Tag Archives: Norms & Transgressions

Calls for Papers

CFP | Postcoloniality, Decolonisation, and Anticolonial Thought from Non-Western Perspectives

One-day academic workshop hosted by CEFRES (French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences, Prague) and co-organised by Dilnur REYHAN, Shaivya MISHRA, and Zbyněk MUCHA (Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences).

Dates: September 17, 2026
Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
Language: English
Submission deadline: July 31, 2026

Please send your submissions to the following e-mail addresses mucha@orient.cas.cz, reyhan@orient.cas.cz, mishra@orient.cas.cz Continue reading CFP | Postcoloniality, Decolonisation, and Anticolonial Thought from Non-Western Perspectives →

CEFRES Team

Niya Metodieva – Research & CV

The “Children” of Socialism: The Shaping of Youth and the Building of a Socialist Society in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria (1944–1968)

Research Area 2: Norms and transgressions

This thesis aims to analyze the construction of socialist society in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria “through” (S. Maza) the issue of youth, from the coup d’état of September 9, 1944, which brought to power the Communist-led coalition of the Fatherland Front, until 1968. By historicizing the construction of the category of “youth,” it proposes to examine the evolution of the sociopolitical boundaries that governed the multiple meanings attached to the notion of “socialist society.” In doing so, she analyzes, in a process-oriented and situated manner, the transformation of the mechanisms of integration and exclusion within this society under construction, the principles according to which they were constituted, and the way in which different groups were thus reconfigured.

She develops a socio-historical methodology rooted in the “critical turn” of the Annales school, which seeks to move beyond the supposed dichotomy between ideology and practice, between representation and action, by proposing a practical history of categories. From a dual methodological perspective, she seeks to understand the co-construction between communist power and socialist society, which requires taking all historical actors “seriously.” Thus, the inquiry unfolds on three levels: first, it examines the construction of categories at the political level; then, their negotiation at the institutional level (high schools and universities) and the potential “controversies” arising from them; and finally, it explores how social trajectories and lived experiences were transformed by the evolution of governance practices. The cross-referencing of political sources (archives of the Bulgarian Communist Party, the Youth Union, biographies, police records) with archives from the Ministry of Public Education (reports, expulsions, documents relating to purges in high schools and universities) and interviews allows for a fresh perspective on socialist construction and the experiences of young people, with a particular emphasis on the issue of repression.

More broadly, the theis, which follows a traditional chronological framework (the postwar period, Stalinization, and de-Stalinization), examines the conceptions of society and social change produced by Bulgarian society and the socialist state through its population policy. The objectification and construction of different “generations,” as well as the production of homogeneous visions of youth, allow us to question the possibility of speaking of “socialist governmentality” but also to situate socialist policy within a longer-term local perspective linking youth and nation. The temporal boundaries allow for a comparison of the experiences of different cohorts (those born around the 1920s and those of the 1940s) against the backdrop of the growing institutionalization of “youth.”

CV

Education

  • Depuis 2022 : Doctorante contractuelle (CNRS International) en histoire (EHESS)
  • 2020- 2022 : Master histoire (EHESS, Paris). Thèse préparée sous la direction d’Alain Blum (EHESS/INED) et de Catherine Gousseff (CNRS/CERCEC).
  • 2016-2020 : Double Licence histoire- histoire de l’art et archéologie (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne)

Fellowship

  • 2026 : dans le cadre de CARSI/Horizon Europe avec l’ONG Transitions. Association au CEFRES et à l’IMS de l’Université Charles.

Teaching Experience

  • Septembre – Décembre 2025 – Chargée de cours : Histoire sociale et politique de la France au XXs. (L2, Université Paris-Nanterre) (48h).

