1st session of CEFRES in-house seminar
Through the presentation of works in progress, CEFRES’s Seminar aims at raising and discussing issues about methods, approaches or concepts, in a multidisciplinary spirit, allowing everyone to confront her or his own perspectives with the research presented. Continue reading The Men and Women of the Polish and Czech Parliamentary Far Right
The fourth session of the seminar “Nature(s) & Norms” (NANO), carried out within the framework of the research program SAMSON (Sciences, Arts, Medicine and Social Norms), developed by Sorbonne University (Paris), the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University (Prague), Warsaw University and CEFRES welcomes two participants: Mathieu Lericq (ESTCA, University of Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis) and Magda Szcześniak (Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw)
Location: Paris, CEFRES Library and online:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86161270934?pwd=UUp6Y1g3V2pkWWp4SVNJWEo3WndOdz09
Meeting ID: 861 6127 0934
Passcode: 695781
Date: Friday, January 27th 2023, 4.30 pm
Language: English
Part 1
“Genealogy of a Taboo: Homosexuality and AIDS within Amateur and Educational Films Produced in Communist Poland”
Mathieu Lericq, ESTCA, University of Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis
Continue reading Body and Sexuality. NaNo Seminar #4
The third session of the seminar “Nature(s) & Norms” (NANO), carried out within the framework of the research program SAMSON (Sciences, Arts, Medicine and Social Norms), developed by Sorbonne University (Paris), the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University (Prague), Warsaw University and CEFRES welcomes two participants: Vojtěch Pojar (CEFRES / CEU) and Alicja Urbanik-Kopeć (IHN PAN)
When: Friday 16. December 2022, 17:00–19:00
Where: CEFRES Library and online
Language: English
Contact: cefres[@]cefres.cz
Part 1
Eugenics in Austria-Hungary: Social Functions and Imperial Circulation of an Ambiguous Body of Knowledge, 1900–1914
The notion of the circulation of knowledge poses new questions to the scholarship on eugenics in the Habsburg Empire. Focusing on imperial networks and the cognitive management of imperial diversity, my presentation will analyze four cases of imperial circulation of eugenic knowledge. It will show that the actors, institutions, and geographies of such circulation varied substantially, depending on the practices out of which the particular type of eugenic knowledge grew and on the social function it was envisaged to serve.
Part 2
Eugenics and social health
Alicja Urbanik-Kopeć (IHN PAN)
The role of criminal antropometry and early eugenics movement on the organization of state control of sex workers in the Kingdom of Poland, 1890-1915. In my presentation, I will show the influence of criminal anthropology on the organization of state run Medical Police Committees, set up by the Russian state officials to find, track, control nad. punish real and assumed sex workers in the cities.The official reasons for the tightening control on the disenfranchised urban population (mostly single, poor women) were care for public health and combating the pandemic of sexually transmitted diseases. However, they were used as a pretext to attempt an administrative control of life, health and reproduction of socially vulnerable women.
More on the whole seminar here.
Image: https://archive.org/details/ldpd_11497246_000/page/n25/mode/2up
The second session of the seminar “Nature(s) & Norms” (NANO), carried out within the framework of the research program SAMSON (Sciences, Arts, Medicine and Social Norms), developed by Sorbonne University (Paris), the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University (Prague), Warsaw University and CEFRES welcomes three participants, Marta Kolářová, Weronika Parfianowicz and Matěj Spurný around a common topic:
Location: CEFRES Library and online
Dates: Friday 25 November 2022, 16:30–18:30
Language: English
Contact: cefres[@]cefres.cz
Moderated by Petr GIBAS, CEFRES-Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Science
Marta KOLÁŘOVÁ, Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Science, Prague
Gender and eco-domesticity: Czech sustainable values, norms and practices in 2010s
The turn to sustainability is related to new norms: changing consumption patterns, decreasing ecological and carbon footprint, and limiting overconsumption. How the sustainable norms relate to gender? This presentation focuses on gendered discourses and practices of Czech „eco-domesticity“ that includes sustainable consumption, green prosumption, and alternative childcare. It shows how the values of sustainability and self-reliance are practiced by women and men in everyday life. The research is based on a qualitative sociological examination using in-depth interviews, participant observation and media analyses.
Weronika PARFIANOWICZ, Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw
“To develop a new form of frugality”. Norms of consumption and environmental awareness in socialist Poland
The 70s in socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe were marked, among others, by the development of the consumer goods sector and emerging consumerist culture. It raised various concerns on how to reconcile this new lifestyle, its values and practices with the ideals of socialist humanism. The traditional critique of commodity fetishism was supplemented with another important dimension: the awareness of the environmental costs of the contemporary economic development model. In my presentation, I’ll focus on the works of Polish intellectuals and academics who attempted to address the problem of over-consumption and ecological crisis within the frames of socialist ideology. The discussions that took place among Polish sociologists, historians and natural scientists in the 70s reveal some important questions and theoretical approaches relevant to contemporary ecological and climate crises.
