Roundtable

When : 20 November 2018, from 10 am to 12 pm
Where : CEFRES Library
Organizers : IMS FSV UK, CEFRES and Prague Civil Society Centre
Language : English

Speakers

• Jérôme Heurtaux (Director of CEFRES)
• Igor Blaževič (Programme Director of the Prague Civil Society Centre)
• Valeria Korablyova (Senior Fellow at the Department of Russian and East-European Studies at IMS FSV, political scientist, regional specialization – Ukraine)
• Jiří Kocián (Researcher at the Department of Russia and East European Studies, regional specialization – Romania)

Moderated by Kateřina Králová  (Head of Department of Russia and East European Studies)

Recent mass protests in Armenia, which ousted the long-standing head of the country, were dubbed a “Velvet Revolution”. Did the moniker refer to the Central European events 30 years back? And, if so, what is their legacy in the 21st century? Is “power of the powerless” still a viable recipe for social and political transformations? Another crucial question here is whether non-violent protests are capable to deliver their agenda in a longrun, or is it just a momentum followed with “business as usual”? And, finally, what are convergences and divergences between popular movements across space and time?

The roundtable discussion brings together the cases of mass protests in Poland, Ukraine, and Romania to expose their peculiarity but also to compare them with the recent wave of protests in Germany, the U.S., and elsewhere. The main question it aims to tackle is the prospects of political transformations based on “the power of the powerless”, as well as broader reverberations of local mass protests in the globalized world.

See the official poster of the event here

Venue: Maison de l’Europe, Jungmannova 24, 110 00 Prague 1
Time: 5-8:30 PM
Organizers: CEFRES and IFP
Partners: Centre Marc Bloch, Institut français de Berlin et Université Paris Nanterre, avec le soutien de l’Institut français de Paris
Language: Czech and French (with simultaneous interpretation)

This discussion on the memory of 1968 on the basis of the 2018 commemorations in Berlin, Prague and Nanterre (Paris) will benefit from the testimonies and discussions with film director Olga Sommerová and writer and journalist Eda  Kriseová. Continue reading Assessing 1968: Intertwining Experiences from Paris, Prague and Berlin →

Round table

Venue and time: French Institute in Berlin, Boris Vian room (Kurfürstendamm 211, Berlin), at 7 pm
Partners: Marc Bloch Center (CMB), French Institute in Berlin (IFB), CEFRES and Nanterre University, with the support of the French Institute in Paris
Organizers: Catherine Gousseff (CMB), Sylvie Robic (Nanterre), Clara Royer (CEFRES), Dominique Treilhou (IFB)
Languages: French, German (with simultaneous translation)

This round table is part of the Cycle Mai 68, a cycle with screenings, debates, workshops and exhibitions around the 50th anniversary of the events of 1968.

With the participation of witnesses of the European events of 1968 :

• Libuše Černá (Czech Republic)
• Jan Gross (Poland)
• Jean-Yves Potel (France)
• Peter Schneider (Germany)

Moderator: Thomas Wieder (Le Monde)

For more information on Cycle Mai 68, see here

See the other events of Cycle Mai 68: the international conference West Winds, East Winds and a concluding conference in June in Prague.

See the whole program of May 68 Cycle here

As the exhibition Notre France. La poésie française dans les traductions et les illustrations tchèques du XX^e siècle, organized by the Museum of Czech Literature  is about to open on 11th of May in Hvězda Summer Palace in Prague, CEFRES organizes a roundtable around the translation of poetry. The exhibition, open until the 31rd of October, 2018, is organized in the frame of the « 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage » program and of the project “Un Siècle commun” [A Shared Century].

Venue: French Institute in Prague, 5th floor (Štěpánská 35, Prague 1 110 00)
Time: 6-8 pm
Language: French

Speakers:

• Robert Kolár (ÚČL AV ČR)
• Guillaume Métayer (CELLF-CNRS)
• Jiří Pelán (FF UK)
• Jovanka Šotolová (FF UK)

Chairs: Antoine Marès (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) and Clara Royer (CEFRES)

Illustration: Linocuts by Josef Čapek for Pásmo (Zone), 1919, by G. Apollinaire, translated into Czech by Karel Čapek

A session of the École normale supérieure European seminar Critical News (see below), in partnership with CEFRES and Charles University, with the support of Paris French Institute.

