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Gender, Political Struggle and Academic Freedom

An International webinar organised by Institut du genre, CEFRES and CEMCA (French Center for Mexican and Center American Studies)

This webinar will focus on the relationship between academia and political struggle, with an emphasis on gender studies and the critical knowledge associated with them. We will first discuss the current terms of the conservative backlash against gender studies, the forms of pressure and censorship against them depending on the powers and political contexts, and the political and economic issues of academic autonomy.

We also aim to re-anchor this reflection into the historicity of the debates that the institutionalization of gender studies has aroused over the past thirty years. In different places, this field has arised in conjunction with democratic-liberal transitions. It also has been accused of depoliticizing feminist studies dissolving them in a scientific “new empire” strongly marked by the intellectual influence of the USA, or by the neoliberal globalization. This field of knowledge supposedly homogeneous in the eyes of its detractors continues to span across various and sometimes divergent approaches. It is on this basis that we will question the current forms of social resistance and the reorganization of this field of study.

Finally, by looking beyond the European perspective, we will consider the role of academic space and gender studies as a base for feminist demands (about gender-based violence in Mexico). And, we will ask how the efforts to constitute or consolidate this field of study are currently being carried out in academic spaces that still unwilling to give them a place in their own right, except under the unique angle of “development” (about gender studies in Cameroon).

This international webinar is organized in partnership with the Institute of Gender in France (IDG), the Center for Mexican and Central American Studies (CEMCA) and the French Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences (CEFRES) in Prague on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the latter.

Date: 15 June 2021, 3–5 pm
Language: English
Place: online on Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81104662184 ID: 811 0466 2184

Program

Welcome and introduction:

Moderation:

Speakers:

  • Andrea Pető, Central European University, Vienne
    Science policy of illiberal polypore state
  • Patrick Awondo, Université de Yaoundé
    What academic freedom does to gender as a subject of research in Cameroon
  • Verónica Rodriguez Cabrera, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco (Mexique)
    Academic freedom and gender studies: the question of violence against women 

 

Featured photograph: Marek Madl, Warsaw, October 2020

From the Berlin Wall to Brexit: Why Politics needs a Free Press

A lecture by Daniel Johnson in partnership with FSV UK (IMS, IPS, IKSŽ) and CEFRES.

Daniel Johnson is a British historian and conservative journalist, co-founder in 2008 and editor of an influential cultural and political monthly Standpoint.

Where: Conference room, Narodni 18 (7th floor), Prague 1
Language: English

More information on the website of Standpoint.

From one justice to another. Narratives of injustice by the executives of the former regime in Tunisia

Jérôme Heurtaux, CEFRES

Will host the 1st session of IMS FSV UK Research Seminar.

From one justice to another. Narratives of injustice by the executives of the former regime in Tunisia

Date: Monday 8 February 2021, 11:00
Place: online
Organizators: Institute of International Relations, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University
Language: anglais

Please report your participation in the seminars and get the link to the seminar :
https://ims.fsv.cuni.cz/en/research/area-studies-research-seminar

From Bohemia to the Adriatic Sea and Back: The Topography of Central-European Patrimony, between Imperial Paradigm and National Contingencies (1900-1940)

Lecture by Daniel Baric

Venue: Institute of Art History (Husova 4, Prague 1)
Date: 22nd May 2019 at 4.30 pm
Organizers: CEFRES, ÚDU AV ČR

Daniel Baric

Daniel Baric studied History and completed German, Slavic and Hungarian studies in Paris, Berlin and Budapest. A former associate professor at the Department of German studies of Tours University, he is currently working at the Department of Slavic studies of Sorbonne University.
His researches focus on cultural transfers and interculturality in Central Europe, especially within the Habsburg Empire.

Abstract

To reflect upon the elaboration of patrimony policies and their endorsement by local actors means necessarily to take into account a wider context. The relationship of central imperial power with its Oriental circumferences is one of its major dimensions even more significant for the Austrian Empire.

There is a double aspect in Daniel Baric’s ongoing researches. They can be especially observed located among its geographical and historical boundaries. On the one hand, we can find a focus point on imperial Viennese institutions as they are considered to be an instrumental in the genesis of modern patrimony policies. On the other hand, there is a specific study revolving around the most peripheral provinces of Austria-Hungarian, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Adriatic coast under Austria-Hungarian administration (1878–1918)

Our considerations will be concerned by the tremendous consequences due to the evanescence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the domains of embellishment policy and cataloging process.

