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Anger in Belarus, Cross Perspectives on an Unexpected Unrest

International Seminar/Webinar

Venue: CEFRES (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1) 
Date: September 16th 2020, 5-7pm
Organizer: CEFRES
Language: English

The seminar will take place simultaneously in person and online. Due to sanitary constraints, it is necessary to register to participate in person at the following address: cefres@cefres.cz

It is also possible to participate online at the following address: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85162249844

The seminar will also be broadcast live on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/cefres

Argumentary

Since June 2020, Belarus has been experiencing a series of popular mobilizations that threaten the authoritarian regime of Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994. This largely unexpected event raises important questions that will be examined during this seminar: on the genesis of this unprecedented unrest and the factors that made it possible; on the characteristics, modalities and significations of the mobilizations; on their ability to enlist or not enlist the majority of the Belarusian population, on the already perceptible effects of the protest on the relations between Belarus and Russia and on the possible role to be played by the European Union, etc. The seminar will bring together researchers and experts from different countries in order to compare their analyses and different possible scenarii.

Moderation : 

Jérôme Heurtaux, Director of CEFRES, author of Pologne 1989. Comment le communisme s’est effondré, Codex, 2019.

Speakers:

Ronan Hervouet, Associate Professor at Bordeaux University, author of A Taste for Oppression. A Political Ethnography of Everyday Life in Belarus, Berghahn Books, to be published in 2021.

Anaïs Marin, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Belarus, Researcher at the Warsaw University (Centre de Civilisation Française et d’Études Francophones CCFEF), and Associate Fellow at the Chattam House Russia and Eurasia Program.

Alena Marková, Assistant Professor at the department of historical sociology of the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University (Prague) and Researcher on national processes in Central and Eastern Europe. Her PhD thesis focused on Belarus : ’The Belarusization Episode’ in the Process of Formation of the Belarusian Nation”.

Daniela Kolenovská, Head of the Department of Russian and East European Studies, Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. She specialises in modern Russian history and foreign policy. In this context, she also deals with the anti-Soviet alternative of Belarusian national development in exile since 1917.

Detailed presentation of the speakers

Ronan Hervouet is Associate Professor at Bordeaux University and Researcher at the Centre Émile Durkheim. He previously taught economics and social sciences at the European Humanities University in Minsk from 1999 to 2001 and was the French director of the Franco-Belarusian Center of political Sciences and European Studies in Minsk from 2009 to 2012. He has previously published a book on Belarus, entitled Datcha blues. Existences ordinaires et dictature en Biélorussie (Belin, 2009). His second book on Belarus has just been published in French (Le goût des tyrans. Une ethnographie politique du quotidien en Biélorussie, Le Bord de l’eau, 2020) and will be published in English in March 2021 (A Taste for Oppression. A Political Ethnography of Everyday Life in Belarus, Berghahn Books, 2021).

Alena Marková is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Historical Sciences of the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University (Czech Republic). Her main research interests cover contemporary history of Eastern Europe, nationalism, nation-building, national identity, and post-socialist transformation. Dr Marková is a main grantee and a project coordinator of many Czech and international academic projects (4EU+ European Universities Alliance, GAČR, SVV CU, and others). She is an Associate Editor of The Journal of Belarusian Studies (Brill). Alena Marková’s latest book “The Road Toward Soviet Nation. Nationality Policy of Belarussization, 1924-1929” (“Šliach da savieckaj nacyji. Palityka bielarusizacyji, 1924-1929”, Minsk 2016) received the best historical monograph of the year 2016 award in Belarusian studies by the expert council of the International Congress of Belarusian Studies (Warsaw).

Markets (Re-)observed – ONLINE

Eleventh session of IMS / CEFRES epistemological seminar of this semester led by:

Felipe K. Fernandes (EHESS / CEFRES)
Topic: Markets (Re-)observed

Where: The session will be conducted over a videoconferencing platform. Registration: adela.landova@cefres.cz
When: Wednesday 13 May 2020, from 4:30 pm to 6 pm
Language: English

Text to be read:

  • Clifford Geertz: “Suq: The bazaar economy in Sefrou” in: (C. Geertz, H. Geertz, L. Rosen, Eds) Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society, Cambridge [et al.], Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 123-175

Coffee Seminar with French Historian Claire Zalc

Informal meeting with Claire Zalc about her research

Open to public.

