A lecture by Thomas C. Mercier (post-doc. CEFRES / Charles University) in the frame of the Franco-czech historical seminar organized by Institute for Czech History of the Faculty of arts, Charles University (FFUK), in collaboration with CEFRES.
Venue: Faculty of Arts of Charles University, nám. J. Palacha 2, Prague 1, room 201
Time: 9:10-10:30
Language: French
Continue reading Velvet Revolution and Intellectual Dissidence: Charter 77 and Jan Hus Association
Lecture
When: Monday 25 April 2022 at 6 p.m
Where: Moravian regional library, Brno www.mzk.cz
Language: English
Host: Emmanuel Désveaux (EHESS)
Since the end of XIXth century, the Indians of North America have occupied a special place in the imaginary of Europeans : they were alltogether fierce and cruel, autonomous and rebellious, half-nude and covered with feathers or beaded dresses, war-like and friendly, etc. All these clichés derive from the Plains Indians and their specific way of living based on bison hunting and horse riding. First, it must be acknowledged that this representation is far too restrictive of the various cultures of the Northern part of America. The role of anthropology, specially that of Franz Boas and his followers, was instrumental to document life styles, social organisations and languages that extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and from the Arctic See to the Gulf of Mexico. In the second part of the talk, il will be discussed how Native people in the US and the Canada have been struggling — and are still struggling — to adjust to a continuous process of colonialization that, if it did not always killed them systematically, impoverished them dramatically and tried to deprive them of their culture and religion. The conference can be understood as a tribute to their enduring resistance.”
International Workshop
Urban Movements and Local Politics in CEE Countries: Recent Developments and Conceptual Ambivalences
DATE: 4-6.11.2021 (Thursday evening: keynote and reception; Friday: presentations
Saturday morning: critical urban tour in the Karlín district: from a working-class neighborhood to a symbol of gentrification)
Deadline for submission: 30.5.2021
Organized by the CEFRES (French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences) in Prague in cooperation with the Institute of Sociological Sciences (Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague), Fundacja Zatoka (PL) and Periféria (HU)
The workshop explores the role of political institutions and social movements in the process of urban change in the CEE countries. The case of Prague demonstrates that post-communist cities have particular historicity in terms of urban development after 1989. On the one hand, there is an overnight introduction of the free market ideology, on the other, there are unprepared institutions that are not capable to include citizens in the debates about urban space – the state and municipal power is either technocratic and elitist or exclusionary towards civic organizations (Horák 2007; Sýkora a Bouzarovski 2012). Mutual delegitimization of the state officials and activists, lack of trust in the municipal politics, misusing municipal politics as a channel for promoting developers’ interests are phenomena influencing the urban development in the 1990s.
Specific historical, institutional, and political development in the CEE countries gave rise to a critique of the blind application of the conceptual apparatus from the Western social sciences without further critical reassessment. “Catching-up-with-the-West” narratives are being revaluated from the perspectives of more complex approaches including West and East as components of the same global system (Gagyi 2015). Distinct local political culture also represents a matter of interest (Císař 2008). In terms of urban development, factors like democratic deficit on the municipal level leading to absent mechanisms of public engagement, or the image of urban planning as hostile to the free-market ideology are few factors specific for the post-communist countries (Jacobsson 2015; Pixová 2018, 2020; Sýkora a Bouzarovski 2012; Temelová 2009). How do we apply and re-think the concepts for studying social movements, including radical social movements, in this context?
Finally, urbanity is not only about governance and resistance but about a physical urban map. A variety of open spaces, squats, social and youth centers constitute an infrastructure for the social movements. Considering the notion of socio-spatial dialectics coined by Edward Soja (the space and social relations are mutually influential) (Soja 1989), one could follow the relations between governance of urban space, accessibility of urban space to the local initiatives and activist projects, and the development of the social movements.
Scholars working on urban development/policies, radical and moderate urban movements, urban civic initiatives and self-organized groups, tenants’ movements, autonomous and decommodified spaces are invited to participate in this call. Critical social and historical reflections of urban development in the CEE countries, as well as personally involved researchers and activists-researchers, are welcomed. The goal of the workshop is to share the knowledge and practices along three axes (but not exclusively):
Local urban development in the 1990s and 2000s was marked by several uneven phenomena. To name a few: low public participation, mutual delegitimization of the activists, state officials and local politicians, big political parties rather than grassroots initiatives present in municipal politics – the case of Prague (Horák 2007). These tendencies fueled the change on the municipal level, for example, activists entering politics aiming to open political opportunity structures to grassroots actors (Pixová 2020), new locally based progressive political movements, and parties emerging in the big cities. How do other institutional, political, and social phenomena that could be traced from the 1990s influence politics in the cities today? What role do big cities play in progressive politics in CEE countries? Can we observe tendencies that could be regarded as “new municipalist” (see Purcell 2006; Russell 2019)? And what is the role of periphery in the process of urban change?
