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The Stage of Pre-solidarity
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Seminars and Colloquia
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Tomasz RakowskiMiloš Vec
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
Tomasz Rakowski's experimental study may reveal elements of recent Polish social history omitted in local knowledge-production. He will focus on enthusiastic building, social deeds, vernacular creativity, and various stages of pre-solidarity in Poland since late socialism. He will discuss the flipside of late socialist modernization in Poland, and its trajectory after 1989, considered as both intimate, unrecognized dimensions of bottom-up statehood practices, and processes of acquiring a kind of latent, almost invisible social and political subjectivity. An experimental, historical-ethnographic methodology may unearth elements of Polish social history kept secret for decades. The study is conducted in the context of the “people’s history”, yet more precise, and based on specially elaborated methodology.
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
Tomasz Rakowski's experimental study may reveal elements of recent Polish social history omitted in local knowledge-production. He will focus on enthusiastic building, social deeds, vernacular creativity, and various stages of pre-solidarity in Poland since late socialism. He will discuss the flipside of late socialist modernization in Poland, and its trajectory after 1989, considered as both intimate, unrecognized dimensions of bottom-up statehood practices, and processes of acquiring a kind of latent, almost invisible social and political subjectivity. An experimental, historical-ethnographic methodology may unearth elements of Polish social history kept secret for decades. The study is conducted in the context of the “people’s history”, yet more precise, and based on specially elaborated methodology.
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Religious Perspectives on Global Solidarity in the Era of Global Crises
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Seminars and Colloquia
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Clemena AntonovaLudger Hagedorn
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
All three global crises of recent times – the financial crisis of 2008, the refugee crisis, and now the coronavirus crisis – have been, among other things, tests of solidarity. But what is it that decides in a concrete situation, whether solidarity is extended to those in need or not? Especially interesting are those cases, when people feel forced to make difficult choices between solidarity to one group versus solidarity to another. The talk tried to distinguish between two concepts of solidarity, one that could be called civic solidarity (to one’s family, friends, compatriots, etc.) and another one offering a broader sense of global solidarity (to all human beings as such).
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
All three global crises of recent times – the financial crisis of 2008, the refugee crisis, and now the coronavirus crisis – have been, among other things, tests of solidarity. But what is it that decides in a concrete situation, whether solidarity is extended to those in need or not? Especially interesting are those cases, when people feel forced to make difficult choices between solidarity to one group versus solidarity to another. The talk tried to distinguish between two concepts of solidarity, one that could be called civic solidarity (to one’s family, friends, compatriots, etc.) and another one offering a broader sense of global solidarity (to all human beings as such).
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The Importance of Being Funny
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Seminars and Colloquia
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Ludger HagedornMila Ganeva
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
This talk was part of a book project on the cultural history of Jewish artistic presence in German-speaking cabaret and film in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. (During her fellowship at the IWM, Mila Ganeva was researching materials at the Austrian Exile Archive at ÖNB and the Österreichisches Kabarettarchiv in Graz.) In this presentation for the colloquium, she focused on a representative figure of cabaret and film, the German-Jewish comedian Siegfried Arno. Arno, who was labeled by contemporaries “our Buster Keaton”, was enormously successful on both the cabaret stage and the silver screen. In the 1920s, Arno and many of his colleagues were also at the centre of the so-called “cabaret wars”, as they were accused (and often sued) by the Centralverein of the German Citizens of the Jewish Faith of excessive use of Jewish jokes and fuelling antisemitism. The presentation reviewed Arno’s role in the very public debate about Jews in cabaret and film, and explored some of his actual performances in films as well as on the stage of the Kabarett der Komiker.
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
This talk was part of a book project on the cultural history of Jewish artistic presence in German-speaking cabaret and film in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. (During her fellowship at the IWM, Mila Ganeva was researching materials at the Austrian Exile Archive at ÖNB and the Österreichisches Kabarettarchiv in Graz.) In this presentation for the colloquium, she focused on a representative figure of cabaret and film, the German-Jewish comedian Siegfried Arno. Arno, who was labeled by contemporaries “our Buster Keaton”, was enormously successful on both the cabaret stage and the silver screen. In the 1920s, Arno and many of his colleagues were also at the centre of the so-called “cabaret wars”, as they were accused (and often sued) by the Centralverein of the German Citizens of the Jewish Faith of excessive use of Jewish jokes and fuelling antisemitism. The presentation reviewed Arno’s role in the very public debate about Jews in cabaret and film, and explored some of his actual performances in films as well as on the stage of the Kabarett der Komiker.
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Dilemmas of Popular Sovereignty: Tocqueville’s Perspective
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Seminars and Colloquia
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Aishwary KumarEwa Atanassow
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
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Whose Story? Which Sacrifice?
