A “Common Memory” of Yugoslav Wars?

A “Common Memory” of Yugoslav Wars?
The Case of Four Female Writers from the Balkan Diasporas

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.

Location: CEFRES Library
Date: Tuesday, 10th of October
Language: English
Contact / To register: cefres[@]cefres.cz

Discussant: Chiara Mengozzi (Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Associate at CEFRES)

Lola Sinoimeri (CEFRES / Université Paris 8 / Sorbonne University)

Abstract

My thesis explores the links between self-writing and collective experiences – those of war, immigration, diaspora and gender violence. The question of the “common” or the “we” that these literatures bring into existence across borders is therefore central to my research. After drawing up an overview of the different types of “we” experienced and/or reappropriated in post-socialist, post-Yugoslav and migratory contexts, I will show how a “common memory” can be created in the works of immigrant women authors dealing with the wars in Yugoslavia. In particular, I will be exploring the deconstruction of a ‘national memory’ (Assmann 2006), the representation of diasporic communities, the treatment of silences and the links between fictional and documentary writing.

See the complete program of 2023–2024 seminar here.

Academic Work. A Tale of Essential Tension Between Research and Teaching

A lecture by Prof. Pierre-Michel Menger, professor at Collège de France

This lecture is held in the frame of the Historicko-sociologických konfrontací organized by the Department of Historical Sociology of the Faculty of Humanities, UK.

Organizers: HISO FHS & CEFRES
Where: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, building C, 3rd floor, conference room
Language: English

Pierre-Michel Menger (1953) is a French sociologist specialized in the sociology of art and creation. A professor at the prestigious Collège de France (Chaire de Sociologie du Travail Créateur) and at the EHESS, he has recently published The Economics of Creativity. Art and Achievement Under Uncertainty (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014).
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Abstract

During the last fifteen years, European reforms in higher education have introduced differentiation in the fabric of academia, and triggered transformations in academic careers even if the various scientific disciplines and generations of academic researchers have been unequally exposed to the main impact of these reforms, that of a pervasive growth of individual and institutional competition on a national and international scale. Competition alters the architecture of organizations, the principles underpinning the evaluation of academic work and workers, the coupling of teaching and research, the incentive tools for scientific production, and the correlation between working conditions and salary levels.

How is the functional link between teaching and research still to be understood in a context of heightened competition between and within universities? Three options surface: complementarity; substitution; sheer dissimilarity and nil correlation between quality of teaching and research.

Analyzing the asymmetrical relationship between the two tasks seems to provide a fruitful agenda of investigation. There are striking dissimilarities between them: the production function of teaching is additive, while that of research is multiplicative. This is why management of research activities has granted increasing importance to the concentration of critical masses of talent to leverage the faculty’s research potential. Meanwhile, teaching staff becomes more substitutable once they move (or are moved) away from the frontiers of advanced research. Unsurprisingly, given the crucial importance of reputational capital to higher education institutions, tension between research and teaching missions is mounting.

My main argument is as follows. In research, the distribution of individual productivity and professional visibility has a highly skewed, Pareto-like profile, whereas individual performance in teaching has a normal, Gaussian, distribution. Since the chances of success in each activity are distributed very differently, their conjunction functions like a risk management mechanism, both individually and collectively. Yet given the differential return on effort and ability in the two tasks, complementarity is best understood when redefined as complementarity under asymmetry.

Actors between Dispositions and Context of Action: how to think the Unity of Social Sciences and Humanities

Prof. Bernard LAHIRE’s public inaugural lecture for CEFRES Platform

Place: Carolinum’s Patriotic Hall

Prof. Bernard Lahire teaches sociology at École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and is the vice-director of the Max Weber Center. He wrote on school failure and success in the working classes, popular appropriation modes of written culture, on the history of illiteracy, on French cultural practices, on life and creation conditions of writers, on Franz Kafka’s work, and on the historical relations between art and domination in the West. He conceptualized a theory of action, both “dispositional” and “contextual”, aiming at specifying and qualifying Bourdieu’s field theory and the related notion of habitus, thanks to his concept of “social game”. Bernard Lahire thus engages in an epistemological reflection on social sciences and their social functions. He also strove to show that social sciences should be taught from primary school upward (L’Esprit sociologique, 2005).

Bernard Lahire published about twenty books, among which:

L’Homme pluriel (Nathan, 1998)

La Culture des individus (La Découverte, 2004)

Franz Kafka. Éléments pour une théorie de la création littéraire (La Découverte, 2010)

Monde pluriel : penser l’unité des sciences sociales (Le Seuil, 2012).

The conference will be held in French, with simultaneous translation in Czech.

Acts of Justice, Public Events: World War II Criminals on Trial

This conference originates from the encounter of three projects: a Russian-French project on trials in the USSR (FMSH/RGNF), the micro-project of the Labex Création, Arts, Patrimoines ‘Images de la justice”, and the WW2CRIMESONTRIAL1943-1991 project supported by the French National Research Agency.

