Archives de catégorie : Appel à participation (CfP)

Dynamics of Political Participation: Disciplinary knowledge through the prism of “area studies”

PhD student workshop

September 26, 2023 (10:00-17:00)

Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3 (Prague)

(with a possibility of online participation)

This workshop aims to bring together Ph.D. students (exceptionally also advanced Master’s students) around the theme of political participation understood broadly. It invites the participants to reflect on how their knowledge situated within “area studies” (including Central Europe, the Middle East, the Americas…) speaks to theories and concepts of the disciplines they mobilize. 

Organized one year after the international conference “Knowledge and Know-How Situated: Humanities and Social Sciences and the World” which took place in November 2022 in Paris, this doctoral students’ workshop pursues – from Prague – the reflection about “area studies”. The theme indeed has a different resonance in Prague than in Paris: our debates shall draw on the strong philological tradition of the Central European area studies while also departing from it in order to analyse the relationship between disciplinary knowledge and situated knowledge.

The workshop participants are invited to reflect on the dynamics of political participation through two non-exclusionary lenses:

1) Norms and transgressions – exploring the tensions between disciplinary knowledge and situated knowledge based on one’s fieldwork. How does “situated” fieldwork and/or archival work speak to the universalizing concepts informing the disciplines of history, sociology, political science, or gender studies? What tensions arise between the application of concepts into one’s “area” and the capacity of the latter to generate theoretical claims? To put it simply, what can “area studies” teach to the disciplines in order to advance our understanding of processes of political participation?

2) Positionality – Secondly, the workshop invites participants to critically assess their own positionality. Positionality is at the core of situated research. The participants should go beyond a static enumeration of identity markers (gender, sexual orientation, religion, citizenship, ethnicity, class…) and shall rather show how these operate during their data collection as well as during the dissemination of their research. To what extent can a thorough reflection on researcher’s positionality be at the forefront of decolonizing the approaches to political participation in non-Western contexts? Continuer la lecture de Dynamics of Political Participation: Disciplinary knowledge through the prism of “area studies”

Reconstructing and Reimagining the Family: Health sciences and welfare on families in Southeastern Europe (1945-1989)

September 8, 2023

Athens, École Française d’Athènes

Organisers: École Française d’Athènes (EFA) //École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) // Centre de Recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé, Santé Mentale, Société (CERMES3)// COST Action “Who Cares in Europe”// Modern Greek History Research Centre, Academy of Athens// The Greek Network for the History of Health

At the end of the Second World War families all over Europe faced harsh realities: missing, killed, and injured members, loss of home and recourses, dislocation and separation. At the same time, “the family” was recognized as “the natural and fundamental group unit of society […] entitled to protection by society and the State”. It was placed at the foreground of a series of discourses and practices aiming at reconstructing Europe, and at guarantying its economic, political and social stability and progress. In a nutshell, the rebuilding and development of post-war societies went through the rebuilding of families, which was often envisioned as reform or even as “modernization” of the family. Subsequently, over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, political, economic and cultural changes had varied and profound effects on families and the notion of “the family”. These developments can be fruitfully explored from the perspective of health sciences and welfare interventions.

The workshop aspires to enrich and nuance our understanding of post-war visions of and approaches to the family through an original geographical and analytical lens. On the one hand, it will chart new research on the countries of the post-war Southeastern Europe (Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania and Turkey), which are understudied in comparison to Western European countries, and which are rarely examined together, owing to their different political systems and social policies. On the other hand, through the concept of health, a notion that was broadened in the post-war period to encompass not only the physical and mental, but also the social, the workshop embarks on a combined exploration of medical and social sciences, along with welfare professions, in shaping discourses and undertaking action on families.
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International Conference: A New-Old Neighbor. Turkish Republic & the Balkans

23-25 November 2023
Panteion University (Athens, Greece)

The Turkish Republic was the last nation-state with Balkan territories to emerge out of the ashes of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, as a result of long-term painful processes (internal conflicts, military occupations, forced migration, resistance and War of Independence) and on the basis of almost total rejection of the Ottoman past. The birth of the new state had significant consequences not only for the new Turkish citizens and the Turkish and Muslim minority populations in the Balkans, but also for all Balkan peoples and, more generally, for the geopolitical balance of
power in the region. The other Balkan states — defeated Bulgaria, newborn Albania and the territorially enlarged and transformed states like Greece, Romania and Yugoslavia, as well as colonial Cyprus — experienced an equally difficult period of transition and adaptation to the interwar world, following comparable or diverse management strategies of containing socio-economic challenges and political crises. Concerning the relations between Turkey and the other post-Ottoman countries, national historiographies have traditionally focused on bilateral diplomatic relations during the interwar period or issues concerning the Muslim minorities in the Balkans, the demographic “legacy as continuity” of the Ottoman era. There is room for fresh and innovative approaches to research on these issues. Yet, the conference aims to shift attention to the intellectual, cultural, social, and economic processes involving varying kinds of collective and individual actors and their reception of the emergence of the Turkish Republic in the various Balkan societies, and more specifically: Continuer la lecture de International Conference: A New-Old Neighbor. Turkish Republic & the Balkans

