What interactions can be observed during the reception of these trials? In socialist regimes, could the political pedagogy conducted by political authorities during the trials stir social initiatives? According to which criteria, the degrees of the autonomy of the bottom up legal elaboration can be determined for different national contexts?

The second research topic shall investigate the aims granted by the State to such public trials and their political consequences. The reinterpretation of WWII during the trials stands out within the range of legitimacy strategies followed by the State. Was the public nature of these trials connected with commemorative endeavours, even with small-scaled investigations? More broadly, how were such decisions to make these trials public received? In this wake, what practices were unfolded by legal and professional actors or by witnesses? What spaces of autonomy were at stake as knowledge and expertises met? What pedagogy of power can be disclosed as the work of the legal system received such emphasis?

Special focus shall be put in a third topic area on the communication tools used to cover the trials and on their content. Connecting studies on cinema, the written press, the radio, leaflets, and the arts, can help understanding the specificity and temporality of the usages of each medium.
Media professionals, who put into words and images the portraits of the victims, the perpetrators and the witnesses, shall be put under scrutiny, along with the processes they resorted to. How did they interact with the know-how and the documentation that were provided by other professional actors implied in setting up the legal procedures? In which social, political and professional contexts did the visual and textual representations get shaped? How did the media impact the trial dramaturgy, the attorneys, judges, defendants and witnesses?[2] What portraits of the public did they sketch? Observing the possible correlations, or even confrontations, between the ‘legal dramaturgy’ elaborated by legal actors and the police, on the one hand, by the media on the other, shall be at the core of this topic.

Papers can consist in case studies of trials or approach transversal dynamics can focus on types of involved actors, forms of public engagement and of mediatization of the trials. The analysis of international dimensions of such trials is particularly welcome, both in terms of aims sought by a large-scale media coverage and in terms of international exchange of information, legal know-how, witnesses, exhibits.