Find out more about the ANR project “Nazi War Crimes in Court” here

Partners: CEFRES, March Bloch Center, CERCEC, CEFR, GDR “CEM” and CERHEC
Time & Venue: 12-14 Octobre 2017, CEFRES, Prague
Language: English

Read the call for papers here

Program

Thursday 12 October

9.00 Opening Remarks

Media narratives and their reception
9.30-11.30
Panel I: Mediatization As a Turning Point: Attractive Features & Risks
Discussant: Françoise Mayer

Ornella Rovetta: Judging War Criminals in the 1920s: A Pioneering Precedent in Making Post-War Justice Visible?
Radu Stancu: Capital Punishment for War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in Romania after World War II
Enrico Heitzer: The “Norwegians”: a Nearly Forgotten Group of German and Austrian Nazi and War Criminals in Front of Soviet Courts 1946/47

Coffee Break

11.45-1.45
Panel II: Fixed Components of Media Narrative and Its Consequences
Discussant: Dimitri Astashkin

Alexander Epifanov: Information Support to Trials over Hitler’s War Criminals and Accomplices in the USSR in 1941–1956
Elena Kokkoken: Pskov Regional Press: The Trials over Russian Collaborators
Marie-Bénedicte Vincent: Ernst Kaltenbrunner in the Trial of Nuremberg: Which Reception in the Press Under Military Control of Occupied West Germany?

Lunch Break

Social Mobilisation and Justice
3.00-5.00
Panel III: Sparking off social commitment
Discussant: Audrey Kichelewski

Agnieszka Smelkowska: Revenge and justice on display: rehabilitacja in post-war Poland
Gabriel Finder: Jews, Poles, and Justice in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
Nadège Ragaru: Differentiated Publicity: The Sandglass of the (In-) visibilization of the Trials for Anti-Jewish Crimes in Bulgaria (1944-1945)

Friday 13 October
Social Mobilization and Justice

9.30-11.30
Panel IV: Victims and Witnesses: Driving Forces for Justice (1)
Discussant: Vanessa Voisin

Natalia Aleksiun: Survivor Networks and the Polish Post-War Trials
Giovanni Focardi, Andrea Martini: Shadows and lights in Trials against Fascists: Transitional Justice in Italy (1943-1953)
Maxilimian Becker: Victims’ Unions’ Reception of Trials: The Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem 1961 and the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-1965

Coffee Break

11.45-1.15
Panel V: Victims and Witnesses: Driving Forces for Justice (2)
Discussant: Emilia Koustova

Máté Zombory: Arrow Cross atrocities on trial: the public trajectory of a key witness in Budapest (1945-1949)
Birte Klarzyk, Anne Klein: Dynamics and Multiperspectivity of Justice: The “FFDJF” and the “Lischka Trial” of Kurt Lischka, Herbert Hagen and Ernst Heinrichsohn in Cologne, 1979/80

Lunch Break

1.50-2.30
Film projection: The Victims Accuse (Moscow/Minsk, 1963). Commented by Jasmin Söhner and Vanessa Voisin

2.40-4.40
Panel VI: The Limits of Social Mobilization
Discussant: Alain Blum

Eric Le Bourhis, Irina Tcherneva: Soviet citizens write to the press and to the general prosecutor: the reception of the Kacherovski trial in Riga (1959)
Regina Kazyulina: The Contingency of Postwar Justice in the Crimean Countryside
Andrea Pető: Post WWII Trials and Perpetrators in Hungarian Cinema. The Missing Composure

Saturday 14 October
Transnational Justice in Postwar Europe

9.30-11.30
Panel VIII: Reception of Propaganda and Political Fallout
Discussant: Clara Royer

James Ryan: Ideology on Trial: Ideology on Trial: The Prosecution of Leftists and Pan-Turkists at the Dawn of the Cold War in Turkey, 1944-1947
Fabien Théofilakis: The Eichmann Trial (1961) on the Front Page”: How did the Western European Press deal with the Nazi Past?
Jasmin Söhner: Presenting unambiguous results: the case of Erwin Schüle

Coffee Break

11.45-1.45
Panel IX: Media Impact on Judicial Procedures
Discussant: Sylvie Lindeperg

Steven Remy: The Visual Politics of Infamy: The Malmedy Massacre Trial and its Aftermath
Kateřina Králová: In the Shade of Eichmann: Prosecution of Max Merten in Greece and Beyond
Vojtěch Kyncl: Judicial scandal in the “Malloth” process

1.45-2.45: Concluding Remarks

Adrian Brisku: Political Economic Thought, Empire, and Nation-State

The IMS-CEFRES seminar “Between Areas and Disciplines” will host post-doctoral researcher Adrian Brisku (FSV UK), who will present his work on Political Economic Thought, Empire, and Nation-State – The Cases of Albania, Czecho/Slovakia and Georgia, c. 1880s to 1920s.

His presentation will be discussed by French historian Xavier Bougarel (CETOBAC-EHESS and Marc Bloch Center, Berlin).

The seminar will be held in English.

Place: Jinonice, room 1037.

Aesthetical Spaciality: On Ludwig Binswanger

A workshop on Ludwig Binswanger organized by Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

Time & Venue: 9 am-5 pm at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 17, rue de la Sorbonne, UFR de philosophie, Halbwachs room
Organizers: Lara Bonneau (Université Panthéon-Sorbonne / associate PhD student at CEFRES), Danièle Cohn (professor at Université Panthéon-Sorbonne), Raphaëlle Cazal (PhD student at Université Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Language: French

See the poster and program of the workshop here.