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Wednesday, 22. February 2023


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Aktuality

30. 3. 2023 to 31. 3. 2023
Call for Papers: “Minority science” in the short 20th century: Imagining science from the margins of academia. 30-31 March 2023, Prague
Call for Papers: “Minority science” in the short 20th century: Imagining science from the margins of academia. 30-31 March 2023, Prague

Call for Papers: “Minority science” in the short 20th century: Imagining science from the margins of academia. 30-31 March 2023, Prague

Datum konání:
30. 3. 2023, 0:00 to 31. 3. 2023, 0:00
When the roars of World War I went silent, the process of redrawing social, cultural, and geographic borders began. Gradually, continental empires seemed a thing of the past, and the idea of the national state seemed to have prevailed – even if overseas empires still remained strong. Socialism became a legitimate approach in academia, with various versions in different countries. Women were increasingly accepted as academics and researchers, a process proceeding at different speeds across the globe.

The process of redrawing and rethinking was obviously a slow one, with a wide geographical variety. In Central Europe, states born from empires were multicultural but not automatically open to scholars of other national identifications/loyalties. Czechoslovakia, home to Czech, Slovak, German, Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish scholars, can be contrasted with Poland, where more Ukrainian scholars taught at clandestine institutions than at official ones. Other countries, like France or Great Britain, retained their colonies and followed policies of imperial othering. Depending on the country and political situation, Socialist scholars could be part of the academia or expelled from it due to their convictions (Horthy-Era Hungary or McCarthy-Era USA). In Socialist countries, on the contrary, liberal but also conservative scholars were excluded or at least othered.

While historians often look at these processes based on the binary exclusion versus inclusion, others have claimed that being an “other” can also be a privilege, allowing a more distant and critical perception of one’s surrounding society. Michel Foucault, Simone Weil, and Jacques Derrida are examples of scholars for whom the outsider position is more a blessing than a curse. A less prominent example is Stefan Baley (Stepan Balej), Polish-Ukrainian psychologist, the author of a number of publications on personality and science. “Minority,” “other,” or “otherness” are of course not innocent concepts, yet they are not set in stone either; they mix legality, ascription, self-perception, numbers, statistics, and individual biographies. Therefore, an integral part of our endeavour is to uncover how (academic) power relations are entangled with those in the society at large.

Our conference wants to look at how cultural outsiders, émigrés, refugees, and members of minorities imagined the sciences and their own position in them. We are interested in contributions discussing scholars who were (and/or regarded themselves as) outsiders/minorities on account of their cultural, gender, political or social identifications. Questions include, but are not limited to:

How did minority scholars see their position within academic scholarship and its institutions? How did they define their minority-ness and otherness (e.g. representatives of “small nations” seeing themselves as a minor part of international science, members of ethnic and/or national minorities within nationalising states, etc.).

What strategies did these scholars pursue to meet their goals (epistemic, political, career-oriented)?

What alternative epistemologies did minority scholars develop or propose? How did they respond to epistemic proposals by mainstream scholars?

How did minority institutions position themselves to the state-dominant institutions?

How did minority and majority scholars differ in their strategies of asserting credibility, building networks, publishing, etc.? For instance, did they demonstratively publish in mainstream media to assert their status within the state, did they search for alternatives, or both?

Can we talk about the specificity of a “minority science,” and how can the mainstream science narrative – our received narrative – be challenged through it?

Please send your abstract of no more than 350 words and a short biographical note by ~~15 October 2022~~ to Jan Surman (surman@mua.cas.cz).

DEADLINE EXTENDED! New deadline 24 October 2022.

The conference is organised by the project “Images of science” in Czechoslovakia 1918-1945-1968, financed by Lumina Quaeruntur fellowship of the Czech Academy of Sciences and hosted by the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

The conference will take place 30–31 March 2023, in Prague, Czech Republic. Travel costs and accommodations for speakers will be provided. We plan the conference to be in person. Language of the conference is English.

[Image: Professors and students of the Faculty of Law and Social and Economic Sciences of the UVU in Munich. 1948 originally printed in "Golden Jubilee of the Ukrainian Free University" Cleveland-Ohio, 1972. Here from Central State Archives of Foreign Archival Ucrainica (TsDAZU), general fond, inv. No. 911]

Call for Papers (PDF)
6. 11. 2023 to 10. 11. 2023
Conference: Lessons & Legacies Europe. Bridging Disciplines, Histories, and Cultures
Conference: Lessons & Legacies Europe. Bridging Disciplines, Histories, and Cultures

Conference: Lessons & Legacies Europe. Bridging Disciplines, Histories, and Cultures

Datum konání:
6. 11. 2023, 0:00 to 10. 11. 2023, 0:00
Prague, 6-10 November 2023

Taking place in Prague, Czech Republic, the 2023 Lessons & Legacies Conference will be the first to be conducted in East-Central Europe, a region in which Nazi occupation and racial policies intersected with competing nationalisms, shifting borders, and the sovereignty of new nation states. It will be the second European iteration of the conference series, after the 2019 Lessons & Legacies Conference in Munich.

