This CENTRAL Workshop is a trilateral cooperation between the University of Vienna, Charles University Prague and ELTE Budapest.
Venue: room TBA, Charles University of Prague.
Humans are in constant motion, and so are things and ideas. These 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.
The workshops build on two already existing bilateral collaborations between RECET and the Institute of International Studies at Charles University on the one hand (with the present co-applicant Valeriya Korablyova & professors Tomáš Nigrin and Ota Konrád), and RECET and the history of globalization research group at ELTE on the other. The present workshop will deepen both collaborations and join them into a wider network of scholars working on issues of mobility, thus strengthening multilateral connections among CENTRAL partner universities.
