Paramilitary Organizations in Central-Eastern Europe

Research Area 2: Norms & Transgressions

Main focus of my dissertation is on understanding motivations and decision-making of members of non-state paramilitary organizations (group of civilians organized in a military fashion) in selected countries of central and eastern Europe. I map their mental world and value-trees, areas of domicile and activities. At the same time I pay attention to the reactions of society, media and state, which vary tremendously across different countries, from mostly enthusiastic acceptance in Poland to basically indiscriminative suspicion in Slovakia.

The overarching method of the whole thesis is the grounded theory, which in opposition to dominant deductive approach that focuses on forming a hypothesis works with induction. In practice it means construction of hypotheses and general theory based on continuous analysis of data during the whole research work, not defining hypotheses before any raw data was available and analysed.

Interdisciplinarity is core to the whole work, combining standardized typologies of political science, worldview analysis coming from religion studies, polling methods from mathematical statistics, geoinformatic data visualisation analytical tools, anthropological fieldwork, frameworks and experiments from evolutionary and moral psychology, theories and questionnaires of cognitive sciences and body/neuro imagining techniques of neurosciences.

CV

Education

2012 – 2013 : MSt Religion Studies (Islam), University of Oxford, Great Britain
Focus on Islam, secondary focus on secularization/de-secularization and atheism

2007 – 2012 : BA + MA Comparative Religion Studies, Comenius University, Slovakia
Focus on Christianity and Islam, Comparative Religious Law, Sociology/Anthropology

2010 – 2012 : Collegium of Anton Neuwirth, PG Diploma equivalent, Slovakia
European Intellectual History, Political Philosophy and Jurisprudence, Just War Theory

Selected Work and Research Experience

• I assist as an ad hoc advisor to the Department of Religion Studies (DRS) at Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand. The university is building a new study programme combining religion studies and neurosciences. I am also helping founding a new cognitive studies laboratory for DRS, in partnership with HUME labs at Masaryk University and COBE Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark.
• I serve as field coordinator for humanitarian projects of St. Elizabeth University of Health Care and Social Work and Caritas Slovakia in Iraqi Kurdistan working with Yazidi organization Shingala Azad and Kurdish governmental Department for Women.
• I am being trained as a court authorized specialist in the areas of religious extremism.

Selected publications

• Kosnac. P., Jihadi Marketing: Reasons for success of Islamic state propaganda and recruiting, in: Hubina, M., Religion and Advertising, Mahidol University, Bangkok, scheduled – winter 2019.
• Kosnac, P., Combat charities, or when humanitarians go to war: Influence of non-state actors on local order of partially governed spaces, Brookings Institution, Washington D.C., 2017.
• Cusack, C., Kosnac, P., (eds.), Fiction, Invention and Hyper-reality: From popular culture to religion, Routledge, London and New York, 2017.
• Kosnac. P., Pop-culture Based Religions: Future of New Religious Movements?, in: Gallagher, E.(ed.), Visioning New and Minority Religions: Projecting the Future, Routledge, London and New York, 2017.

Lecturing (2019 / 2020)

• Unintentional and natural threats
• Security aspects of New Religiosity
• Concepts and methods of academic research

Selected Grants and Awards

• BEA Institute Scholarship, Kosovo Program, 2014
• British Sociological Association´s Peter B. Clarke Memorial Prize 2013
• AMBergh KEFOUND Essay Competition 2013
• Slovak Society for Study of Religion´s Prize of Ján Komorovský 2012
• The Nobel Peace Prize 2012 (member of the awarded organization)

Languages

Slovak (native), Czech (fluent), English (fluent), Russian (active), Portugal (passive), French (passive), Ukrainian (passive), Arabic and Kurmanji Kurdish (phonetic, beginner)

Civil Disobedience: A Conceptual History

Research Area 2: Norms & Transgressions

Contact: eraldo.santos(@)cefres.cz

Over the last half-century, civil disobedience has become a key political concept in the United States. The meaning of the phrase, however, has been contested on more than one occasion—from discussions on the radicalism of Occupy Wall Street’s political aims to controversy over the legitimacy of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing and recent debates about the use of the concept by far-right movements. 

My current research project seeks to contribute to such debates by offering the first conceptual history of civil disobedience. By drawing on both published materials and archival sources from Asia, Europe, and the Americas, I analyze the historical development of the phrase from its use in abolitionist circles in the mid-nineteenth century to its circulation in the British Empire and its eventual appropriation by activists, lawyers, and scholars in the 1960s and 1970s. 