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Seminars and Colloquia
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Ludger HagedornMarci Shore
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
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Denial, Ignorance and Wilful Unknowing: The Episteme of the Israeli Occupation
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Seminars and Colloquia
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Merav AmirMieke Verloo
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
To the external onlooker, a puzzling predicament plagues Israeli politics. While the majority of Jewish-Israelis state that they support reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians abiding by the two-state solution, this public still has been repeatedly electing leaders who oppose reaching such an agreement for over two decades to date. Most often, this apparent anomaly is explained through the disillusion of Jewish-Israelis from the peace process, which has swayed the Israeli electoral power towards nationalistic hardliners. However, a more fundamental change has occurred in this period, rendering the question of the position of the Jewish-Israeli electorate towards peace obsolete. Accordingly, Jewish-Israelis are increasingly becoming ignorant regarding the causes fueling regional hostilities: that Israel maintains an occupation, and that Israel is holding millions of Palestinians as occupied subjects under a military rule. This talk explored the political technologies and discursive strategies through which this ignorance has been induced, and how the politico-spatiality of the occupied Palestinian territory has so successfully been eradicated from the collective Israeli consciousness. Through this analysis Merav Amir demonstrated that this epistemic reshaping has not only reconfigured the geography of the Israeli polity for this public, but has also warped the region’s political time, and disrupted the State’s own political trajectory, as it bestows the (presumed) future eventuality onto the present.
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
To the external onlooker, a puzzling predicament plagues Israeli politics. While the majority of Jewish-Israelis state that they support reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians abiding by the two-state solution, this public still has been repeatedly electing leaders who oppose reaching such an agreement for over two decades to date. Most often, this apparent anomaly is explained through the disillusion of Jewish-Israelis from the peace process, which has swayed the Israeli electoral power towards nationalistic hardliners. However, a more fundamental change has occurred in this period, rendering the question of the position of the Jewish-Israeli electorate towards peace obsolete. Accordingly, Jewish-Israelis are increasingly becoming ignorant regarding the causes fueling regional hostilities: that Israel maintains an occupation, and that Israel is holding millions of Palestinians as occupied subjects under a military rule. This talk explored the political technologies and discursive strategies through which this ignorance has been induced, and how the politico-spatiality of the occupied Palestinian territory has so successfully been eradicated from the collective Israeli consciousness. Through this analysis Merav Amir demonstrated that this epistemic reshaping has not only reconfigured the geography of the Israeli polity for this public, but has also warped the region’s political time, and disrupted the State’s own political trajectory, as it bestows the (presumed) future eventuality onto the present.
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The EU Periphery and Revisionist Powers
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Seminars and Colloquia
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Dimitar BechevIvan Vejvoda
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
Starting with the annexation of Crimea in the spring of 2014, scholars and analysts have been debating the standoff between the West and competitors such as Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, and lately China on Europe’s periphery. “The return of geopolitics” has become a standard phrase to describe the new moment in the international politics of Eastern and Southeast Europe. A contrast is drawn with the 2000s, the highmark of the European Union’s “transformative power” and NATO’s eastward expansion. But the top-down view highlighting the preferences and actions of big players, including core EU member states like Germany and France, Russia, Turkey etc. overlooks the critical role played by peripheral countries and their elites. Rather than being the object of great powers’ decisions, they manipulate rivalries in pursuit of political advantage. Though the domestic arena provides entry points for external actors’ influence it also empowers incumbent elites in the target countries. The talk drew on examples from Southeast Europe (the Western Balkans, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece) but drew parallels to the post-Soviet space.
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
Starting with the annexation of Crimea in the spring of 2014, scholars and analysts have been debating the standoff between the West and competitors such as Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, and lately China on Europe’s periphery. “The return of geopolitics” has become a standard phrase to describe the new moment in the international politics of Eastern and Southeast Europe. A contrast is drawn with the 2000s, the highmark of the European Union’s “transformative power” and NATO’s eastward expansion. But the top-down view highlighting the preferences and actions of big players, including core EU member states like Germany and France, Russia, Turkey etc. overlooks the critical role played by peripheral countries and their elites. Rather than being the object of great powers’ decisions, they manipulate rivalries in pursuit of political advantage. Though the domestic arena provides entry points for external actors’ influence it also empowers incumbent elites in the target countries. The talk drew on examples from Southeast Europe (the Western Balkans, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece) but drew parallels to the post-Soviet space.
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Forced Immobility and Forced Mobility During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Rethinking the Notion of Forced Migration
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Seminars and Colloquia
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Ayşe ÇağlarSandro Mezzadra
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
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The Remains of the Real
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Seminars and Colloquia
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Jan SowaLudger Hagedorn
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
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Hagia Sophia as Symbol and Hostage of Actual Politics
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Seminars and Colloquia
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Alexey LidovAyşe ÇağlarClemena Antonova
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
On 10 July 2020, by a decree of the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the basilica of Hagia Sophia – the central monument of the Byzantine Empire and the entire Orthodox world – was turned from a museum into a mosque. The conversion attracted worldwide attention and the leaders of the US, the EU and Russia, as well as most international institutions, appealed to Erdoğan not to go ahead with the plan. However, all the warnings were ignored and the first festive Muslim service was held on 24 July, with the country’s leadership in attendance. In this talk, various aspects of the conversion of Hagia Sophia, including political, religious, cultural and art-historical issues of this most significant event, were discussed.
Read more
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Series: Seminars and Colloquia
On 10 July 2020, by a decree of the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the basilica of Hagia Sophia – the central monument of the Byzantine Empire and the entire Orthodox world – was turned from a museum into a mosque. The conversion attracted worldwide attention and the leaders of the US, the EU and Russia, as well as most international institutions, appealed to Erdoğan not to go ahead with the plan. However, all the warnings were ignored and the first festive Muslim service was held on 24 July, with the country’s leadership in attendance. In this talk, various aspects of the conversion of Hagia Sophia, including political, religious, cultural and art-historical issues of this most significant event, were discussed.
Read more
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