Selective Bibliography

  • Astaškin, Dmitrij. 2014. ‘Otkrytyj sudebnyj process nad nacistskimi voennymi prestupnikami v Novgorode (1947 god)’, in: Janin, V. (Ed.), Novgorodskij Istoričeskij Sbornik. Sbornik Naučnyh Trudov. Velikij Novgorod, Institut istorii RAN / Novg. gos. universitet, Velikij Novgorod: 352-375.
  • Astaškin, Dmitrij. 2015. Sovetskij Njurnberg. Processy nad nacistskimi prestupnikami na territorii SSSR v 1943-1949 gg.. Rossijskoe istoričeskoe obščestvo / Gosudarstvennyj central’nyj Muzej sovremennoj istorii, Moskva.
  • Bankier, David & Michman, Dan (Eds.), 2010. Holocaust and justice: representation and historiography of the Holocaust in post-war trials. Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.
  • Barbat, Victor. 2017. ‘Une guerre en marge. Le conflit sino-japonais sur les écrans soviétiques, 1938-1941’. Conserveries mémorielles. To be published in 2017.
  • Berkhoff, Karel C. 2009. ‘“Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population”: The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941-45’. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10 (1): 61 ‑ 105.
  • Berkhoff, Karel C. 2012. Motherland in Danger Soviet Propaganda during World War II. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
  • Bosch. William. 1970. Judgement on Nuremberg. American Attitudes toward the Major German War-Crime Trials. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press.
  • Cassiday, Julie A. 2000. The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen. DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press.
  • Cehreli, Ayse Sila. 2014. Les magistrats ouest-allemands font l’histoire: la “Zentrale Stelle” de Ludwigsburg. Paris, France: L’Harmattan.
  • Christian, Michel & Emmanuel Droit. 2005. “Écrire l’histoire du communisme : l’histoire sociale de la RDA et de la Pologne communiste en Allemagne, en Pologne et en France”. Genèses no 61 (4): 118‑33.
  • Delage, Christian. 2006. La vérité par l’image: de Nuremberg au procès Milosevic. Paris: Denoel.
  • Delpla, Isabelle. 2011. Le mal en procès: Eichmann et les théodicées modernes. Paris: Hermann.
  • Douglas, Lawrence. 2001. The Memory of Judgement Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust. New Haven [CT]: Yale University Press. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10217106.
  • Douglas, Lawrence, Martha Merrill Umphrey & Austin Sarat. 2005. Law on the Screen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  • Douglas, Lawrence, 2016. The right wrong man: John Demjanjuk and the last great Nazi war crimes trial. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
  • Dufour, Diane & Christian Delage. 2015. Images of conviction: the construction of visual evidence. Paris: Le Bal : Éditions Xavier Barral.
  • Feferman, Kiril. 2014. ‘Soviet legal procedures against the Nazi criminals and Soviet collaborators as Historical Sources’. Legacy, no 6: 34‑ 43.
  • Feltman. Brian K. 2004. ‘Legimizing Justice: The American Press and the InternationalMilitary Tribunal, 1945–1946’. Historian, 66 (2): 300–319.
  • Fischer, Axel. 2014. ‘Promoting International Criminal Law: The Nuremberg Trial Film Project and US Information Policy after the Second World War’. In Historical Origins of International Criminal Law: Volume 1, Morten Bergsmo, Wui Ling Cheah, et Ping Yi: 623‑53.
  • Friedman, Alexander. 2016. ‘Krankenmorde im Raum Minsk und ihre Aufarbeitung in der Sowjetunion und in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland’ in Alexander Friedman and Rainer Hudemann (eds.): Diskriminiert – vernichtet – vergessen. Behinderte und Kranke in der Sowjetunion, in den besetzten sowjetischen Gebieten und im Ostblock, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag: 395-414.
  • Friedman, Alexander, 2016. “”Objektiv unausweichliche Maßnahmen“. Die Ermordung von Menschen mit körperlichen und geistigen Behinderungen In den besetzten sowjetischen Gebieten: Die Beispiele Šumjači (Gebiet Smolensk) und Makar’evo (Gebiet Leningrad)’ In Alexander Friedman and Rainer Hudemann (eds.): Diskriminiert – vernichtet – vergessen. Behinderte und Kranke in der Sowjetunion, in den besetzten sowjetischen Gebieten und im Ostblock, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 385–393.
  • Hicks, Jeremy. 2012. First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
  • Holmila. Antero. 2011. Reporting on the Holocaust in the British, Swedish and Finnish Press, 1945-50. London. Palgrave Macmillan: 89–106.
  • Smith, Jeremy & Melanie J. Ilic. 2011. Khrushchev in the Kremlin : Policy and Government in the Soviet Union, 1953–1964. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge.
  • Kantorovitch, Nati. 2007. ‘Soviet Reactions to the Eichmann Trial: A Preliminary Investigation 1960–1965’, Yad Vashem Studies, t. 35. 91–122.
  • Koskenniemi, Martti. 2002. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • Koskenniemi, Martti 2002. Between Impunity and Show Trials. Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law 6, 1–35.
  • Kozlovsky-Golan, Yvonne. 2011. “L’image visuelle de la Shoah et les procès de Nuremberg. Le film Les Camps de concentration nazis et son impact”. Les Écrans de la Shoah. La Shoah au regard du cinéma, Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, no 195: 61‑104.
  • Krakovsky, Roman. 2014. Réinventer le monde. Les cadres sociaux d’espace et de temps en Tchécoslovaquie communiste. Paris: Publications Sorbonne.
  • Lindeperg, Sylvie & Annette Wieviorka. 2008. “Les deux scènes du procès Eichmann”. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63 (6): 1249‑74.
  • Lindeperg, Sylvie & Annette Wievorka, éd. 2016. Le Moment Eichmann. Bibliothèque histoire. Paris: Albin Michel.
  • Maeck, Julie, et Matthias Steinle. 2016. L’image d’archives : Une image en devenir. PU Rennes.
  • Marrus. M. R.. 2000. “L’histoire de l’Holocauste dans le prétoire”. In Bayard. Florent, (dir.), Le génocide des Juifs entre procès et histoire. 1943-2000. Bruxelles. Complexe: 26–56.
  • Michalczyk, John J. 2014. Filming the End of the Holocaust: Allied Documentaries, Nuremberg and the Liberation of the Concentration Camps.
  • Moine, Nathalie. 2011. ‘Defining “war Crimes against Humanity” in the Soviet Union Nazi Arson of Soviet Villages and the Soviet Narrative on Jewish and Non-Jewish Soviet War Victims, 1941–1947’. Cahiers Du Monde Russe 52 (2-3): 441‑73.
  • Moine, Nathalie. 2013. ‘‘Fascists Have Destroyed the Fruit of My Honest Work”. The Great Patriotic War, International Law and the Property of Soviet Citizens’. Jahrbücher Für Geschichte Osteuropas 61 (2): 172‑95.
  • Mouralis, Guillaume. 2008. Une épuration allemande: la RDA en procès, 1949-2004. Paris: Fayard.
  • Mouralis, Guillaume. 2015. “Outsiders du droit international. Trajectoires professionnelles et innovation juridique à Londres, Washington et Nuremberg, 1943-1945”. Monde(s) 1: 113-34.
  • Mouralis, Guillaume. 2012. ‘Lawyers versus Jurisconsults: Sociography of the Main Nuremberg Trial’, In: X., D.K.M., Leuwers, H. Luyten, D. et Rousseaux, (Ed.), Justice in Wartime and Revolutions: Europe, 1795–1950 : Europe, 1795–1950, Justice and Society. Archives générales du Royaume, Bruxelles: 325–36.
  • Pendas, David O. 2006. The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, 1963-65: genocide, history and the limits of the law. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York.
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  • Schulberg. Sandra. 2012. ‘Filmmakers for the Prosecution. The Making of Nuremberg: Its lessons for Today’. American Bar Association. Chicago. http://www.americanbar.org
  • Shneer, David. 2011. Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust, Rutgers U.P.
  • Shneer, David. 2015. ‘Is Seeing Believing ?: Photographs, Eyewitness Testimony, and Evidence of the Holocaust’, In East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 45, no. 1.
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Calls for Papers, workshops

