Location:
Marietta Blau-Saal, Universität Wien,
Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien

In the opening essay of the 2017 issue of DIK Fagazine, its editor, Karol Radziszewski, contemplates the diverse ways of demarcating Central and/or Eastern Europe, asking: ‘Eastern Europe? Central-Eastern Europe? Central and Eastern Europe? East Central and South-East Europe? Eastern Europe, Northern and Central Asia? The Baltics? The Balkans? Europe?’ Reflections on the geographical, political and cultural borders maintained in research in area studies remain crucial for overcoming the theoretical and methodological limits of our analyses. If it is the existence of a particular area that brings us together as scholars of history, politics, society, media, literature, arts and languages where do we start and where do stop our studies of Central and/or Eastern European contexts? In this talk, I will reflect on several ways in which scholars conceptualise Central/Eastern Europe and I will foreground a transnational approach to the study of culture. I will draw on my research into queer print cultures in Poland in the 1980s and their cross-border links to think about cultures as provisional assemblages of multiple and entangled scales that co-create each other.

Łukasz Szulc (he/him) is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture at the University of Manchester, UK. He specializes in critical and cultural studies of digital media at the intersections of gender, sexuality and transnationalism with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland. His publications include a monograph Transnational Homosexuals in Communist Poland: Cross-Border Flows in Gay and Lesbian Magazines (Palgrave, 2018), an edited collection LGBTQs, Media and Culture in Europe (Routledge, 2016) and articles in such journals as Sociology, Sexualities and New Media & Society. Łukasz sat on the board of directors at the International Communication Association (ICA) and was a co-chair of ICA’s LGBTQ Studies interest group between 2017 and 2021. He is a member of editorial boards at the International Journal of Cultural Studies, International Journal of Communication, and Communication, Culture & Critique.

To register for the public lecture, contact: rasa.navickaite(at)univie.ac.at

This lecture is a part of the workshop "Queering Modernization in Eastern Europe: Deviant Sexualities, Gender Regimes, and the Limits of State Control" (University of Vienna, June 29-30, 2023).

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101025145, and the Research platform "Transformations and Eastern Europe," University of Vienna.