Archeologists had indeed to find new ways of protecting patrimony through the implementation of new museums and university chairs (i.e. Carl Patsch in Sarajevo and then Vienna, Anton Gnirs in Pula and then at Loket). This process had been achieved by overcoming imperial structures that had collapsed in 1918.

Both of them were scholars born in Bohemia and trained in Prague. In accordance with their acknowledged expertise, they were sent to the Slavonic speaking provinces in the South of Austria-Hungary. They also both finished their researches once they went back to Bohemia and Austria.

The mainstream archeological researches were modified due to political changes and their own departure from their first fields of excavation. De facto, studies on romanization and imperial latinity that were so strongly developed in the Austria-Hungarian period were no more dominant. A new interest emerged for all things medieval and national, giving way to a new paradigm in archaeology.

The tight ties between biography and topography shall be addressed, in regard with current researches based on (mainly autobiographical) manuscripts due to be published.

Daniel Baric’s bibliography

Publications
1. Langue allemande, identité croate. Au fondement d’un particularisme culturel, Paris, Armand Colin, 2013. (Croatian translation : Zagreb, Leykam, 2015)

As an editor
2. Identités juives en Europe centrale, des Lumières à l’entre-deux-guerres, with Tristan Coignard and Gaëlle Vassogne, Tours, Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2014.

3. Archéologies méditerranéennes, Revue germanique internationale, 2012.

4. Mémoire et histoire en Europe centrale et orientale, with Jacques Le Rider and Drago Roksandić, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010.

From an anthropological to an ontological pluralism

A lecture by Philippe Descola organized by the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences and CEFRES, in cooperation with the French Institute in Prague.

Where: Conference Room, Jilská 1, Prague 1
Language: English

Abstract

The key concept and methodological tool of Lévi-Straussian structural anthropology is the group of transformation. A structure, understood as a system of contrastive oppositions, only acquires an analytical dynamism thanks to its capacity to organize the transformations between the models of a same group of phenomena. For a structure to be differentiated from a mere system, then, invariant relations must be brought to light between the elements and the relations of different sets so that each of these is connected to another by the means of a transformation. However, there are different ways to conceive a structural transformation in anthropology. The lecture will explore some of them, particularly those used by the lecturer in his book Beyond Nature and Culture (2013), and will build on these results to approach the epistemological consequences of apprehending ontological pluralism as a group of transformation.

Philippe Descola graduated in philosophy from the École normale supérieure of Saint-Cloud and in ethnology from the University Paris X and EPHE. Since 2000, he has been professor at the chair in Anthropology of nature at Collège de France and he supervises the research laboratory on social anthropology (Collège de France, EHESS, CNRS). Renowned for his groundbreaking work on comparative anthropology of the relationships between human and non-human beings, he is the co-author of Nature and Society (Routledge, 1996), with G. Pálsson, and of the Dictionnaire de l’ethnologie et de l’anthropologie (PUF, 1991). He is the author of several major works attempting to transcend the traditional dualism between nature and society such as Beyond Nature and Culture (Par-delà nature et culture, 2005).
Read more on Philippe Descola

Friend, Writer, Zionist: the Quest for Kafka’s Judaism in Hugo Bergman’s Writings

A lecture by Enrico Lucca (Simon Dubnow Institute, Leipzig) in the frame of the seminar on Modern Jewish History of the Institute of Contemporary History (AV ČR) and CEFRES in partnership with the Masaryk Institute (AV ČR).

Where: CEFRES library, Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1
When: from 5 pm to 6:30 pm
Language: English

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Hugo Bergman (1883-1975) have been classmates and very close friends until their first years of university. Yet, Bergman started to write on Kafka only very late in his life, dedicating to him a number of essays–both in Hebrew and in German–scattered in small journals and published in the last years of his life. By analyzing both the story and the vicissitudes of their friendship as well as Bergman’s later insights into Kafka’s work, the talk will try to get a sense of the meaning of Kafka and his figure in Bergman’s intellectual biography.