CfP: The Emergence of the Business School in Europe: Social, Economic, and Scientific Contexts (1818-1939)

CEFRES Platform Workshop for Young Scholars

Deadline for submission: February 28, 2017
Decision notification due: March 15, 2017
Submission of papers: May 15, 2017
Date & Place: CEFRES, Prague, June 6, 2017
Language of the workshop: English

Organizer: Mátyás Erdélyi (CEFRES & CEU)
Partners: CEFRES and Department of Historical Sociology of the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University

Confirmed discussants: Marianne Blanchard (University of Toulouse, ESPE Midi-Pyrénées /CERTOP); Marcela Efmertová (ČVUT) ; Jiří Hnilica (Charles University, Faculty of Pedagogy); Victor Karady (Central European University, Department of History)

Please send a paper title, a 400 word-long abstract, and a short academic CV to: matyas.erdelyi@cefres.cz. A limited number of accommodation grants are available.

Call for papers

The emergence of business or trade education makes an essential, although seldom recognized, part of the overall modernization of European societies in the nineteenth century. The significant growth of business schools in the middle of the nineteenth century can be directly connected to the second phase of industrialization and, consequently, to the growing needs of a professionally trained workforce in industry and trade. The present workshop is interested in the history of all types of business education – schools teaching uniquely business courses and other vocational-technical schools offering business courses (e.g. the Technische Hochschulen). It thus seeks to provide a comparative overview of the emergence of business education in its historical context focusing on the following problem areas: the business school in the educational field, its economic context, its social environment, and its scientific pretensions in the Europe between 1818 and 1938.

The workshop will bring together junior researchers (PhD candidates and early career researchers) engaged in the field of the history of science, social history, economic history, the history of ideas, or sociology.

A) The Institutionalization and Systematization of Business Education

In the educational context, the emergence of business education can be studied in relation to the general systematization of secondary and higher education, as part of the social transformation of the educational system in the nineteenth century, and as one of the main forms of institutional diversification. We are interested in case studies of institutions and national systems of business education that reflect upon the historical development and the functioning of business schools, the legislative, economic, cultural environment of their foundation, the origins of the curriculum, the transfer and influence of institutional patterns in the European context, the conflict between state and private institutions, the professionalization of business education (professional associations, teacher training colleges, professional journals, publication of textbooks), and the scope of the business schools and their positioning in relation to other forms of education.

B) The Business School in the Economic Context

This problem area seeks contributions that address the following general questions: what is the contribution of business education to economic transformation, industrialization, and the rise of capitalism? How business methods influence the cognitive content of vocational education; how the connections between the business school and the world of business could be comprehended (direct involvement of businessmen in the management of schools, recruitment patterns in business favoring or not favoring certain qualifications, professors co-employed in schools and business enterprises)? What are the career patterns of business school graduates and how to analyze the connection between the emergence of the large enterprise, the separation of ownership management, and the rise of vocational education?

