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Revolutions, Political Crises and Regime Changes

2nd session of FSV / CEFRES seminar “Reflecting on Crises” will be hosted by:

Jérôme Heurtaux (CEFRES / Paris-Dauphine University)
Topic: Revolutions, Political Crisis and Regime Changes

Where: online.
To register, please contact the organizers: maria.kokkinou@cefres.cz
When: Wednesday, October 7th, 12:30-1:50pm
Language: French

As part of the seminar: “Enjeux contemporains. Penser les crises” / “Current Issues: Reflecting on Crises” organized by Maria Kokkinou (CEFRES / UK) and Jérôme Heurtaux (CEFRES)

Presentation of the seminar:

The crisis has the wind in its sails: due to the appearance and extensive spread of Covid-19 in 2020, this concept has regained a world-wide attention, last observed during the financial crisis of 2009. Apart from these spectacular moments of global turmoil, we can no longer count the events or phenomena that are described as crises.

A concept inextricably linked to modernity, a “crisis” (pre)occupies our societies in all its dimensions. The polysemic uses of the term and its very topicality prompt us to revisit this concept, its different meanings and uses. This seminar course is devoted to this task. It will involve the intervention of researchers from various disciplines – political sociology, history, art history, anthropology, philosophy, etc.

What realities are qualified as “crises” and in which ways are they critical? What is a crisis and how to explain its emergence? How does a crisis unfold, what are its effects and consequences? Why do crises give rise to conflicts of interpretation over their meaning? Is the notion of crisis a central operator of our modernity and a key to understanding the challenges that contemporary societies face?

 

 

Revisiting “La pensée de midi”. Albert Camus & Mikhail Bakunin

Revisiting “La pensée de midi” – Albert Camus and the Legacy of Mikhail Bakunin

6th 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.

Location: CEFRES Library and online, to get the link, write to cefres[@]cefres.cz
Date: Tuesday, 18th February, 2025 at 4:30 p.m.
Language: English

It wll be hosted by:
Dominik Kulcsár (CEFRES / Institute of Philosophy, Slovak Academy of Sciences)

Chair: Dan SWAIN (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences)

Abstract Continue reading Revisiting “La pensée de midi”. Albert Camus & Mikhail Bakunin →

Revisiting Thing Theory. An Ethnography of Prison Worlds

Lecture by Didier Fassin

Venue: Faculty of Arts of the Charles University, náměstí Jana Palacha, Prague 1, 2nd Floor, Room 200
Date: 31st October, 5 pm
Organizers: Institute of Ethnology (Faculty of Arts, Charles University) and CEFRES
Language: English

Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Director of Studies in Political and Moral Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, is an anthropologist and a sociologist who has conducted fieldwork in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa, and France. Trained as a physician in internal medicine and public health, he dedicated his early research to medical anthropology, focusing on the AIDS epidemic and global health. He later developed the field of critical moral anthropology, which explores the historical, social, and political signification of moral forms involved in everyday judgment and action as well as in the making of national policies and international relations. He recently conducted an ethnography of the state, through a study of urban policing and the prison system. His current work is on the theory of punishment, the politics of life, and the public presence of the social sciences, which he presented for the Tanner Lectures, the Adorno Lectures, and at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, respectively. He regularly contributes to newspapers and magazines. His recent books include Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (2011), Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (2013), At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions (2015), Prison Worlds: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition (2016), The Will to Punish (2018), and Life: A Critical User’s Manual (2018).

The lecture is a part of “Ethnography and Theory” series organized by Institute of Ethnology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University

Revisiting the 1989 event in Central Europe: social margins, writing practices, new archives

International Conference

Venue: Scientific Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences (74, rue Lauriston, Paris), Sorbonne University (17, rue de la Sorbonne, “Salle des actes”, Paris)
Date: 7-8 June 2019.
Organizers: Science Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Paris, Centre of Polish civilisation (Sorbonne University), CEFRES,  Centre of French Civilisation and Francophone Studies in Warsaw
Language: English

This conference is the first in a cycle of conference entitled “1989-2019: Beyond the Anniversary, questionning 1989“, held in Paris, Warsaw and Prague.

You can check the detailed program here.