Presentations (sélection)

  • 19 janvier 2026 – Séminaire : « Empire russe, URSS, sociétés et territoires post-impériaux. Savoirs et pratiques de l’État » (CERCEC/EHESS). Présentation : « La genèse d’une société socialiste bulgare ? Penser, réguler et construire les nouvelles frontières sociales en sortie de guerre : le cas de la jeunesse (1944-1947).
  • 22 janvier 2024 – Workshop “The Voices from Below in the Face of Repression and Arbitrary State Violence” (CEFRES, EHESS, Charles University, Czech Academy of Sciences). Workshop Paper: “Defending Values, Seeking Justice: Parent’s Petitions to the Minister of Popular Enlightenment as Voices from Below, Bulgaria (1944-1946)”
  • 26 septembre 2024 : Table ronde à “Allez Savoir-Marseille » (EHESS). « Le temps de l’obéissance ? Adolescences européennes à l’épreuve des bouleversements du long XXe siècle », avec Emma Papadacci (LIER-FYT) et Lucas Bouguereau (LIER-FYT). Table ronde animée par Julie Pagis (IRIS/CNRS).
  • 5-6 Avril 2024 – Conference Moving Beyond the Centre-Periphery Dynamics: Central and Eastern Europe from the mid-19th century to the present”. Conference paper: “Managing Time, Creating Specialists: Socialist Modernization as seen through the Youth Brigade Movement in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria (1947-1950)”.

Organisation of academic sessions

  • Co-organisatrice de la Conférence doctorale du CERCEC-CETOBaC, « Modernities Debated. Crossed perspectives from Russian, Soviet and Ottoman (post-)imperial spaces: Central and Eastern Europe, Balkans, Eastern Mediterranean, Caucasus and Central Asia” 21 et 22 mai 2024.
CEFRES Team

Ali Al-Moussaoui – Research & CV

“Domestic Archives of Displacement: Memory, Language, and Informal Bookmaking among Armenian and Palestinian Populations and Women in Lebanon”

Research area 1: Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices

Ali Al Moussaoui holds a PhD in Cognitive Sciences of Language from the University of Nova Gorica (UNG), Slovenia. His research interests span bilingualism, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, language consciousness and identity, language politics, analysis of language situations, language adaptation processes, heritage language, code switching, discourse analysis, translation, and applied linguistics.

At the Centre français de recherche en sciences sociales (CEFRES), he plans to conduct a research project entitled Domestic Archives of Displacement: Memory, Language, and Informal Bookmaking among Armenian and Palestinian Populations and Women in Lebanon. The research relates to the trends of memory, diaspora, feminism, and informal bookmaking practiced by marginalized communities in Lebanon, namely Palestinian and Armenian populations, and especially women. The aim is to unearth the ways in which the aforementioned practices act as effective tools in memory-making, expressing identity, and resisting social and cultural difficulties. The research will shed light on the narratives, languages used, and different forms of informal dissemination of information being utilized by the two communities to record their stories and cascade their experiences. The research will utilize a multi-method qualitative approach which combines ethnographic fieldwork with textual, visual, and discourse analysis.

This research is conducted within a broader project titled “Paper Bonds: Bookmaking for Kin, Friends and Self in Contemporary Europe and the Middle East,” itself embedded in the TANDEM program, a collaboration between CEFRES, the French National Research Center (CNRS), the Czech Academy of Sciences (AV ČR), and Charles University (UK). As one of the project’s three researchers, Dr. Al Moussaoui will be working alongside Dr. Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė and Dr. Hélène Martinelli to explore how bookmaking practices and non-commercial publishing shape relationships, express identity, and respond to political and technological change.

CV

Academic Qualifications

2021: PhD in Cognitive Sciences of Language, University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. Thesis: Theoretical and Experimental Aspects of Numerosity and Quantification in Lebanese Arabic. Final Average: 90.01

2016: Master’s in English Linguistics, Lebanese University. Thesis: The Effect of Collocational Input on Linguistic Awareness and Proficiency in Writing in UAE

2008: Bachelor’s in English Language and Literature, Lebanese University, 2008

2022: Certificat d’Aptitude à la Profession de Médiateur, Ecole Professionnelle de la Médiation et de la Négociation (EPMN) Paris, France & Université Saint Joseph (USJ), Lebanon
Training: Focused on facilitating communication and building trust within domestic and informal spheres, in line with the “kitchen politics” theme

Professional Experience

2023- 2025: University Instructor, American University of Culture and Education (AUCE), Lebanon: diverse courses including Cognitive Development, Approaches to Research, Translation of the Community, and Translation of Cultural Texts/ supervision of student research on identity, language, and cultural exchange/ integrated discussions and workshops on literacy practices within the digital age versus material culture.