Discussants: Pavel Baloun (FHS UK/CEFRES), Florence Vychytil-Baudoux (EHESS/CEFRES), Francesca Rolandi (Masaryk Institute of the CAS)
Moderated by Jérôme Heurtaux (CEFRES)

Venue: CEFRES Library (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1)
Date: 18 November 2019, 2-4 pm
Organizer: CEFRES
Language: English

Claire Zalc (CNRS) is a prolific and innovative french historian specializing in immigration issues, Jewish studies and economic history. She has published several books, some of which have been translated into English, such as Microhistories of the Holocaust (dir., with Bruttmann), New York, Berghahn Books, 2016 and Quantitative Methods in the Humanities. An Introduction (with Claire Lemercier), Virginia Press, 2019. She is also Principal Investigator de l’ERC Consolidator LUBARTWORLD « Migration and Holocaust : Transnational Trajectories of Lubartow Jews Across the World (1920s-1950s) ».

State, Kinship, Care: Towards a relational Approach

Gellner Seminar

Tatjana Thelen (Professor in the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna) will give a lecture within the Gellner seminar organized by the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA– Česká Asociace pro Sociální Antropologii), the Czech Society of Sociology, in cooperation with the Department of General Anthropology (FHS UK) and CEFRES.

When: 14 November 2019, 5:30 pm
Where: CEFRES Library (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1)
Language: English

Abstract

State, Kinship, Care: Towards a relational Approach

In October of this year (2019), the first two so-called ISIS-children arrived in Austria. Their mother was separated from her children, had disappeared during the war. Nothing is known about the father. Lacking birth certificates, citizenship was granted based on a DNA-test that established the kinship with their Austrian mother. The Kurdish self-government then gave them over to the Austrian state representatives at the Syrian border. Meanwhile, custody has been transferred to their maternal grandmother. This is only one recent example of the deep entanglement between kinship, state and care. Despite and constant co-production, kinship and state are still often dealt with conceptually separately, or even contrasting domains, which creates unhelpful blind spots. In my talk I will propose a relational approach that uses care as an entry road into ethnographically researching their intricate relationship. The aim is to show how kinship is not only influenced by the state but also shapes political structures. Ultimately, I argue that overcoming the stereotypical divide and myth of the “modern” family as functionless in politics, can be an important contribution of anthropology in public debates.

Tatjana Thelen is Professor in the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. She has carried out fieldwork in Hungary, Romania, Serbia, and eastern Germany on questions of property reform, care, kinship and the state. The epistemic foundations and significance of boundary work between kinship and state formations increasingly form the focus of her research. This was at the heart of the interdisciplinary research group on Kinship and Politics, which she co-led at the Center for Interdisciplinary research in Bielefeld (ZIF). Recently, she co-edited Reconnecting State and Kinship (University of Pennsylvania Press 2018) and Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State (Berghahn 2017).

Complete Civil Disobedience. On Gandhi’s Critique of the State

A lecture by Eraldo Souza Dos Santos (PhD candidate at Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, associated at CEFRES) as part of the Franco-Czech historical seminar organized by Institute for Czech History of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University (FFUK), in collaboration with CEFRES.

Venue: Faculty of Arts of Charles University, nám. J. Palacha 2, Prague 1, room 201
Time: 14 November 2019, 9:10-12:10
Language: French

Continue reading Complete Civil Disobedience. On Gandhi’s Critique of the State →

Velvet Revolution and Intellectual Dissidence: Charter 77 and Jan Hus Association

A lecture by Thomas C. Mercier (post-doc. CEFRES / Charles University) in the frame of the Franco-czech historical seminar organized by Institute for Czech History of the Faculty of arts, Charles University (FFUK), in collaboration with CEFRES.

Venue: Faculty of Arts of Charles University, nám. J. Palacha 2, Prague 1, room 201
Time: 9:10-10:30
Language: French

Continue reading Velvet Revolution and Intellectual Dissidence: Charter 77 and Jan Hus Association →