My Ph.D. project is the first step toward this broader aim of writing a global intellectual history of civil disobedience. In my dissertation, I reconstruct the historical process by which civil disobedience became a key political concept in the American public debate (1866–1971).

CV

Education

2015– : Ph.D. in Philosophy, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Advisor: Jean-François Kervegan

2013–2015: M.A. in Philosophy (French and German Philosophies in the European Context, ERASMUS Mundus – EuroPhilosophie), Charles University, Bergische Universität Wuppertal and Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn

2009–2013: B.A. in Philosophy, University of São Paulo

Publications

• “Variationen über das bilderlose Wesen der Musik: Bilderverbot als Motiv der Musikphilosophie Theodor W. Adornos.” In “Der Schein des Lichts, der ins Gefängnis selber fällt”. Religion, Metaphysik, Kritische Theorie (Ansgar Martins, Grazyna Jurewicz, Dirk Braunstein, eds.). Berlin: Neofelis, 2018.

The Image of Cultural Decline in the Anticolonial Francophone Sub-Saharan Novel: The processes of subjectivation, objectivation, reification and identity emptiness

Research Area 2: Norms and transgressions

Contact: vojtech.sarse@cefres.cz (from September, 1st)

The novels written in the French language by Sub-Saharan authors and published in the 1950s unconditionally by French publishers is a literature of paradoxes. It is considered to have been an instrument of anti-colonial revolution and the expression of a renaissance of African culture (systematically repressed during the colonial era). But at the same time these novels describe the degradation of African identity, the cultural alienation of main characters and delineate the unbalanced relations between colonizer and colonized, criticizing in this way the intention and the determination of colonizer to devastate the individual existences of colonized nations.

For my Ph.D. thesis I have chosen ten novels (written between 1953 and 1960). The protagonist, the young African man, is pushed by the given circumstances (life in a French colony, an imposed French educational system, assimilation, etc.) at the crossroads of two cultures: an inferior Sub-Saharan culture and a superior French culture. Either they themselves criticise the colonial system by means of their revolt, for example, or they are influenced by European manners, thus refusing African roots.

My work is based on fiction (I am not working on the given sociological or psychological standards); the main characters are fictional. But at the same time the novels are very clearly rooted in historical, political and cultural facts connected to the real world – that is to say, to the contexts of the authors (it is clear where the fictional story is taking place and in which period, the landmarks usually being easily decipherable). As it is undeniable that the African nations went through the process of assimilation, the story of the chosen novels is focused on identity research and a lack of cultural points of reference. For this reason, I will in my work describe a new term which we have invented to thematize such interior uprooting: identity emptiness. This state of mind and of consciousness is provoked by the artificial need to be a part of the dominant culture (imposed by the French colonizer).

CV

Education

2015–: PhD, Department of Romance literature, Faculty of Arts Charles University (Prague)

2013–2015: Masters, French Philology, Faculty of Arts Charles University (Prague)

2010 – 2013: BA, French Philology, Faculty of Arts Charles University (Prague)

Selected Publications and Conference Papers

• Čtyři africké romány jako exkurz do antikoloniálních frankofonních literatur. Cizí jazyky, 2017, 60 (5), 38-45. ISSN 1210-0811.
• La (dis)simulation des langues d’origine africane. In: ČERNÍKOVÁ, Veronika. Echo des etudes romanes. České Budějovice: Ústav romanistiky, 2017, s. 315-324. ISBN 0-000-00000-0. ISSN 1801-0865.
• La manifestation (non)collective des sentiments dans l’Afrique romanesque. Acta Universitatis Carolinae. Philologica, 2018, 6 (3), 205-215. ISSN 0567-8269.
• Hledání subsaharských identit v románové tvorbě. Antologie subsaharského frankofonního románu. Filozofická Fakulta, Univerzita Karlova. ediční řada Varia, 2018, 221 s. ISBN 978-80-7308-892-7.
• Rozpravy o identitách ve frankofonním prostoru subsaharské Afriky. Soubor rozhovorů a esejů. Filozofická Fakulta, Univerzita Karlova. ediční řada Varia, 2018, 129 s. ISBN 978-80-7308-894-1.