2022- 2025: Professional Mediator & Facilitator, Centre Professionnelle de la Médiation (CPM), Université Saint Joseph (USJ), Lebanon: formal training in mediation theory and practice, with a focus on ethical facilitation, conflict-sensitive communication, and trust building in domestic, community, and informal institutional settings/ application of mediation principles to qualitative research contexts, including fieldwork, in-depth interviewing, and engagement with marginalized and displacement-affected communities/experience in facilitating dialogue around sensitive sociocultural issues such as identity, language, gender, memory, and social vulnerability/ competence in managing interpersonal dynamics and asymmetries of power, supporting reflexive and ethically grounded research practices.

2021-2025: Project Manager & Communications Officer, Lebanese Organization for Studies and Training (LOST), Lebanon: cross-sectoral projects focusing on displacement, identity, and cultural resilience in Lebanon/ communications highlighting issues of feminism, migration, and cultural erasure within local and refugee communities/ outreach materials and partnerships addressing refugee education and empowerment/ trust-based communities and the sociology of literature.

2022: Freelance Translator, Cultural & Artistic Texts, Al Tashkeel Magazine, United Arab Emirates: translating a variety of non commercial and specialized texts including art criticism, cultural commentary, and literary works between Arabic and English/ engaging with the nuances of linguistic and cultural expression/ addressing the challenges of cultural erasure and preserving local narratives/ working closely with individual authors and small cultural organizations to gain insight into non-commercial publishing and the symbolic dimensions of text creation.

2008- 2015: English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Instructor, International High Schools, United Arab Emirates: delivering extensive EFL instruction/ conducting applied research on the acquisition and use of collocations and their relevance to linguistic awareness, identity formation, and the potential impact of cultural erasure in a multilingual context (research formed the basis of Master’s thesis)/ designing curriculum materials that addressed real-world communication needs, fostering an understanding of cross-cultural communication and the symbolic dimensions of language.

Conferences, Workshops, & Training
• July 2021: The 4th Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference (XPRAG.it) – University of Turin, Italy. The anti-duality inference: Implications for cross-linguistic variation and L2 learning (Co-presentation with Prof. Dr. Penka Stateva)
• November 2019: The 12th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting (MMM 12) – University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Poster presentation of a psycholinguistics experiment: The Facilitatory Effect of Phonological Priming on Visual Word Recognition in Arabic: Speed and Overlapping Positions.
• May 2021: Dynamic Syntax course – University of Bergen, Norway (online)
• May 2021: Psycholinguistics in Flanders 2021 Conference (PiF) Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany (online)
• May 2021: Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 31 – Linguistic Society of America, Brown University, USA (online)
• March 2021: 34th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing – University of Pennsylvania, USA (online)
• March 2020: Foundations in Literacy- Orton Gillingham Learning Centre (REACH), Lebanon
• August 2019: Research Methods in Corpus Linguistics & Computational Linguistics- Frankfurt Summer School, Goethe University, Germany
• October 2017: European Dyslexia Association (EDA) Seminar, Munich, Germany Publications
• Al Moussaoui, A., & Stepanov, A. (2020). When a Wh-Word Refuses to Stay in Situ. Linguistic Inquiry. https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/ling_a_00345
• Al Moussaoui, A. (2022). Expanding the Mediation Lexicon in Arabic. USJ Repository
• Al Moussaoui, A., & Zekri, W. (2024). Algerian Teachers’ Motivation and Self-efficacy Towards Online Teaching. Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, 21(1), 55 73. https://e-flt.nus.edu.sg/v21n12024/zekri.pdf

Languages
• Arabic: Native
• English: C2 (Proficient)
• French: B2 (Upper Intermediate)
• Persian: B2 (Upper Intermediate)
• German: A2 (Elementary)
• Italian: A2 (Elementary)

Calls for Papers

CFP | Colliding Women

Narratives of Womanhood in the Modernisms of Central and Eastern Europe (1870-1970)

Organization Committee: Naïma Berkane, Mateusz Chmurski, Cécile Rousselet & Clara Royer

When: June 4-5, 2026
Where: Paris
Submission Guidelines: Your proposals (in French or English), in the form of a title, a summary of around 300 words and a bio-bibliographical note, should be sent by December 1, 2025 to: femininenarratives@gmail.com

Scientific Committee: Biljana Andonovska, Arnaud Bikard, Mateusz Chmurski, Alessandro Gallichio, Petra James, Luba Jurgenson, Jean-François Laplénie, Jasmina Lukić, Lena Magnone, Jelena Petrović, Alexandra Wojda

See the event program here.

