As a comparative social historian, most of my work focuses on the history of interwar capitalism in Eastern Europe and Latin America. My current research looks at the contentious debates regarding the restructuring of Romanian credit relations after the Great Depression, with a special emphasis on the private debt of rural communities and the state’s sovereign debt. It shows how, following one of the most dramatic debt crises of the 20th century, the social conflicts surrounding debt and credit became one of main arenas for articulating contending views of market relations and the capitalist economy. Continue reading Mihai-Dan Cîrjan: Research & CV→
My research project deals with the presence and values granted to bodies in East-Central European cinema during the Communist era (1968-1989). At the crossroad between aesthetics and anthropology, it aims at showing how the images related to affective, family and sexual relationships became a space where modalities of “resistance” pertaining to civil society could develop. Continue reading Mathieu Lericq: Research & CV→
My Ph. D. project explores the intellectual, theological, and discursive methods and arguments used to encourage and legitimize religious violence, as well as their historical variability and radicalization. My research is focused on the context of late-medieval Bohemia, particularly on a heterodox sect therein (the “Hussites”), and traces the employment of both traditional and innovative discourses on violence to construct a universalistic theory of violent, apocalyptic revolution. Particularly central here were both orthodox and heterodox Biblical hermeneutical methods, and especially hermeneutics of apocalyptic narratives and agents. Continue reading Martin Pjecha: Research & CV→
Between Citizenship, Ethnicity and the Politics of Exile: The Logics of Polonia‘s Political Integration. France, the United States and Canada, 1945-1980
Research Area 1 – Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices
My research explores the strategies of political inclusion designed and implemented by Polish communities (Polonia) in the United States, Canada and France after World War II. More precisely saying, this project investigates the renewal of collective political imagination and action in the wake of WW2 and during the Cold War and questions the shifting perceptions, conceptualizations and operationalizations of host country citizenship by Polish communities abroad at that time. Continue reading Florence Vychytil-Baudoux: Research & CV→
Past two decades had brought series of changes to the Czech economy with important implications for the labour market. One of its effects, which did not so far attract much attention, is rising levels of precarious forms of employment, in-work poverty and structural, long-term unemployment, which is often spatially concentrated and unequally impacting different groups of the population. In my PhD project, I focus on the relationship between these labour market changes and the construction of systems of social protection for low-income households in the Czech Republic. This scheme has low public legitimacy and overall trends in its construction follow increasingly punitive and controlling, workfarist logic and seem to disregard every day realities of social assistance recipients.
In my dissertation, I focus on the conflicting imaginaries which are produced by critical actors and institutions in the civic polity. Those conflicting imaginaries are represented by the squatters, who occupy a decaying building in Prague, on the one side, and state institution (the owner), on the other. Both conflicting sides have their own representation of how the way society should look like and what the role of a citizen should be. Continue reading Yuliya Moskvina: Research & CV→
French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences – Prague
As a comparative social historian, most of my work focuses on the history of interwar capitalism in Eastern Europe and Latin America. My current research looks at the contentious debates regarding the restructuring of Romanian credit relations after the Great Depression, with a special emphasis on the private debt of rural communities and the state’s sovereign debt. It shows how, following one of the most dramatic debt crises of the 20th century, the social conflicts surrounding debt and credit became one of main arenas for articulating contending views of market relations and the capitalist economy.