Research Grants

• 10/2016–12/2018: Charles University Grant Agency, No. 579916: “The analytic research of selected African francophone novels, focused on the question of identity – from the origin (1935) up to the present day”

Work Experience

• 01/10/2018 –: Charles University, Department of Foreign Languages (teacher)
• 01/10/2015 –: Charles University, Department of Romance studies (Teacher – Lecturer)
• 01/03/2015–31/12/2018: Charles University, Research Office (officer)

Civic Integration of Immigrants in Europe: the Case of Austria and Czechia

Research Area 1 & 2: Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepencies: People, Knowledge and Practices & Norms and Transgressions

Contact: anna.simbartlova@cefres.cz (from September 1, 2019)

My PhD research deals with a phenomenon of new immigrant integration policies, that have been implemented across Europe since the turn of the century. Countries that traditionally used different approaches to immigrant integration in the past, such as France, the Netherlands or Germany, started to introduce language and civic courses or tests, often put as an obligation to immigrants to obtain a certain type of stay permit in the host country. As follows from the scholar debate of the past twenty years, these new integration policies are referred to as civic integration.

This PhD research aims to contribute to the civic integration debate with new knowledge from the region of Central Europe which is omitted in the academic debate on immigrant integration. On the example of Austria and Czechia, the research intends to point out the dissemination of civic integration policies eastward and to evaluate the development of civic integration use and its form in the selected countries. Most importantly, the research aims at studying the question of civic integration in regards to the net of actors who put these integration policies into practice. While working with the multi-level governance theory, the outcomes of this project shall contribute to the debate of questioning a national vs. local turn in integration policies as a consequence of civic integration introduction.

CV

Education

2016- : International Area Studies (PhD Programme), Department of European Studies, Charles University

2013-2016: West-European Studies (MA Programme), Department of European Studies, Charles University

2009-2013: International Area Studies (BA Programme), Institute of International Studies, Charles University

Research

• 2016- : Civic Integration of Immigrants in Europe: the Case of Austria and Czechia (PhD dissertation, GAUK project 2019-2020)
• 2018-2020: Increasing Personal Representation of the Czech Republic in International Organizations (TAČR research 2018-2020)
• 2016: Civic Integration of Immigrants in France in 2002-2012 (Master Thesis)
• 2013: Alliance Française and Institut Français: Cooperation or Competition? The Case of the Czech Republic (Bachelor Thesis)

Publication

• Simbartlová Anna, „Civic Integration Policies in Central Europe: The Case of the Czech Republic”, Der Donauraum, forthcoming (2019).

Academic Experience

• 2019- : Associated PhD Fellow at CEFRES 2019/2020 (CEFRES, Prague)
• 2019- : Associated Researcher of the Institute of International Relations (IRR, Prague)
• 2018-2019: Europaeum PhD Scholar
• 2017-2018: Bachelor Seminar Migration and Integration of Immigrants in Western Europe (FSV UK)
• 2017: The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (PhD Internship)
• 2014-2017: European Parliament Simulation SPECQUE
• 2014-2016: Václav Havel Europaeum MA Scholar
• 2015: Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris (Václav Havel Europaeum Study Exchange)
• 2011-2012: Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Aix-en-Provence (Erasmus Study Exchange)
• 2006-2008: Invisible Victims of Communism (Research Team Member)

Conferences, Workshops, Summer Schools

• 2018-2019: Europaeum PhD Scholars Modules (Oxford, Brussels, Geneva, Leiden, Barcelona, Berlin, Prague)
• 2018: Young Scholars Forum Conference (Institut für den Donauraum und Mitteleuropa, Vienna)
  • Author‘s contribution: Civic Integration of Immigrants in Central Europe. The Case of the Czech Republic
• 2018: IOM Summer School (International Organization for Migration, Prague)
• 2018: Europaeum Graduate Workshop (University of Oxford, Oxford)
• 2014: Europe Work Workshop (University of Cologne, Berlin, Brussels)
• 2014: Europaeum Graduate Workshop (University of Oxford, Oxford)

African American Poets Abroad: Black and Red Allegiances in Early Cold War Czechoslovakia

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

Contact: frantiska.zezulakova.schormova@cefres.cz (from September 1, 2019)

I just finished a PhD program at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University in Prague with a dissertation called “African American Poets Abroad: Black and Red Allegiances in Early Cold War Czechoslovakia.” I am now working on turning it into a book with the preliminary title Prague, Red and Black: Early Cold War Journeys, Networks, and Poems.