Continue reading CFP | Colliding Women →

Calls for Papers

CFP | Gender and Mediation

⇒ In German below ⇐

Translational and Editorial Practices in the Reception of Belgian Literature in Czech- and Germanophone Cultural Spaces during Modernism (1870–1940)

 Workshop is organised by Petra James, Hubert Roland, Quintus Immisch di Padua and Martina Mecco, MODERNITAS (MSH – Université Libre de Bruxelles) – UCLouvain and CEFRES – French Research Centre in Humanities and Social Sciences in collaboration with Department of Czech and Comparative Literature, Charles University, Institute of Czech Literature, CAS, Institut of Slovak Literature, SAV.

Deadline for submissions: December 30, 2025
Date: April 15 – 17, 2026
Location: CEFRES, Prague
Languages: English, French, Czech, German
Send an abstract of 300 words to: martina.mecco@ulb.be

See the event program here.
Download the offical poster here.

(See German below)

The conference is organised as part of the FNRS (Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique, Belgium) project entitled “Belgium ‘Read’ in German and Czech” (2024-2027), directed by Petra James (Université libre de Bruxelles) and Hubert Roland (UCLouvain). Continue reading CFP | Gender and Mediation →

Non classé

Markus Pollak – Research & CV

“Evaluating Democracies: International Election Observers and the Contestation of Liberal Ordering”

Axes de recherche 1 : Déplacements, dépaysements et décalages : hommes, savoirs et pratiques & 2 : Normes et transgressions

I am a Ph.D. candidate in International Relations at Central European University and a DOC-Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. My research focuses on international election observers in the post-Cold War era. Specifically, I examine practices of contestation facing observation missions sent out by regional organizations. As a key pillar of democracy promotion and liberal international ordering, election observation provides an entry point for understanding contemporary endogenous and exogenous challenges to liberal international ordering.

My project is embedded in the subfield of international political sociology. To collect data, I combine interviews with election observation practitioners and intergovernmental organization staff with archival research, particularly at the OSCE archives in Prague. In line with a Bourdieu-inspired research methodology, my project emphasizes participant observation. I have worked as a OSCE and EU election observer in Bolivia, the United States, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Serbia. I am also a research associate at the NGO Election-Watch.EU.

Currently I work on a research project investigating OSCE election observer careers and the recruitment practices of OSCE missions. Previously, I conducted research on parallel election observation missions and published an article on the election observation missions of the Commonwealth of Independent States in the OSCE region.

Education

  • PhD in International Relations, Central European University (ongoing)
  • MA in International Relations, Central European University
  • Certificate of Social Sciences and Humanities, Sciences Po Paris
  • BA and MA in Political Science, University of Vienna

Selected Publications

Pollak, M. (2025). Mimicking Election Observation: The Politics of Parallel Election Monitoring. Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy.

Teaching experience

2025-2026: Lecturer at the University of Vienna for the course “Politics of Democratization and Autocratization”

2025: Teaching Assistant at Central European University for the courses “International Intervention and Statebuilding” and “Introduction to International Relations”, Vienna

Conferences and Public Presentations

  • European International Studies Association (EISA) – 2025 Pan-European Conference on International Relations (“It´s a small world! For 20 years it´s often been the same people”)
  • Electoral Integrity Conference (EIP) – 2023 (“Mimicking Election Observation”) + 2025 (“It´s a small world! For 20 years it´s often been the same people”)
  • University of Vienna – “The Subversion of Liberal Election Observation?”, presentation at the Marie Jahoda Summer School 2024 (July 2024).
  • University of Oxford – “Mimicking Election Observation”, presentation was a part of the programme of the Europaeum Oxford Spring School 2024, St Antony´s college (April 2024).
  • Sciences Po Paris – “Mimicking Election Observation”, guest speaker at an event of the CERI VERELECT research group (November 2024)
  • Central European University – Pollak, M.“´Being an observer is not a profession – although everyone thinks it is”, guest speaker at the Conflict and Security Research group (March 2025)