Archives par mot-clé : Associations

EFA- 10/04/2025- #SemMod Associational life as public sociality

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/

Programme 2025

Hybrid seminar

École française d’Athènes, Didotou 6

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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.

Séminaire – Voluntary Associations and Social Movements in 20th-Century Yugoslavia

 

What is a Voluntary Association? Rethinking Associational Life from Southeastern Europe: Concepts, Archives and Perspectives
Seminar #1

jeudi 20 mars 2025    
18:00-EET
École française d’Athènes
Didotou 6, Athens, 10680

Beyond Dichotomies: Voluntary Associations and Social Movements in 20th-Century Yugoslavia

Fabio Giomi CNRS, CETOBaC
Melvin Bernard EHESS, CETOBaC
Jovana Papovic EHESS, CETOBaC
Ana Otasevic EHESS, CETOBaC
Lucie Raskin INALCO, CREE

In collaboration with the CETOBaC and the Modern Greek History Research Center of the Academy of Athens

#SemMod
Programme 2025

Abstract

This seminar aims to revisit the research conducted over the past ten years within the CETOBaC Balkans cluster on voluntary associations and social movements. Particular attention will be given to the seminar For a History of Social Movements in Southeastern Europe (19th-20th Century), led for four years at EHESS by Fabio Giomi and Nathalie Clayer, as well as to several publications involving members of the group: Fabio Giomi, Stefano Petrungaro (eds.), Voluntary Associations in Yugoslavia, 1918-1941, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, Special Issue, 26, 1, 2019; Fabio Giomi, Célia Keren, and Morgane Labbé (eds.), Public and Private Welfare in Modern Europe: Productive Entanglements, Routledge, London, 2022; and Fabio Giomi, Lukas Posselt (eds.), Qu’est-ce qu’une association ? Pratiques volontaires, pratiques documentaires, 1870-1960, 20-21. Revue d’histoire, forthcoming. Building on these works, the seminar organizers will seek to demonstrate, through their respective case studies, how research on Southeastern Europe can contribute to destabilizing several dichotomies that continue to shape global historiography on voluntary associations—such as public-private, East-West, and liberal-illiberal divides.

About the seminar cycle

This seminar cycle aims to bring together a network of scholars at different career stages and institutional affiliations who share a common interest in two key aspects: first, the study of voluntary associations; and second, a regional focus on Southeastern Europe, with particular attention to Greece and the (post-)Yugoslav region in the 20th and 21st centuries. Despite Southeastern Europe’s reputation for being less inclined toward civic engagement, recent research—including our own—has highlighted the central role of voluntary associations (udruženje/удружење or društvo/друштво in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and σύλλογοι or εθελοντικές οργανώσεις in Greek) in shaping social and political life since their emergence in the 19th century. Given the region’s profound socio-political transformations throughout the 20th century—ranging from imperial rule to nation-state formation, from liberal democracy to right-wing dictatorship and to “real socialism”—this project seeks to integrate Southeastern Europe into the global history of associations.
Over the course of three sessions, members of this research network will present recently published and ongoing research on the trajectories of volunteering and associational engagement. We will explore how individuals and groups navigated and shaped these networks over time, focussing on the lived experiences of association members and the interplay between personal agency, institutional structures, and broader social transformations. This seminar cycle aims to foster a dialogue on the key research questions driving participants’ work, the concepts they mobilize, and the sources available for studying associational life.

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

Fabio Giomi, Making Muslim Women European, Voluntary Associations, Islam, And Gender in Post-Ottoman Bosnia and Yugoslavia (1878–1941), Budapest, CEU Press, 2021 (410p., €90.00)

 

This social, cultural, and political history of Slavic Muslim women of the Yugoslav region in the first decades of the post-Ottoman era is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the issues confronting these women. It is based on a study of voluntary associations (philanthropic, cultural, Islamic-traditionalist, and feminist) of the period.

It is broadly held that Muslim women were silent and relegated to a purely private space until 1945, when the communist state “unveiled” and “liberated” them from the top down. After systematic archival research in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and Austria, Fabio Giomi challenges this view by showing: • How different sectors of the Yugoslav elite through association publications, imagined the role of Muslim women in post-Ottoman times, and how Muslim women took part in the construction or the contestation of these narratives. • How associa­tions employed different means in order to forge a generation of “New Muslim Women” able to cope with the post-Ottoman political and social circumstances. • And how Muslim women used the tools provided by the associations in order to pursue their own projects, aims and agendas. The insights are relevant for today’s challenges facing Muslim women in Europe. The text is illustrated with exceptional photographs.

 

Continuer la lecture de Fabio Giomi, Making Muslim Women European, Voluntary Associations, Islam, And Gender in Post-Ottoman Bosnia and Yugoslavia (1878–1941), Budapest, CEU Press, 2021 (410p., €90.00)