After being a PhD Fellow in 2019/2020, I am pleased to be able to stay in the CEFRES team as an Associated Fellow. In the future, I look forward to my stay at Northumbria University in Newcastle (Anglo-Czech Fund), FU Berlin (John F. Kennedy Library Research Grant), and, most recently, at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Jan Patočka Fellowship).

CV

Education

2016–2020 :PhD studies, English and American Literature, Faculty of Arts, Charles University Prague. Dissertation title: African American Poets Abroad: Black and Red Allegiances in Early Cold War Czechoslovakia.
Supervisor: Justin Quinn
Date of Defense: December 18, 2020
Opponents: prof. Penny Von Eschen, Stephen Delbos, PhD

2014-2016: Master’s Degree in Anglophone Literatures and cultures, Faculty of Arts, Charles University Prague. MA thesis title: Us and Them: Presenting America 1948-1956

2010-2014: BA program English and American Studies and German for International Communication

Professional Awards and Fellowships

• 2017-2018: Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University
• Fellow, Fulbright-Masaryk Scholarship
• 05/2017: Oxford University, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities Research stay and participation in Race and Resistance workshop, EUROPANEUM Scholarship
• 2016: Mathesius Award for the MA thesis, Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Charles University Prague
• 2016: Free University Berlin, John F. Kennedy Institute of North American Studies Catholic Academic Exchange Service (KAAD) Scholarship, research stay

Grants

2017-2019 : Things in Poems – Poems of Things
Researcher, supported through Charles University grant (GAUK). Main outcome: international conference in January 2019

Journal articles

2021 – “Stalinův černý apoštol: Paul Robeson v Praze,” [Stalin’s Black Apostle: Paul Robeson in Prague], Soudobé dějiny  (accepted for publication, spring 2021)

Chapters in collective monographs

2020 – “Hlasy z Harlemu: Transkontinentální solidarita v poezii Noémie de Sousy” [Voices from Harlem: Transcontinental Solidarity in Noémia de Sousa’s Poetry], Zamyšlení nad africkými identitami zobrazenými v básnickém prostoru [Reconsidering African Identities in Poetry], Praha: FF UK, 2020.

2018 – “Pravidla hry: Zábranovy poznámky k detektivní próze” [Rules of the Game: Zábrana’s Translations of Detective Fiction] Jan Zábrana, Básník, překladatel, čtenář [Jan Zábrana: Poet, Translator, Reader], Praha: Karolinum, 2018

Selected academic reviews

2020 – “Kánon a já”[The Canon and I], Svět literatury 62, p. 183–187. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/123014

2019 – Half-Buried Books: Forgotten Anti-Imperialism of Popular Front Modernism”Historical Materialism, electronic version http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/book-review/half-buried-books-forgotten-anti-imperialism-popular-front-modernism

2018 – “Forget English! Orientalism and World Literature” Twentieth Century Literature 64 (2): p. 259–264. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-6941939

2017 – “Švéda, Josef. Země zaslíbená, země zlořečená: obrazy Ameriky v české literatuře a kultuře (Promised Land, Accursed Land. Images of America in Czech Literature and Culture)” Brno Studies in English, 42 (2): p. 179–184. https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2017-2-10

Conferences

• 09/2019 – Secrets: Biennial Conference & 22^nd International Colloquium of American Studies, Czech and Slovak Association for American Studies & the Department of English and American Studies, Palacky University Olomouc
  “Cold War Secrets and African American Literature: The Story of Abraham Chapman”

• 03/2019 – Bad Romance: The Ethics of Love, Sex, and Desire, Harvard University.
  “Me, Too, but What? Socialist Sex, Translatability, and Milan Kundera

• 01/ 2019 – Things in Poems – Poems of Things, Charles University Prague
  “All those Pretty Things: Women and Their Objects in Anglophone Poetry”
  conference organizer – the conference was supported through a grant from Charles University (GAUK)

• 11/2018 – Cesty translatologie, Charles University Prague “Konceptualizace rasy v českých překladech afroamerické literatury” [Concepts of Race in Czech Translations of African American Literature]

• 10/2018 – New Pathways in American Studies, Masaryk University Brno “Black Bodies White Translations: Cold War Journeys of African American Poets”

• 06/2017 – The Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies Seminar, Aarhus University „Solidarity in Black and Red: Transnational Perspective on the Translation on Anti-colonial Poetry in Cold War Czechoslovakia”