Are the “usual conceptual suspects” of the social movement studies (political opportunity structure, recourse mobilization, etc.) suitable for the CEE context? What can we say about such concepts as prefiguration and direct action applied in the research of the radical movements? While both sets of concepts are applied in the context of CEE, the critical reassessment of their compatibility with the local context is still missing.
While in Poland, squatters’ and tenants’ movement is rather strong, in other CEE countries, the situation is different. The Czech Republic is a country of one political social center, but with a plurality of self-organized urban initiatives. How is this development connected to the physical space (infrastructure) that the movement is able to acquire and sustain? How do different types of urban spaces influence the strength of the movement and what type of spaces can we observe in CEE countries? What are they struggling with? While capitalist urban development pushes the local inhabitants to the periphery by financialization set in stone graved, what spatial strategies of resistance remain?
The workshop language is English. Send you paper proposals (abstract of up to 300 words) for 20-minute talks and a short biography (150 words) to Yuliya Moskvina (yuliya.moskvina@fsv.cuni.cz). Help with travel and accommodation costs may be offered to participants who are not able to secure funding from their institutions. The workshop will take place in Prague on 4-6.11.2021 at the CEFRES (French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences).
Scientific committee:
Jérôme Heurtaux (French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences, Prague)
Yuliya Moskvina (Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague)
Lukáš Kotyk (Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague)
Zsuzsanna Pósfai (Periféria Policy and Research Center, Budapest)
Grzegorz Piotrowski (Institute of Sociology, University of Gdańsk)
Yoann Morvan (CNRS, Paris)
International Workshop organized by the CEFRES, in cooperation with the Institute of Sociological Studies (Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague).
Date: 4–6 November 2021
Place: CEFRES, Prague and online (for the access, please contact: claire(@)cefres.cz)
Language: English
17:30 Welcome speech
18:00 – 19:00 Keynote: Agnes Gagyi, University of Gothenburg, Housing struggles in Eastern Europe as a structural field of contention
19:00 Cocktails
9:30 – 11:00 Housing crisis: Alternative housing and resisting actors
Zsuzsanna Pósfai, Periféria Policy and Research Center, Potential financial mechanisms for new forms of affordable housing
Yuliya Moskvina, Ludmila Böhmova, Charles University in Prague, Jakub Černý, University of Ostrava, Písnice as a space of resistance to privatization
Jakub Černý, University of Ostrava, Processes of (collective) resistence in the context of residential displacement in Czechia: Case study „Bedřiška”
Chair: Yoann Morvan (CNRS)
11:00 – 11:30 Coffee break
11:30 – 13:00 Urban initiatives and movements
Alexandra Bitušíková, Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica, Not in our town: Urban activism in Slovakia (The case of Banská Bystrica)
Justyna Kościńska, University of Warsaw, Theorizing urban movements in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms of capital and habitus
Klemen Ploštajner, University of Ljubljana, Between political and post-political: Two urban movements in Ljubljana
Chair: Ronan Hervouet (CEFRES / CNRS / Bordeaux University)
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch break
14:30 – 16:00 Institutional formations in the cities: neoliberalism and beyond
Michaela Pixová, Charles University in Prague, Governance of crises in crisis: Dialogue, cooperation and radical forms of democracy as a way of overcoming inaction
Václav Orcígr, Charles University in Prague, Recent development and planning in Prague – NGO perspective
Pavel Šuška, Slovak Academy of Sciences, From Local ideology to tactical urbanism and strategic integration: Changing place-frames within urban political landscape of post-socialist Bratislava
Svetlana Moskaleva, European University at St.Petersburg, Institutionalization of urban planning in post-soviet Russia
Chair: Yuliya Moskvina (UK)
16:00 – 16:30 Coffee break
16:30 – 17:30 Spatial practices
Lýdia Grešáková, Zuzana Tabačková, Spolka, Spatial practices from the margins
Adela Petrovic, Greta Kukeli, Charles University in Prague, From a former industrial neighborhood to a creative-class oasis: A case study of Karlín, the inner-city neighborhood of Prague
Chair: Václav Orcígr (UK)
10:00 Critical urban tour at Karlín district with Jakub Nakládal (meeting at CEFRES)
For more information, see the call for papers: here.
The fifth session of CEFRES / IMS epistemological seminar will be led by Ludovic LEPELTIER-KUTASI (Tours University / associated PhD fellow at CEFRES)
Where: CEFRES library – Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1
When: 3:30 pm to 5 pm
Language: English
2nd 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, 7th of November
Language: English
Contact / To register: cefres[@]cefres.cz
Discussant: Stanislav Holubec (Institut of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
Continue reading Urban Aesthetic Environmentalism in the Late 19th Century