Taking its location as a point of departure, but not limiting the geographical scope of conference presentations, we invite proposals that investigate the crossings of boundaries of various kinds, including national and group or community histories as well as scholarly disciplines. Combining a thematic and a methodological track, the Prague Lessons & Legacies Conference aims to promote scholarly debate on the manifold divides and connections that exist in Holocaust studies.

Sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University, Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, the German Federal Agency for Civic Education, Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and the Charles University, the conference invites proposals for papers, panels, and workshops. Proposals should relate to recent issues and advances in Holocaust scholarship, Holocaust education, and Public History and should conform broadly to the two tracks of the conference:

Situating the history of the persecution, exclusion and flight, deportation, and murder of Jews and Roma on a broader map of ethnic and other cleavages and conflicts in East-Central Europe and beyond, remains a research challenge and a point of contention in public debate. Probing sites of competing victimhood, the study of the Holocaust faces the question of how to fruitfully integrate the histories of occupation, national histories of antisemitism, racism and ethnic conflict. We welcome proposals that address and incorporate the histories of migration, including refugees and displaced persons, or which challenge the often prevalent methodological nationalism of history writing. This thematic track aims to place the Holocaust and its aftermath in its wider contexts and to engage with the variety of histories of exclusionary processes and mass violence in diverse societies. It may include analyses of how this troubled past is used or weaponized in recent conflicts.

The methodological track aims to probe and challenge disciplinary boundaries in order to advance multidisciplinary inquiries into the Holocaust. We invite proposals examining the connection of Holocaust Studies to a variety of other research fields and disciplines, including, but not limited to social sciences, culture, and memory studies. This track includes the exploration of methodological connections when it comes to placing the Holocaust into the context of social, cultural, linguistical, and ethnic diversity to colonial, postcolonial and decolonial studies. We welcome contributions from the field of digital humanities, digital history, and the emerging quantitative studies on the Holocaust, using large prosopographic and other datasets. We also welcome papers that challenge both established and new disciplinary approaches to the study of the Holocaust.

Submission Deadline: 15 December 2022

Conference sessions include several formats as outlined below. Submissions should clearly aim at one of these formats.

Individual Papers should include title and abstract (up to 300 words) and a CV (max. 1 page). Individual submissions will be grouped into appropriate thematic panels by the conference chairs/organizers.

Conference Panels will consist of three to four papers and a moderator. Each paper proposal should include title and abstract (up to 300 words) and a CV (max. 1 page). Proposals for full panels should additionally include the panel title and a brief description of the full session (up to 300 words).

Workshops consisting of one or two presenters should focus on particular questions, approaches or sources. Workshops are intended to be interactive and practical, highlighting (for example) a new pedagogical approach, research question, or method; curricular innovations; or creative ways to examine and interpret artifacts or texts both in research and the classroom. Conference organizers will prioritize proposals centered on participation and discussion.

Registered participants will not be charged with fees for the conference or the visiting program. To the extent possible, financial assistance towards travel and accommodation costs for conference presenters will be provided. Priority is given to graduate students, faculty at teaching-oriented colleges not offering research support, staff members at memorial sites without institutional funding, and scholars with unusually high travel costs. Instructions for funding applications will be posted once the conference program is finalized.

Program Committee:

Ildikó Barna (Eötvös Loránd University)

Sarah Cushman (Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University)

Michal Frankl (Masaryk Institute and Archives, Czech Academy of Sciences)

Hana Kubátová (Charles University)

Zuzana Schreiberová (Multicultural Center Prague)

Anna Ullrich (Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History)

Amy Wlodarski (Dickinson College)

Florian Zabransky (Federal Agency for Civic Education)

All proposals must be submitted online via the Lessons & Legacies ConfTool conference system.

Questions regarding registration and submission can be addressed to lessons@mua.cas.cz.

Address

Masarykův ústav a Archiv AV ČR, v. v. i.

Gabčíkova 2362/10
Praha 8
182 00
Czech Republic

tel: +420 286 010 110
e-mail: mua@mua.cas.cz

Registration number: 67985921
VAT ID: CZ67985921
IBAN: CZ48 5500 0000 0076 5427 0028
BIC/SWIFT: RZBCCZPP

Primary tabs

Wednesday, 22. February 2023

30. 3. 2023 to 31. 3. 2023

Call for Papers: “Minority science” in the short 20th century: Imagining science from the margins of academia. 30-31 March 2023, Prague

6. 11. 2023 to 10. 11. 2023

Conference: Lessons & Legacies Europe. Bridging Disciplines, Histories, and Cultures