This CENTRAL Workshop is a trilateral cooperation between the University of Vienna, Charles University Prague and ELTE Budapest.
Venue: Charles University of Prague, Campus Jinonice, Prague, Czechia
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.
Workshop Program
Thursday, 13 March
10:00 – 10:30 – registration, welcome coffee
10:30 – 11:00 – opening words (Tomáš Nigrin / Jannis Panagiotidis / Valeria Korablyova)
11:00 – 12:00 - Panel “Transnational entanglements in local contexts: the case of Germany”
Chair – Zsombor Bódy (ELTE, Budapest)
Jannis Panagiotidis (RECET, U of Vienna) "Migration, Mobility, and Transformation in a Small West German Town, 1945-2025“
Alexander Schneidmesser (RECET, U of Vienna) "Between prejudice(s) and shared experiences. Interethnic relations between post-Soviet Jews and post-Soviet Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany, from the 1990s to the present, in the Stuttgart Metropolitan Region."
12:00 – 13:00 - Panel “Gendered migration: activism and/or victimhood?”
Chair – Valeria Korablyova (IMS, Charles U)
Kinga Alina Langowska (IMS, Charles U) "Silent Victims or Hidden Leaders? The Fate of Women Left Behind After Political Emigration"
Ecem Nazlı Üçok (ISS, Charles U) "Feminist Diaspora Activism from Poland and Turkey: Resisting Authoritarianism, Anti-Gender Politics, and Reimagining Solidarity Beyond Western Frameworks in the CEE and SWANA Regions."
13:00 – 14:00 – lunch break
14:00 – 15:00 – Panel “Blending art and (geo)politics: cultural diplomacy in wartime Ukraine”
Chair – Irena Remestwenski (RECET, U of Vienna)
Sofia Nyblom (Uppsala U / IMS, Charles U) ”Migration, occupation and exile: Ukrainian playwrights bearing witness”
Valeria Korablyova (IMS, Charles U / CEFRES) “Musical diplomacy of an endangered nation: Ukraine at the Eurovision Song Contest”
15:00 – 15:30 – coffee break
15:30 – 16:30 – Panel “Transnational feminism in the East European context”
Chair - Markus Keller (ELTE, Budapest)
Alexandra Ghiț (RECET, U of Vienna) “A Context where one may dare to work for peace”. War
and Peace in the Political Thought of Feminist Women in Romania Placed in Transnational Perspective (1925–1935)”
Ana Kozelnik (RECET, U of Vienna) “A Latecomer Among Yugoslav Feminisms? Feminist Textual Interventions in Slovenia, 1982-1990”
16:30 – 17:30 - Panel “Mental health and economic strength: from Habsburg Monarchy to the EU Hungary”
Chair – Jannis Panagiotidis (RECET, U of Vienna)
Mátyás Erdélyi (CEFRES, Prague) “Bank Clerks, Economic Rationality, and Capitalism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy: A Social History Perspective (1890-1914)”
Gergely Magos (ELTE, Budapest) “Hungarian Insanity: Nation and Mental Illness in Hungarian Medical Discourse”
19:00 – dinner
Friday, 14 March
10:00 – 11:00 - Panel “Labor migration in the Cold War era”
Chair - Gergely Magos (ELTE, Budapest)
Ondřej Klípa (IMS, Charles U) “Polish builders in Communist Czechoslovakia”
Lars Kravagna (RECET, U of Vienna) „Labor Migration beyond the Anwerbestopp? Employment of posted workers in the FRG, 1973-1988“ – online
11:00 – 12:00 - Panel “Mines & arms: sectoral labor migration in a historical perspective”
Chair – Ondřej Klípa(IMS, Charles U)
Philipp Moritz (RECET, U of Vienna) "No passports for miners? Objections to the emigration of Austrian miners between 1919 and 1926"
Leo Stauber (IMS, Charles U) "No tanks for fascists!" – Chilean exiles and the 1980 protests against Austria's arms exports”
12:00 – 12:30 – coffee break
12:30 – 13:45 – keynote lecture – Ioana Cîrstocea (EHESS/CEFRES) “Contentious Feminisms: Learning Gender after the Cold War” - TBC
Chair – Valeria Korablyova (IMS, Charles U / CEFRES)
14:00 – lunch