• 12/2015 – Prva Stran, International Student Conference in Comparative Literature, University of Ljubljana “‘The Other America’: Constructing American Literature 1948- 1956“

• 11/2015 – Jan Zábrana: básník, překladatel, čtenář, Charles University Prague “Pravidla hry: Zábranovy překlady detektivní prózy” [Rules of the Game: Zábrana’s Translations of Detective Fiction]

Academic Seminars

10/2019–02/2020 : Charles University Prague, Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures: “Reading African American Literature Now (and from Europe)” Course Design; Lecturer

 

Multiple Bodies in the Context of Vaccination as a Medical Practice

Research Area 2: Norms & Transgressions

Contact: tereza.sedlackova@cefres.cz

The research focuses on understanding the nature and character of vaccination as a medical practice and controversies associated with it. Firstly, it asks How is vaccination done in medical practices?. The project focuses on mandatory vaccination of children in the Czech Republic and, by conducting ethnography, it aims to examine practices, activities and negotiations connected with vaccination in paediatricians’ clinics. Secondly, the research is concerned with bodies in the context of vaccination. It studies practices that enact (un-)vaccinated bodies, various conceptualisations of (un-)vaccinated bodies and their consequences for social debates related to the vaccination.

CV

Education

2018 – : Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Sociology
PhD thesis: Multiple Bodies in the Context of Vaccination as a medical practice

2016–2018: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Sociology
Specialization: Social Anthropology and Qualitative Research Master thesis: Lived Epilepsy: Management of Disease and Embodied Knowledge

2012–2017 Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Media studies
Bachelor thesis: I eat, therefore I am: the construction of foodie bloggers identity

2012–2016 Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Sociology and Social Anthropology
Bachelor thesis: Workcamp Liminality, or There and Back Again (and the extraordinary experiences that happen between)

Working Experience

• 2019-2020: Teaching Assistant, leading seminars – Introduction to Social Anthropology, Thinking sociologically – an introduction
  Charles University in Prague
• 2018-2019: Teaching – Seminar in Anthropology II
  Charles University in Prague
• 2017–2019: Research assistant
  Civic Engagement and the Politics of Health Care
  Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Social Science
• 2017-2019: Teaching Assistant
  Leading seminars – History of Sociology
  Charles University in Prague
• 2017-2018: Public Space Research in Humpolec Town
• 2016–2018: Moral Economies of Contemporary Monasteries in the Czech Republic and in Austria, member of international research team under guidance of Barbora Spalová, Ph.D. and Isabele Jonveux, Ph.D.

Conference Papers

• 2019 SEDLÁČKOVÁ, T. “Body, memory and vaccination in different political regimes”. Accepted for The 2nd International Workshop in Medical Anthropology. Jerusalem.
• 2019 SEDLÁČKOVÁ, T. “Objectified subjectivity: Multiple modes of knowledge production among epileptic patients”. Social Sciences & Health Innovations: Multiplicities. Tomsk.
• 2018 NUMERATO, D., HONOVÁ P. A., SEDLÁČKOVÁ T. “Politicisation, de-politicisation and re-politicisation of health care”. Midterm Conference ESA RN 32. Prague.
• 2018 SEDLÁČKOVÁ, T. “To vax, or not to vax, is that even the question?” Workshop Re-politicising Public Health. King’s College London.
• 2018 SEDLÁČKOVÁ, T., SPALOVÁ, B. “Reinvention of monastic life in the Czech Republic: The agency of material archives of monastic buildings” Biennial Conference of European Association of Social Anthropologists. Stockholm.
• 2018 SEDLÁČKOVÁ, T., SPALOVÁ, et al. ”Moral Economy of Monasteries in the Czech Republic; in the Process of Separating the State and the Church” Annual Conference of Biograf Journal. Mochov.

Publications

• Sedláčková, Tereza, and Barbora Spalová. 2019. “The Lived Spirituality Of Czech Monasteries Through Architectural Materiality”. In A Visual Approach To The Study Of Religious Orders: Zooming In On Monasteries, Marcin Jewdokimow and Thomas Quartier, 121-147. New York, NY: Routledge.
• In press: Sedláčková, Tereza. Becoming authentic: Sartrian sadomasochism of fieldwork. Biograf.
• Under review: Vochocová L. / Numerato D. / Sedláčková T. 2020. The Other Side of the Pendulum: Pro-vaccine Online Participation and Trench-warfare Dynamics in a Public Health Controversy. Social Science and Medicine.