Archives

Nano #2 | Environmental Consciousness before and after 1989

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.

Nation(s) in the Middle Ages?

2nd session of CEFRES Seminar 2021–2022

Nation(s) in the Middle Ages? Discussing a Controversial Concept through a Sample of the Oldest Czech Historical Sources

Date: Wednesday 13 October 2021 at 4:30 pm
Location: CEFRES Library and online (to register, please write to the address: claire(@)cefres.cz)
Language: English
Hosted by:
Arthur Pérodeau (PhD candidate at EHESS, Paris, and Charles University, Prague, associated at CEFRES)

National Identities in Central Europe in the Light of Changing European Geopolitics 1918–1948

From June the 29th to July the 1st 2015, in the Faculty for Social Sciences at the Masaryk University in Brno.

International conference, organized by the Institute for European Policy Europeum, in collaboration with the CEFRES and the help of the Visegrad fund and the “Europe for citizens Programme” of the European Union.

Objectives of the conference:

The conference aims at conceiving the historical context of the first half of 20th century from the perspective of its influence on current political discourses. National mythologies built on the events of 1918-1948 don’t lose their significance both in the individual Visegrad countries and in the context of the region as a whole. Our attempt to conceive the conference from the perspective of the entire CEE region enables us to focus on selected case studies within broader context.

Questions of national identity and citizenship are key topics for civic education throughout Europe, and the Visegrad region makes no exception. The conference provides a forum for discussion about these topics from an historical perspective. The insights into the historical events of 1918-1948 gained from the conference contributions and reflections of their role in contemporary political discourses are crucial for cultivating public discussion. The outputs of the conference may also be used as materials for civic education with an aim to support the consolidation and strengthening of democracy in the region.

The proposed conference builds on the tradition and results of the conference “My Hero, Your Enemy : Listening to Understand” which took place in Prague in 2011. In a similar way to its predecessor the conference will focus on national histories. Moreover, it will also try to build a bridge and to identify links between historical events and the contemporary identity politics in the Visegrad countries.

Voir le programme.

Nationalism, Religion and Violence

Summer Seminar 

Where & When: Prague, 18-29 June 2018
Organizers: Charles University  and  Aristote University of Thessaloniki
Partners: CEFRES–French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Slavonic and East European Studies (UCL),  University of Birmingham and Humboldt University of Berlin

See the program below

The Summer Seminar on Nationalism, Religion and Violence is ready to launch its sixth year with a special focus on the topics of ethnic and religious diversity, migration and transformation. A key goal of the Summer Seminar is to contribute to the study of violence in a substantial way and to catalyze the growth of the study of violence as a field.

The seminar targets highly motivated students, particularly graduate students, as well as post-docs and professional activists. It is led by international researchers from universities with an excellent reputation, such as the Humboldt University of Berlin, Central European University (Budapest), the University of Birmingham, the University of Manchester, the University of Pennsylvania, Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) and the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. The program involves fieldwork designed in cooperation with research centers and international institutions in Prague and beyond.

For more details please  visit the website of the Nationalism, Religion and Violence Summer Seminar. 

Continue reading Nationalism, Religion and Violence →

Nature Management and Emotional Response. NANO #7

The seventh 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:
Rodolphe GAUDIN (Sorbonne University) and
Małgorzata LITWINOWICZ  (Warsaw University).

Location: Paris, CEFRES Library and online
To receive the link, please contact us at cefres[@]cefres.cz
Date: Friday, May 26th 2023, 4.30 pm
Language: English

Part 1

Parc Management as Political Practice and Metaphor. The Politics of Public Space in Karamzin’s ‘Letters of a Russian Traveler’
Rodolphe BAUDIN (Sorbonne University)

While walking around Paris and Versailles in the spring of 1790, Nikolai Karamzin’s Russian Traveller reflects on garden landscaping, improvements made by monarchs or grandees in public parks and popular reactions to these changes. This talk postulates that Karamzin uses the Traveller’s comments on this topic to reflect on the way authorities use parks and gardens to manage public discontent and the way the population oppositely use is it as a space of social Independence to escape disciplining efforts from the top. As a result, this co-management of nature in public space is used as a metaphor for the social contract and its mismanagement by the authorities as a metaphor for the origins of the ongoing French revolution, an event Karamzin reflects on using a nature-based discourse typical for Conservative thinkers in this time.

Rodolphe BAUDIN is a Professor of Russian literature at Sorbonne university. He works on 18th-century sentimentalist culture and ego documents. His current research interests include Descriptive translation studies, disability studies and eco-criticism.

Part 2

Forest as Performed Myth in Literature of Interwar Poland
Małgorzata LITWINOWICZ (Warsaw University)

In my presentation, I will focus on the phenomenon of mythologizing natural spaces, in particular the primeval forest and swamps. They were loaded with various content and engaged for various purposes in interwar Poland – among others, they were to testify to the eternal and natural character of Polishness. So these spaces (its images, descriptions or knowledge about it) were used in the service of state propaganda. Referring to this context, I would like to present in more detail the writings of Maria Rodziewicz, the most popular Polish writer of the interwar period. Her texts served – yes – the propaganda of Polishness, especially in the eastern borderlands and were nationalistically engaged. They were also – like the author herself – queer texts, emphasizing a relationship between man and nature other than exploitation, questioning the accepted gender roles, proposing a new social order. I would like to focus on these paradoxes and their place in Polish imaginary.

Małgorzata LITWINOWICZ is assistant Professor at Institute of Polish Culture (University of Warsaw, Poland). Primary fields of research include 19th century history of Polish and Lithuanian cultures, problems of modernity and modernization, in particular issues related to media transformations and inventiveness. Her research interests include also traditional stories but above all, telling literature. Currently working on  a project devoted to “domestication” of the Baltic Sea in Polish culture and the middle-war period and cultural history of national parks in Poland in the same period.

See the complete program of the Seminar here.

Neo-Avant-Gardes: Serving or Opposing Historical Narratives?

10th 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, June 10, 2025 at 4:30 pm
Language: English

Speaker: Honorata Sroka (CEFRES / Charles University)
Chair: Hélène Martinelli (CEFRES / École Normale Supérieure de Lyon)

Text to be read: Peter Bürger (1974). Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translation Michael Shaw. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Abstract

The presentation will take the form of very preliminary remarks related to my post-doctoral research, which I have been conducting for 7 months at the French Research Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences. My project develops the same line of research as my doctoral thesis, however, approaches the issue in a broader way. Specifically, using selected examples of neo-avant-gardes in Central and Eastern Europe, I hope to show how and why artists decided to create subversive forms of historiography and what kind of experimental strategies can be found in archives. Employing the methodology so-called “cultural history of the avant-gardes”, I will reflect on vanguard institutions and practices oriented towards a self-historiography. What I dare to claim one can essentially call a discussion on Peter Bürger’s pivotal book Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974). He was the one who argued that the avant-gardes stood against institutions. In contrast to his assumption, my research aims to display how neo-avant-gardes in Central and Eastern Europe developed rather than destroyed art institutions, as well as subversive forms of historiography, and why these two were intertwined.

Please find the complete program of 2024–2025 seminar here.