Matěj SPURNÝ, Institute of Economic and Social History, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague
A quiet revolution in a period of timelessness. The transformations of the relation toward the environment in Czechoslovakia 1968–1989
The essential role played by ecologists and ecological criticism in the final phase of delegitimization of communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia, is usually attributed to the degree of devastation of the natural environment resulting from lignite mining and air pollution caused by North Bohemian power plants. My approach is different. I understand the ecological criticism of the second half of the 1980s as the result of a fundamental societal change which occurred paradoxically in the era that Václav Havel once called “timelessness”. Beneath the surface of apparent immobility represented by rigid normalization political culture, a process similar to that taking place in Western Europe or the USA in the late 1960s also occurred in Czechoslovakia. From the point of view of social history, we can describe this process as a crisis of organized modernity (and, according to Ulrich Beck, the transition to reflexive modernity). Instead of focusing on theoretical reflection I’ll try to show the re-evaluation of key paradigms (such as modernization or progress) on the example of changes in the relationship to nature, the cultural landscape, but also to the urban environment, in which accents gradually move from modernization to heritage care. My presentation will be based on the long-term research devoted to the North Bohemian city of Most, but also on other sub-researches devoted to ecological and conservation epistemic communities, or the influence of the media discourse on the transformation of discourses about these key topics of human existence in the world.
More on the whole seminar here.
When: Friday, November 11th, 16:30 a.m.
Where: CEFRES Library, Na Florenci 3, Prague and online (please contact cefres[@]cefres.cz
Language: English
The fourth session of CEFRES seminar will be hosted by two researchers:
Jan Kremer (PhD candidate, Charles University / CEFRES) :
Ludohistorical Representations of Religion and Spirituality: Historical Culture and Digital Remediation
Abstract
The paper analyzes digital medievalism constructed in Kingdom Come: Deliverance (Warhorse 2018). It focuses on ludic mechanics, characters and game lore related to religious elements and tries to contextualize them within both the past and contemporary artifacts of Czech popular history.
Julien Wacquez (post-doctorant, CEFRES) :
Approaching Matters: Socio-Historical Perspectives on What Is to Come
Abstract
It is impossible to know what will happen, to determine what the future will be like. What will the world after the multiple ongoing crises look like, for example? A scientific investigation cannot rigorously account for it, for this future world does not yet exist—so it is not. We can neither experience it, concretely live it, nor observe it, collect data about it. And perhaps that this future world will never happen.
The project Approaching Matters considers this absence of being, this lack of phenomenality and observability, as a driving force for a range of practices specialized in bringing the future into presence. If all our everyday actions tend—consciously or unconsciously—towards a certain future, there are fields of activities that explicitly intend to take charge of the future in the present tense, be they scientific or technologic, administrative or managerial, spiritual or esoteric, artistic or literary. Science Fiction, Futurology, Prediction: all these practices offer us a repertoire of scenarios, speculations, models, simulations and other methods to achieve the impossible task of producing “knowledge” about what cannot be known—the future.
This session will bring together two presentations:
Astrid Greve KRISTENSEN (PhD candidate Sorbonne University – CEFRES)
E(co)schatological Entrypoints: The Abject and the Anthropocene in Bianca Bellová’s novel Jezero [The Lake]
Matylda SZEWCZYK (University of Warsaw)
On Darkness and Light: Images of Nuclear Power and Reproduction
Location: CEFRES Library and online
Dates: Friday 21 October 2022, 16:30–18:30
Language: English
Contact: cefres[@]cefres.cz
Abstracts
The 2016 Czech coming-of-age novel Jezero [The Lake] by Bianca Bellová conjoins the drying up of a life-giving lake with an obscene amount of bodily fluids bursting from its teenage protagonist. Together, this ecocritical subject combined and a rather literal interpretation of the abject, form a basis for my interpretation of this orphan narrative.
The seemingly counterintuitive juxtaposition of nuclear energy images – power plants, atomic tests, nuclear apocalypses – with visions of reproduction (biological fertilization, parenthood, symbolical figures of parents and children) returns in the history of culture with puzzling frequency. It brings along the questions about the social attitude towards technology, science and the fundamental “facts of life” and has already been a subject of academic discussions, from the feminist analysis of Evelyn Fox Keller to historical reconstructions of Spencer R. Weart. The contemporary and historical functioning of these motives in visual culture will create the background for my presentation, concentrating on the images of nuclear apocalypse and parenthood/reproduction in the novels Sakhalin Island by Eduard Verkin (2018) and Brightness by Maja Wolny (2019).
See the complete program of the SAMSON Nature(s) & Norms Seminar
Featured image : P. Christopher Staecker.