Argumentary

What is known about 1989, this chain of major events that have shaken up the map of Europe and the world? The collapse of communist regimes has been extensively studied and commented on. The human and social sciences have long focused on the 1989 enigma, which saw the un-anticipated collapse of the European part of the Soviet bloc in just a few months. However, the work on 1989 quickly led to other research agendas, proposing to study the current transformations in Central and Eastern Europe. Because contrary to what the large number of stories about 1989 may suggest, there are few empirical studies on this object and for good reasons. Because of its historical situation as the final moment of the communist period and as the inaugural moment of the “democratic transition”, 1989 was finally little addressed as such and for itself. Retrospective analyses of the reasons for the fall of the communist bloc and prospective studies on the democratization of Eastern European societies quickly marginalized the event as an object of investigation, in favor of more interpretation-oriented writings. More recently, it is more a questioning around the memory controversies on 1989 that has caught the attention of researchers. This conference therefore proposes a return to the event itself. Going back to the field, diving in the past, mobilizing new sources, without of course sacrificing the analysis to pure facts. This is the perspective adopted which consists in questioning the event through its social margins, actors who have until now remained in the shadows (for example workers or women), through writing and cultural practices and by engaging in a debate on the archives of 1989, raising new or too long ignored questions. Several leads seem to be possible:

  • 1989 and social margins : What did 1989 mean for the Eastern European working classes, rural communities, people living in urban areas far from the heart of events, women, young people or the regime’s elites? Crossing the political event and the social worlds offers an original perspective on the dynamics of the collapse and makes it possible to rethink the relationships between the “revolutionary process” and social classes, which are known to be central to Marxist theory.
  • Writing and cultural practices : How was 1989 figured, documented and co-constructed, both during and after, through various writing practices (diaries, actors’ memoirs, underground press, samizdats, correspondence) and artistic genres such as literature, theatre, happening, painting or documentary? What traces does it leave in the visual memory of the event? What exactly is described, from what point of view?
  • New archives : Which archives were constituted on 1989 and on the period preceding the event? Are the archives on 1989 part of the archives of communism? Did 1989 produce its own archivists? Who are they and how can these archives be used? How can we interpret the development of oral history in the East and the multiplication of real “banks of testimonies”, which are emerging as new archives of communism and post-communism?

It is therefore about revisiting 1989 by consciously taking a fragmented look on the series of political events that have transformed Central and Eastern Europe. Hence the use of new and heterodox sources: oral history with ordinary citizens, self-writing, memoirs written by former members of the opposition or communist parties, posters, literary and artistic materials, etc., which have been the subject of so few publications since then.

Scientific direction of the Cycle of conferences
  • Maciej Forycki, Scientific Centre in Paris of the Polish Academy of Science
  • Jérôme Heurtaux, CEFRES–French Research Centre in Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Nicolas Maslowski, Centre for French Studies (CCFEF), University of Warsaw
  • Paweł Rodak, Centre of Polish Civilisation, Sorbonne University

Revision of the Experience of Failure in Growth Societies, and Its Hegelian Basis

Revision of the Experience of Failure in Growth Societies, and Its Hegelian Basis

4th 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.

Location: CEFRES Library
Date: Tuesday, 3rd December, 2024 at 4:30 p.m.
Language: English
Contact / To register: cefres[@]cefres.cz

It wll be hosted by:
Josefína Formanová (Faculty of Arts, Charles University)

Chair: Ivan LANDA (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences)

The following text will accompany our discussion:
Wiliiam DESMOND: “Philosophy and Failure” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1988, New Series, vol. 2. No. 4 (1988)

Abstract:

Continue reading Revision of the Experience of Failure in Growth Societies, and Its Hegelian Basis →

Return Home: Holocaust Survivors Reestablishing Lives in Postwar Vienna 

A lecture by Elizabeth Anthony (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) in the frame of the seminar on Modern Jewish History organized by the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, CEFRES and the Prague Center for Jewish Studies.

Where: CEFRES Library, Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1
When: from 5:30 pm to 7 pm
Language: English

Abstract

Of the pre-Anschluss total of more than 200,000 Austrian Jews – both self-identified and those categorized as such by National Socialist “racial” policy – more than 90 percent lived in Vienna. Some 130,000 managed to escape but the Nazis murdered no less than 65,000, and by 8 May 1945, fewer than 6,000 remained alive in the capital city. Some survivors reemerged from hiding immediately upon the Soviets’ conquest of the city and those who had endured internment in concentration camps joined them there shortly thereafter. The majority of Austrian Jews who survived in exile remained abroad, but a few thousand also returned to reestablish lives in Vienna.

Why lay down roots anew in a homeland from which they had been deported or expelled, and why choose to live among former compatriots who neither expected nor desired their return? What did survivors expect to find in Vienna? What reality did they encounter? And why did they stay? This presentation elucidates the different concepts of familial home, political home, and professional home that inspired a handful of Viennese Jews to go back to their hometown. It analyzes the first opportunities survivors took to exert personal agency for their futures in the immediate postwar period with their emotional, political, and professional reconnection to Viennese society.