This CENTRAL Workshop is a trilateral cooperation between the University of Vienna, Charles University Prague and ELTE Budapest.
Venues and program: See below
Humans are in constant motion, and so are things and ideas. Two trilateral workshops in Vienna and Prague will bring together junior and senior scholars working on human movement & migration and on the circulation of goods and ideas to explore the development of new transnational perspectives on the history of Central and Eastern Europe in its global context. They will link up and deepen existing collaborations between the partners on topics of connections and movement in the socialist world and on trade during the Cold War, tying them in with new formats of doctoral education at the University of Vienna.
The workshops bring together different scholars working on the issue of mobility in a broad sense of the term: mobility of people, goods, and ideas. They connect to a broader trend in recent transnational and global historiography, which seeks to connect different strands of research on cross-border movements and connections of human and non-human actors and agents. The workshops thereby also explicitly build on two previous workshops hosted at RECET, which dealt with mobilities and connections in the socialist world (2022) and with commodities, trade, and materiality during the Cold War (2023), combining perspectives on movement with those on materiality. The geographic focus will mainly be on Central and Eastern Europe, embedded in global and comparative contexts.
The core teams of researchers from the three partner universities will include five PhD students in total. They will present their ongoing research in the workshops alongside more senior scholars, who will offer their comments and advice. In addition to the core teams of this application who will travel to both workshops, we will involve other scholars from our respective institutions to participate on-site (without need for funding), both as paper-givers and to act as chairs and commentators. At the University of Vienna, this will allow us close integration of the workshop with the Doctoral School for Historical and Cultural Studies (DSHCS), the new FWF doc.funds project "The Dynamics of Change and the Logics of Transformation", and the Migration Reading Group (a RECET research group funded by the dean's office). At Charles University, we will draw on further scholars from Institute of International Studies and especially the Ukraine in A Changing Europe Research Centre.
Workshop Program:
Thursday, 12.12. (Venue: Alte Kapelle, University of Vienna Campus, Hof 2.8)
10:00 - 10:30: Welcome and Introductory Remarks
10:30 - 12:00: Panel 1 – Post-Soviet Migrant Experiences
- Alexander Schneidmesser (RECET): Between prejudice(s) and shared experiences. The interethnic relationship between post-Soviet Jews and post-Soviet Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany from the 1990s until the present day in Berlin
- Jannis Panagiotidis (RECET): “Privileged” Migrants? Comparing the Experiences of Spätaussiedler and Refugees from Ukraine
Chair: Valeriya Korablyova (Charles University)
12:00 - 13:00: Lunch (catering in the seminar room)
13:00 - 14:30: Keynote
Chair: Jannis Panagiotidis (RECET)
15:00 - 16:30: Panel 2 – Socialist Encounters
- Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu (RECET): Between the Heroic and the Mundane: The Vietnamese Presence in state Socialist Poland
- Zsombor Bódy (ELTE Budapest): Ideas in the Minds of Travelling Socialist Professionals
Chair: Tomáš Nigrin (Charles University)
18:00: Conference dinner (Café Merkur, Florianigasse 18, 1080 Wien)
Friday, 13.12. (Venue: DSHCS Offices, University of Vienna Campus, Hof 1.11)
09:00 - 10:30: Panel 3 – Non-/Post-Socialist Encounters
- Leo Stauber (Charles University): From Steyr to Bauchi: Austrian Experiences in Nigeria
- Valeriya Korablyova (Charles University): Migration as a "Contact Zone": Cultural Encounters and Cultural Diplomacy in the Wake of the Russo-Ukrainian War
Chair: Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu (RECET)
11:00 - 12:30: Panel 4 – Cold War Migration
- Daniel Jerke (RECET): Precarious Privileges: Polish Refugees between Poland, Austria and Canada in the long 1980s
- Kinga Alina Langowska (Charles University): Polish Diasporas in the USA during the Cold War
Chair: Márkus Keller (ELTE Budapest)
12:30 - 14:00: Lunch (SOLO Pizza, University Campus)
14:00 - 15:30: Panel 5 – Regulating Migration
- Philipp Moritz (RECET): The Austrian Wanderungsamt 1919-1939. The Control of Emigration of Austrian Workers in the Context of International Labour Markets in the Interwar Period
- Daria Tashkinova (RECET): “Assignments to Towns of Provincial Importance”: Labour Migration, Empire-Building and the Job Assignment System in the Late Soviet Union
Chair: Zsuzsanna Kiss (ELTE Budapest)
