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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.

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.

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.

A view from abroad: Czechoslovaks in World War II and the early Cold War

Discussion around Paul Lenormand’s book Tchécoslovaques en guerre (Passés composés 2023)

Date: 7 December, 2023, from 4 p.m.
Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3
Language: English

Organizors: CEFRES; University Paris-Nanterre / Institut des sciences sociales du politique (ISP); Research Center „Postwar(s). Political and Social Changes during and after the Second World War“ at the Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University (IMS FSV UK)

Chair: Jakub Štofaník, Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences (MÚA AVČR)

Discussant: Václav Šmidrkal, Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University (IMS FSV UK)

Continue reading A view from abroad: Czechoslovaks in World War II and the early Cold War →

A Subaltern That Sings

A Subaltern That Sings.
From Sound Resistance to Musical Diplomacy in Wartime Ukraine

Kick-off meeting of a research project developed within CU-CNRS TANDEM Program supported by Charles University, CNRS and CEFRES.

Date: April 9, 2024, from 2 pm to 3:30 pm CET
Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
Language: English
Project Coordinators:
Valeria KORABLYOVA (CEFRES / Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University) and
Louisa MARTIN-CHEVALIER (CEFRES / Sorbonne University)

The meeting will be opened by:

  • Mr. Stéphane CROUZAT, Ambassador of France to the Czech Republic
  • Mr. Ladislav KRIŠTOUFEK, Vice-rector for Research, Charles University
  • Mr. William BERTHOMIÈRE, director for European and international affairs at CNRS Sciences humaines et sociales

Abstract

Valeria Korablyova and Louisa Martin-Chevalier will present this research project dedicated to the musical dimension of Ukrainian resistance as a vehicle for escaping the subaltern position of a double periphery in the blind spot between the EU and Russia. The project brings together two academic subfields – cultural diplomacy and postcolonial studies – to reveal how Ukrainian musicians and activists use musical means to increase their visibility on a global level and to raise their country’s geocultural status on the mental maps of international audiences. From the European opera scene to the Eurovision Song Contest, Ukrainians deploy their soft power to manifest their country’s agency and garner international support for their cause.

Since 2018, the TANDEM program endeavors excellency in social sciences and humanities by bringing together Czech and French colleagues to intensify scientific collaboration between our countries in the frame of European Research Area. The program is a joint initiative of CEFRES, CNRS SHS, CU & the Czech Academy of Sciences (AV ČR) in the frame of the CEFRES Platform of scientific collaborations. Its former members have obtained two ERC grants, including the BOAR project.

A religion of nature? Anthropology of sacred artefacts and cyborg gods in Afro-Brazilian religions

Gellner Seminar

Giovanna Capponi (CEFRES/FSV UK) will give a lecture within the Gellner seminar organized by the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA– Česká Asociace pro Sociální Antropologii), the Czech Society of Sociology, in cooperation with the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and CEFRES.

When: 1st April 2019, at 4:30 pm
Where: CEFRES Library (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1)
Language: English

Abstract

A religion of nature? Anthropology of sacred artefacts and cyborg gods in Afro-Brazilian religions

Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, the worship of the West African deities which spread around Brazil as a consequence of the Atlantic Slave Trade, is often described by its followers and by the anthropologists who studied it as a “religion of nature”. Indeed, Candomblé deities (called orixás) are closely associated with natural elements in the landscape; but they are also associated with human temperaments and with different stages of life and matter. In the attempt to problematize and understand what kind of “nature” is implied in this context, I will analyse the sacred artefacts that constitute a central part of the ritual practice, the so called assentamentos.

The rules of fabrication of these mysterious factishes, using Latour’s neologism, are often surrounded by secrecy and sacredness as they constitute the physical “bodies” and “mouths” of the orixás where sacrifices and offerings are performed. Involving animal blood, vegetable substances, and other materials like wood, iron or copper in the making, the assentamentos are made by humans as a means of condensing and manipulating axé, the sacred force that is infused in natural elements. Trying to escape the colonial narrative that long described these practices as “fetishism”, I would argue that these artefacts can be understood as powerful “technological” devices and channels of communication between the visible and the invisible world. Moreover, these receptacles mirror both the deity and the heads of the novices who undergo the initiation ritual, which starts a lifelong bond between the orixá, the artefact, and the human.

Using Haraway’s metaphor of the cyborg, I analyse how these artefacts transcend and challenge the dichotomies of Western thought. Being it at the same time alive and inert, natural and technological, human and animal, infused with life force and mere vessel, the assentamento subverts these categories and sheds a light on the ways in which humans, gods, animals and elements of the landscape are made and perceived.