10/04/2025- 18.00 EEST
What is a Voluntary Association? Rethinking Associational Life from Southeastern Europe: Concepts, Archives and Perspectives
Seminar #2
Associational life as public sociality: Α research project, a database, a case study
Efi Avdela University of Crete
Despo Kritsotaki Academy of Athens
Dimitra Lampropoulou University of Athens
In collaboration with the CETOBaC, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Modern Greek History Research Center of the Academy of Athens
https://www.efa.gr/events/semmod-10-4-25/
Hybrid seminar
École française d’Athènes, Didotou 6
Follow online / Suivre en ligne
This seminar engages with the concept of “public sociality”, which encompasses different forms of collective public action, both formal and informal. Based on the research conducted within the project “Forms of public sociality in 20th-century urban Greece: associations, networks of social intervention and collective subjectivities”, the seminar highlights the main theoretical and methodological aspects of “public sociality”, presents the associations’ database created within the aforementioned project, and delves into a more specific paradigm, the case of Greek mental health related associations from the 1950s to the 1980s. With this tripartite structure we intend to flesh out the notion of public sociality and discuss the concepts, sources and methodologies we can use to examine collective identities and action in the 20th century. Among the main themes of the seminar are the meanings of collective subjectivity as envisioned by the subjects themselves and the agents they interacted with; the conceptualisation and transformation of the boundaries between private and public and state and non-state; and the political dimensions of voluntary action.