1922: In the Wake of the Death of an Empire: The archival journey of entrenched post-Ottoman minorities Workshop for scholars and archivists

Place: Istanbul, Turkey (Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations-ANAMED, Koç University)
Date: October 6, 2023
Deadline for submission: 30/03/2023

St. Sepulcre façade portes et personnages militaires, A. Reid. The Lenkin Family Collection of Photography, University of Pennsylvania Libraries

How does one apprehend the lives of Eastern Mediterranean minorities who managed, or were allowed to stay where they resided despite the upheavals brought by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire? On the face of it, the task might appear easier than the one facing scholars of actively persecuted populations. Traumatic events like the massacres and expulsions of Muslim and Christian populations from the Balkans and Anatolia that have marked the abolition of the Sultanate never say their name -often given to them subsequently by historians or activists- in the written record. The latter’s destruction was often indeed planned, an integral part of the nationalistic demographic engineering at work in these events. By contrast “minorities,” as were sometimes designated after the Great War ethnically distinct groups allowed to remain in the successor states of the Ottoman empire, are much more visible in the archive. Indeed, official concerns regarding their size, wealth, activities, and indeed loyalty, meant that they were constantly surveilled. In this sense, the written record contributed very much to fabricating minorities, namely discrete, legible, and ultimately controllable groups. This was not a uniquely top-down process, however. Minority groups themselves, using the official channels of communication available to them, and performing -sometimes tactically- the social function they had been ascribed as a strategy of survival in their interactions with state authorities or official and unofficial third parties, participated in the entrenchment of their identity.

Continuer la lecture de 1922: In the Wake of the Death of an Empire: The archival journey of entrenched post-Ottoman minorities Workshop for scholars and archivists

Séminaire de formation doctorale- Religion et politique

Séminaire de formation doctorale organisé par l’EFA, l’EFR, AMU, l’Université de Macédoine, l’Université de Trieste et le CETOBaC

Deuxième édition du cycle Les Balkans. Espaces, sociétés, histoire

Religion et politique : entre res publica et pratiques privées (Sud-Est européen, espace post-soviétique et Méditerranée orientale)

Lieu : Université de Macédoine, Thessalonique
Date : du 18 au 22 septembre 2023

Institutions partenaires : École française d’Athènes, École française de Rome, CETOBaC (UMR 8032 CNRS/EHESS), Université Aix-Marseille (Institut SoMuM, UMR 7303 TELEMMe AMU/CNRS), Università degli studi di Trieste, Laboratoire « Culture, Borders, Gender » de l’Université de Macédoine (Thessalonique).  

Date limite de candidature : 30 janvier 2023

Appel FR
Call for apllication EN

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Cinéma, Architecture et espace urbain dans les Balkans / Cinema, Architecture and Urban Space in the Balkans

Appel à propositions / Call for Papers

East European Film Bulletin -

East European Film Bulletin (Paris) – Special Issue on Cinema, Architecture and Urban Space in the Balkans”
Deadline for proposals (in English language): 15th of July 2022
Papers due: 1st of November 2022

Often unified by the concept of the “cinematic city”, different approaches in film studies tend to examine urban space through three main angles.
Films shot within the build environment may record – perhaps unwillingly its current dynamics, architecture and urban planning (city as
background), consciously use the representational value of specific places
for narrative purposes (as character) or directly comment on the
socio-political conditions and memories of a city (as subject). However, it
can be argued that most of these discussions eventually converge to a
double question: how does cinema reflect upon the past, present and
future of a city and how do films reinforce or contest narratives and myths and affect the collective urban experience.

Following our previous special issue on urban themes in Russian and
Soviet cinema, this year we turn our focus to the Balkans. Often described as the “other” of Europe, “insufficient European”, or a “specter haunting Western culture” (to use the Maria Todorova’s provocative description), the countries and people of the Balkan Peninsula more often than not are seen as a geographic and culturally unified unit of measurement, against which Europeans can prove their superiority. The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent Balkan wars as well as breakup of Yugoslavia, led the newly formed Balkan states to assert distinct national identities, mainly structured around religion and language. The collective amnesia of a multiethnic past is however negated in everyday practices where cultural footprints proliferate (linguistic and culinary p.e.), the result of a century-long multicultural blend and the Ottoman presence in the region.

The special issue is intended to discuss Balkan urban space and
architecture through a cinematic perspective, and further explore
elements linking urban studies with film studies. We are particularly
interested in contributions discussing fiction films or documentaries
focused on specific urban spaces of the Balkans, significant
constructions, major cities or lesser-known towns and villages. We are
also interested in itinerary films that map the peninsula through their
passage from different built environments.
Suggested topics (non-exhaustive list):

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