C) The Business School in Society

The main concept here is the social transformation of secondary and higher education, which refers to the social functions the educational system performed in the frame of larger social change (mobility, social legitimation, etcetera). The aura of secondary and higher education could enhance the social recognition of certain professions (most importantly trade); and most business schools became an important avenue of social mobility as it granted access to secondary education and provided bourgeois social prerogatives to its graduates. We invite contributions dealing with recruitment patterns of business schools (social and denominational) in relation to other educational institutions, the social representation and prestige of the school, the business school as an avenue of mobility, its function in the shift from an emphasis on hereditary rights to meritocracy, the evaluation of the gender proportions in business schools.

D) The Business School and Science

This section of the workshop concentrates on the status and production of knowledge transmitted in business schools. Their emergence is intertwined with a claim over the scientificity of the ‘sciences of trade’ (sciences commerciales, Handelswissenschaften, obchodní nauka, kereskedelmi tudományok). However, there is an increasing gap between the theory and practice of business in the educational setting. It is not by chance that contemporaries vehemently discussed whether the instruction of business and trade should be comprehended as a Bildung or as a vocational training. Contributions may address the following problem areas: how the scientificity of business management is enhanced through the educational system and vice versa; how to conceptualize the contention between theoretical knowledge and practical skills in the field of business education; how the interaction of scientists and business reshape scientific epistemologies, methods, and tools; who the agents are and where the knowledge production of business management takes place.

Calls for Papers

CFP: French pragmatism and the renewal of contemporary sociology

Deadline for abstracts: 15 November 2016
Date & Place: 15&16 December 2016
Language: English
Organizers: Paul Blokker (FSV UK) and Nicolas Maslowski (CCFEF of Warsaw University)

French pragmatic sociology will be the main theme in the workshop on “French pragmatism and the renewal of contemporary sociology”, held on 15 and 16 December, and organized by the Institute of Sociological Studies (Faculty of Social Sciences), the Department of Historical Sociology (Faculty of Humanities), Charles University, the French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences (CEFRES) and the CCFEF UW—Center for French Civilization and Francophone Studies of Warsaw University.

Pragmatic sociology – as a distinct, new type of French social science – probably became most well-known in the global academic community because of the publication in English of the landmark publication by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification. Economies of Worth, in 2006 (original: 1991, Editions Gallimard).  On Justification is, however, probably best understood as a ‘travail d’étape’ , an intermediate stage in a much larger and highly original social-theoretical enterprise, to which evermore scholars in a variety of disciplines contribute (e.g. historians, anthropologists, economists) in a range of research endeavours. The workshop will explore the fundamentals of this approach and the insights it has brought, and still brings, to contemporary sociological and interdisciplinary research. The upshot is to explore the rich potentialities of pragmatic sociology and to discuss its relevance and usage in Czech sociology.

Prof. Laurent Thévenot will open the workshop with a lecture on the recent and current further developments in his work. Much of prof. Thévenot’s work since On Justification draws on earlier insights while developing an innovative and rich perspective on the analysis of social life. Prof. Thévenot explores the dimensions of social life ‘under the public’ as a condition to enlarge the scope of public critique to oppressions, and to understand the required transformations and obstacles to their exposition in common, to the discord of the political community.

Please send your proposition (150-200 words) to the organizers before November 15th.

A workshop organized by:
Institute of Sociological Studies (Faculty of Social Sciences)
Department of Historical Sociology (Faculty of Humanities), Charles University
French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences (CEFRES)
Center for French Civilization and Francophone Studies of Warsaw University

Calls for Papers, International Conference, Other Activities

CFP: New Approaches to the History of the Jews under Communism

European Association of Jewish Studies Conference, Prague

Deadline for abstracts: End of October 2016
Decision notification due: End of November 2016
Date & Place: Villa Lanna, Prague, from 23 to 25 May 2017
Language: English
Organizers: Kateřina Čapková (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences), Kamil Kijek (Department of Jewish Studies, University of Wrocław), Stephan Stach (Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences)

The experience of the Jews under the Communist régimes of east-central and eastern Europe has been a hotly debated topic of historiography since the 1950s. Until the 1980s, Cold War propaganda exerted a powerful influence on most interpretations presented in articles and books published on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Moreover, most works focused both on the relationship between the régime and the Jews living under it and on the role of the Jews in the Communist/Socialist movements and the political events connected with the rise of antisemitism and emigration.

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