Venue: French Institute of Prague, 5th floor
Time: 5:30-7:30 PM
Organizers: Clara Royer, Ondřej Švec (FF UK) and Frédéric Worms (ENS Ulm)
Language: English
Open to public—in duplex with ENS Ulm

A debate on humanities in the post-fact era

In duplex with the ENS seminar: the presentations will be followed by debates between Paris and Prague 

Speakers

• Jakub Jirsa, current director of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of FF UK, and a specialist in political philosophy, the editor of the collective volume Idea university (Prague, 2015). See the thesis of his contribution.
• Václav Štětka, sociologist from FSV UK and Loughborough University, director of the research group on political communication (PolCoRe), and the author of “The Rise of Oligarchs as Media Owners”, in Media and Politics in New Democracies. Europe in a Comparative Perspective (Oxford 2015); “The Powers That Tweet: Social Media as News Sources in the Czech Republic” (with R. Hladík, Journalism Studies, 2015). See the thesis of his contribution.
• Ondřej Švec, philosopher from FF UK, author of the research project on Rationality and Argumentation Practices in Public Space and the editor, with J. Čapek, of the monography Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology (Routledge, 2017). See the thesis of his contribution.
• Frédéric Worms, philosopher from École Normale Supérieure (Paris) where he acts as vice-director, the current director of the International Study Center of Contemporary Philosophy, is among many other books the author of 100 mots de la République (“The Republic in 100 Words”, PUF, 2017) See here the thesis of his contribution.

Argument

At a time when a large part of the population has replaced traditional media such as TV, radio and newspapers with internet forums and social networks as their first channel of information, public debates are increasingly plagued with conflicting exchanges, all the more as many political representatives now use immoderate and “excluding” speeches which do not aim at consensus but at humiliating so-called adversaries or foes. Increasing verbal and physical violences, abstention and citizens’ widespread suspicion toward political representation bear witness to the subsequent deterioration of public debates.

Such trend poses a significant challenge to the academic world as it reflects upon both new discursive analytical tools and new forms of intervention within the public space to tackle information falsehoods. The debate will focus as much on the available means to better scrutinize and understand the specific dangers of the so-called alternative truth and of simplistic arguments as on the responsibility weighing on researchers in social and human sciences as they are confronted to the dissemination of such nexus of fake news. What is the part sociologists, political scientists, historians and philosophers should play in the so-called post-fact era?

To launch the discussion, see on this topic:

• V. Štětka, Between Instrumentalization and Para-Journalism. “Frontiers of Democracy” Working Papers, 2016.
  
• Marci Shore, A pre-history of post-truth, East and West, Eurozine, 1 Sept. 2017.
• Jean-Claude Monod, Between post-truth and epistemocracy: Positioning a democratic politics, Eurozine, 27 Sept. 2017 (orig. in French Esprit 10/2017)
• Markéta Krejčí, State of the Czech desinformation community in 2017, European Value, 12.10.2017
• Roger Brubaker, Forget Fake News. Social media makes Democracy Less Democratic, Zócalo, 29 Nov. 2017.

What’s the Critical News Seminar?

Who can deny that news have become critical and should be criticized? However, critical news  raise dangerous, if not lethal issues: crisis manipulation, perverted criticism, permanent state of emergency, constant suspicion, concurrent enforcement of “breaking news” and “fake news”. This is why we need to defend a new Critique and adress the fact of critical news today:

• A critique that distinguishes what is critical, and what is not;
• A critique that articulates facts to their interpretation by appealing to historical, interdisciplinary and/or transnational points of view.

Critique can suffer from a national bias, but no issue can ever be analyzed as an universal, abstract situation. This is why it is not only possible, but necessary to promote an European and interdisciplinary approach to critical news.
The European Critical News Project (Actualité critique européenne) originates from the seminar “Actualité critique” seminar of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris: it gathers students and researchers and focuses on various critical topics, from politics to science to economy, society and art. The European project aims this seminar to an European level, with a special emphasis on European issues.

The European Critical News Project is supported by the Institut Francais network. It will be launched in 2018 and will be hosted in Prague, Warsaw and Rome successively, in duplex with the ENS seminar in Paris. During this first semester the “University” will not only provide a critical frame, but also act as a critical question, in more than one way: academic freedom, academic fees, student status in Europe, European university…

The Ecole normale supérieure and the Institut Francais welcome European Universities to join this network and address together, and today, the vital challenge of critical news.

Illustration: