IAS-Fellows-beliv-WEB-2020-10-12

—

Institute for

Advanced

Study

at

Central

European

University

fellows

2020—2021

p.2 IAS CEU Fellows

István Pál ÁDÁM

Larissa BUCHHOLZ

Gina CAISON

Mary COX

Tyrell Caroline HABERKORN

Stephan HAGGARD

Zsuzsa HETÉNYI

Raluca IACOB

Constantin IORDACHI

Frances KNEUPPER

Viktor LAGUTOV

Oksana MAKSYMCHUK

Mostafa MINAWI

Geoffrey ROBERTS

Lorenzo SALA

Tanja ŠLJIVAR

Róbert SOMOS

Somogy VARGA

Petr VAŠÁT

Ildikó ZAKARIÁS

Constructive Advanced Thinking Team 2020-23

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István Pál

Ádám

p.4 IAS CEU Fellows

Post-doctoral Research Fellow

Selma Stern Zentrum für Jüdische

Studien Berlin-Brandenburg,

Germany

Junior Thyssen Fellow

October 2020 – June 2021

project

Coping Strategies and Holocaust Survivors

in Light of the Hungarian Professional

Chambers’ Anti-Nazi Screenings

This research project focuses on the history of

occupational groups in light of post-Second World

War transitional justice documents. It analyses

the intense activity of Holocaust survivors within

the denazification committees that were set up

in most professional clusters in 1945, as part of a

larger anti-Nazi screening of Hungarian public

life. Through the retelling of wartime anti-Jewish

incidents and other conflicts, these procedures

give a complex picture of how certain professional

groups tried to cope with upheavals of the war and

attempts of state intervention. In the framework

of the anti-Jewish exclusionary atmosphere of the

epoch, I ask questions about professional competition,

leadership, respectability and professionalization,

the marginalization of Jewish professionals

and the control of knowledge. I am also interested

in the forms of solidarity towards persecuted colleagues

and towards Jews in general. Furthermore,

I aim to show how greater state control of certain

occupational groups could result in more support

for anti-Semitic political notions among the

colleagues belonging to these vocational clusters.

By using a micro-historical method, this archival

material can give scholars a better understanding

of the daily life of Jews and non-Jews during

and immediately after the Second World War.

p.5

IAS CEU Fellows

Larissa

Buchholz

p.6 IAS CEU Fellows

Assistant Professor

Department of Communication and

Sociology, Northwestern University,

USA

Junior Thyssen Fellow


project

Dynamics of Valuation in a Cultural World Economy

My research engages with the dynamics of valuation

and the making (or unmaking) of cultural

hierarchies within a global context. The fellowship

project grows out of my first book, The Global

Rules of Art, which examines the emergence of a

global field in the visual arts and the different ways

artists become valued worldwide. In my subsequent

research, I’ve expanded my interest in valorization

by turning from the perspective of mediation to

art consumption. Although social scientists have

been increasingly interested in the contemporary

art market, existing research has largely ignored the

growth of art collectors outside traditional market

centers in the US and Western Europe. My project,

which draws from fieldwork in the Middle East and

China, moves beyond this prevailing West-centric

focus and explores how elites from rising world

economies become invested in contemporary art

to the extent that they spend substantial sums,

even millions, on it. The study also advances a new

theoretical model concerning how elite cultural

preferences and practices form at the intersection

of national and global field levels, where they can

take on different meanings and valences. My project

thus redresses a considerable gap in the current

scholarship and contributes to a more multidirectional

understanding of the dynamics that remake

a major cultural market in an era of globalization.

p.7

IAS CEU Fellows

Gina

Caison

p.8 IAS CEU Fellows

Associate Professor

Department of English, Georgia

State University, USA

Junior Core Fellow


project

Erosion: American Literature

& the Anxiety of Disappearance

Erosion: American Literature & the Anxiety of Disappearance

examines the evolving cultural engagement

with narratives of erosion. It draws from methods

in Critical Indigenous Studies to reveal how pervasively

settler colonial logic undergirds contemporary

discourses of climate change in the United

States. By aligning work from geological sciences

with literary texts about specific geographic areas

including California, Oklahoma, Georgia, Louisiana,

the Chesapeake Bay, and the North Carolina Outer

Banks, this project illuminates the links between

the lived concerns about erosion and theoretical

investments in an erosive America, as it shifts from

pre-colonial to post-climate apocalypse contexts.

p.9

This work contributes to an understanding of how

narrative construction shapes our understanding

of planetary crises. In many ways, narrative allows

humans to experience the necessary affective

investment required for action. Alternately, narrative

also limits our possible responses as well-worn

assumptions of declension narratives involving

settler colonialism and lost cause-ism map all too

easily onto stories about the demise of the earth.

My project pulls threads from the humanities

and earth sciences together to demonstrate that

how we talk about the dirt matters for how we

regard our role as a human species on the planet.

IAS CEU Fellows

Mary

Cox

p.10 IAS CEU Fellows

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of History, University of

Oxford, United Kingdom

—

Botstiber Fellow

—

October 2020 – April 2021

project

Nutritional Inequality and International

Aid in Vienna, 1919-1922

Civilians in Vienna are widely considered to have

suffered intense nutritional deprivation during and

following the First World War. My project is an

empirical and qualitative study of the nutritional

status of children in different districts of Vienna

following WW I. It examines the impact that international

food aid, particularly from charities based in

the United States and Sweden, had on improving the

nutritional status of Viennese children and in reducing

nutritional inequality across the city. I use anthropometric

indicators and basic econometric modelling to

measure changing growth patterns of children, and

as a tool to measure effectiveness of food aid. I also

use a number of more traditional historical sources

including reports from international aid organizations

and medical doctors, films, letters from private

aid workers, and drawings and letters from child

aid recipients themselves. This project is of necessity

interdisciplinary in its approach. This fellowship

will support me as I prepare the book manuscript.

p.11

IAS CEU Fellows

Tyrell Caroline

Haberkorn


Professor of Southeast Asian Studies

Department of Asian Languages

and Cultures, University of

Wisconsin-Madison, USA

—

Senior Core Fellow

—

January – June 2021

project

Dictatorship on Trial in Thailand

Dictatorship on Trial in Thailand analyzes the individual,

social, and legal impacts of the five years of

dictatorship under the National Council for Peace

and Order (NCPO, 2014-2019) and identifies how

they might be redressed and justice forged. First,

drawing on extensive court observation and human

rights research, I enumerate the kinds of violence

used by the junta, the how victims were made

vulnerable rather than protected by the law, and

the practical and structural mechanisms through

which perpetrators evaded accountability. Second,

I correlate this analysis with the relevant articles

of Thai law and Thailand’s international human

rights obligations to write a draft indictment of the

NCPO. Third, I revisit a series of cases in which

the court adjudicated in favor of the junta and

the abrogation of the people’s rights and rewrite

the decisions with a more just interpretation that

approaches the state and the people as equal parties.

p.13

IAS CEU Fellows

Stephan

Haggard


Laurence and Sallye Krause

Distinguished Professor of Korea-

Pacific Studies

School of Global Policy and Strategy,

University of California San Diego,

USA

—

Senior Core Fellow

—


project

International Liberalism and Its Discontents

While in residence at the Institute, I will be working

on a book that outlines the contours of the intellectual

tradition I call “international liberalism.”

The book divides the task into two halves. The first

considers the empirical evidence with respect to

three core pillars of international liberal claims: the

democratic peace; the commercial liberalism or the

commercial peace; and the role of international institutions.

The second half of the book takes up a set

of cognate normative claims: about the cosmopolitan

worldview and human rights claims; about distributive

justice and the role that economic openness

plays in it; and in the role of reasoned discourse in

mitigating conflict. The purpose in both halves is

to outline the empirical and normative arguments

respectively, and to highlight how they are under

challenge not only from developments in the world,

but from alternative worldviews resting on very

different empirical and normative foundations.

p.15

IAS CEU Fellows

Zsuzsa

Hetényi


Professor

Institute of Slavic and Baltic Studies,

Eötvös Lóránd University, Hungary

—

Affiliated Fellow

—


project

“The Unfinished Past.” The Legacy of Shimon

Markish, Founder of Russian-Jewish Studies

My aim is to compile and edit an e-book of essays

on Russian-Jewish culture by Shimon Markish

(1931–2003). Markish was the first to outline and

define the corpus of texts he named “Russian-

Jewish” literature, founding the forceful branch

of Jewish Transcultural Studies. Markish was

linked to Hungary, to Budapest, to the CEU with

many ties. Besides writing an introduction to the

volume, I plan an essay on his illegal not-returning

to Hungary in 1974 based on documents.

p.17

The contents of the planned electronic volumes

will be arranged chronologically, according to the

biography’s timeline. A theoretical introduction

will be followed by three texts on the “founding

fathers” (Osip Rabinovich, Lev Levanda, Grigory

Bogrov), then by articles on Vladimir Jabotinsky,

Isaac Babel, Ilya Ehrenburg, Vasily Grossman,

Miklós Radnóti, Friedrich Gorenstein, Aleksandr

Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky. Several thematic

articles complete the book e.g. on religious

ecstasy or eroticism in Russian-Jewish Literature.

The second part of the publication will consist of

selections from Markish’s lecture series that aired on

Radio Free Europe’s Russian language broadcast.

IAS CEU Fellows

Raluca

Iacob


Researcher and Editor

Astra National Museum Complex,

Romania

—

Junior Core Fellow

—


project

Records (re)claimed: Found Footage, Memory and

Ideology in Eastern European Documentary Film

This research project will focus on selected documentaries

of Sergei Loznitsa, Péter Forgács, Andrei

Ujica, and others. It will address the ways in which

documentary film(maker)s create new meanings out

of found footage material, and explore the ways in

which connotations can be drawn from the association

of images and sounds – an approach that has

been used since the Soviet montage experiments

of the 1920s – as well as the impermanence of

memory in the face of historical changes. Drawing

on the findings of film studies, memory studies,

twentieth century history and cultural studies,

the aim of this research project is to investigate

whether images have intrinsic ideological values

or whether their meaning is constructed and

derived from the context they are situated in.

p.19

IAS CEU Fellows

Constantin

Iordachi


Professor Dr. hab.

Department of History, Central

European University, Austria

CEU Faculty Fellow


project

The Making of Nation-State Citizenship

in the Balkans: A Comparative-

Historical Analysis, 1815-1945

This project proposes a first theoretically minded

and historically grounded comparative analysis

of the emergence, evolution and main features of

nation-state citizenship in the Balkans during the

modern period (1815-1945). The analysis focuses on

the emergence of new nation-states on the political

and demographic background of the late Ottoman

Empire, on techniques employed for ascribing state

citizenship, and on practices of naturalization of

aliens. Another major line of research will be the

legal status of ethnic, religious, and gender minorities

and the emergence of an international regime

of minority protection in the Balkans. The project

employs a dual comparative perspective: internal,

among the Balkan states; and external, among the

making of citizenship in the region as a whole, as

compared to other European regions. The analysis

does not consist of a collection of disparate studies,

but highlights the interdependence among them, by

employing a relational and transnational approach.

p.21

IAS CEU Fellows

Frances

Kneupper


Associate Professor

Department of History,

University of Mississippi, USA

Senior Core Fellow


project

Beware False Prophets: The Contest Over

Prophecy in the Late Middle Ages

Beware False Prophets examines the contest over

knowledge of the future from the time of the Papal

Schism to the Council of Basel. Because a prophet

claimed her own brand of authority and knowledge,

prophecy became embroiled in contests over

knowledge, authority, gender, governance, and power.

Several controversies over prophecies and prophets

emerged. At issue were definitions of prophecy, the

right of laypeople to prophesy, the possibility of

female prophets, the role of clerical oversight, and

the professionalization of future-telling. My current

project details these struggles while situating them

within the upheavals over spiritual and intellectual

authority that convulsed Europe during the conciliar

era. This contest represents a crucial, overlooked,

moment in the transition from medieval to early

modern thought, in which individuals meditated

on the mechanisms of knowledge and the basis

of spiritual authority, and offered new answers.

p.23

IAS CEU Fellows

Viktor

Lagutov


Assistant Professor

Department of Environmental

Sciences and Policy, Central

European University, Austria

CEU Faculty Fellow


project

Is Climate Change the Only Villain to

Blame for Increasing Disaster Risks?

Increasing disasters risk is often explained by

progressing climate change. At the same time

there are many other influential, yet not discussed,

factors. The neglected factors can be found in

both environmental (e.g. changing land cover)

and social (e.g. evolving risks perception) domains.

These factors vary depending on regional

conditions. To be better prepared for upcoming

threats, communities should not only follow global

narratives of climate change, but also understand

their own regional climate associated risks.

p.25

The proposed research focuses on river-related

disasters, communities and goods. On the one hand,

the project relies on the previously conducted studies

of historical changes in rivers’s hydrological regimes

and the lifestyles of riverine communities adapting

to changing conditions. The Don and Ural rivers

along with associated Cossack communities are used

as a case study for analyzing these transformations.

On the other hand, many contemporary climaterelated

water security issues could and should be

explored for having anthropogenic causes. Sometimes

these phenomena are unintentional consequences of

trade-offs among various users of water management

schemes (e.g. the Aral Sea). In other cases, existing

risks could have been intentionally aggravated as

an instrument in political or economic conflicts.

IAS CEU Fellows

Oksana

Maksymchuk


Independent Scholar, Poet and

Translator

Fayetteville, AR, USA

—

Writer in Residence

—

October 2020 – March 2021

project

The Bestiary

What does it mean for a species to survive in the

rapidly changing world? How does bearing witness

to the extinction of other animal species affect

humankind and its way of life? To what extent

can humans retain their own species-defining

practical, political, and emotional capacities of

cooperation, civility, and fellow-feeling in adverse

environmental conditions? Drawing on the rich

tradition of medieval bestiaries, I develop a modern-day

bestiary that reflects on the condition of

humankind during the turbulent historical periods

widely thought of as the end of times and of

human life as we know it. This book will assume

a hybrid form, oscillating between poetry, prose,

and carefully curated and artfully adapted excepts

from philosophical, scientific, and religious texts

from different ages and traditions. Because the

book constitutes a reflection on animal mortality

and the fragility of the species, my chosen literary

form will emphasize the change in animal forms

through experimenting with grammar, syntax, and

intonation, using literary and narrative devices that

collapse, expose themselves, and undergo a process

of mutation. In the manner of traditional bestiaries,

each poem will offer moral, allegorical, and mystical

interpretations, illuminating the human condition

through its metamorphoses, past and future.

p.27

IAS CEU Fellows

Mostafa

Minawi


Associate Professor

Department of History, Cornell

University, USA

—

Senior Core Fellow

—


project

Ottoman-Ethiopian Relations and the

Geopolitics of Imperialism in the Horn

of Africa and the Red Sea Basin

Relying on a large set of archival documents recently

made available at the General Directorate

of National Archives in Istanbul, this project will

uncover an untold history of Ottoman imperial

ambitions along the Red Sea coast stretching from

Djibouti to the Suez, and the northern Somali

coast from Bab el-Mandab to the tip of the Horn

of Africa. This book project will bring to light

an Istanbul-Addis Ababa imperial axis of power

which existed in dialectic tension with the other

North-South axes that stretched from European

imperial capitals to the African coasts of the Red

Sea and Indian Ocean. The result promises to be

a complex global history of competing imperial

interests in the period between the Conference of

Berlin (1884-85) and the First World War. A transregional

project cannot be written by relying on

Ottoman imperial records only. That is why I have

conducted research in several archives and libraries

in the UK, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Djibouti, and

Somalia. The result will be a book that transcends

the boundaries of area studies: a new history of

shared political interests and competing imperial

goals between the only two non-western European

empires with territorial claims and expansionist

ambitions in Africa at the turn of the 20th century.

p.29

IAS CEU Fellows

Geoffrey

Roberts


Emeritus Professor of History

School of History, University College

Cork, Ireland

Affiliated Fellow

—

March – June 2021

project

Stalin's Peacemakers: A Transnational

History of the World Peace Council

From its inception in the late 1940s the communist-led

peace movement quickly grew into a

global network of peace organisations and activists.

Its congresses attracted thousands of delegates

and the support of a dazzling array of scientists,

artists and intellectuals. Hundreds of millions

of people signed its anti-nuclear petitions.

p.31

The story of the communist peace movement is a neglected

page in cold war history. It is the story of the

rise and fall of a powerful movement that created a

template for postwar transnational peace campaigning.

Its history exemplifies the utility of soft power

and the role of transnational movements in helping

to shape not just international relations but the foreign

policy identities of diverse societies. The communist

peace movement did not succeed in ending

the cold war but it did help ameliorate it, not least

by its impact on the societal politics of the USSR.

Based on findings from American, Belgium,

British, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian,

and Russian archives, this project explores the

history of the postwar communist peace movement

through the role of Its key core leaders: J.D.

Bernal, Isabelle Blume, Pierre Cot, Ilya Ehrenburg,

Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Pietro Nenni.

IAS CEU Fellows

Lorenzo

Sala


Department of Philosophy,

University of Pisa, Italy

Junior Core Fellow


project

Conceptualism or Non-conceptualism? Kant's

Understanding of the Relation of Intuition and

Concept in Light of Its Historical Roots

In the debate about Kant's conceptualism or

non-conceptualism the relation of Kant's philosophy

to that of his predecessors is systematically ignored.

My project aims to fill this gap in the literature.

Accordingly, I will consider the question at the heart

of this debate in light of the fact that the concepts

which are crucial for answering it are through and

through shaped by Kant's engagement with his

predecessors, especially the Wolffians. In order to do

this, I will first draw a general scheme of the various

sub-issues into which this question is factually

divided, and then individuate the key concepts for

answering each one of them. Secondly, I am going to

provide an analysis of these concepts – and consequently

solve the issue – in light of how the concept

in question emerges from Kant's confrontation with

the philosophical scenario of his time. The final result

will be an articulate picture of the answer to the

question of whether Kant is a conceptualist or not.

p.33

IAS CEU Fellows

Ta nja

Šljivar


Playwright

Belgrade, Serbia

Writer in Residence

October 2020 – January 2021

project

National Theater (the Novel)

After working for a year as an artistic director at

the National Theatre in Belgrade, I want to write

a novel based on that, in many aspects, extreme

experience. While working in such a high position,

I was struggling with supra-systems of capitalism,

patriarchy and cultural institutions.

p.35

I will use a range of materials, so that the final body

of text would differ in its poetic qualities: theoretical

texts in the field of institutional critique (Anthropology

of institutions by Virno, The institutions

of fictions by Monaco, The imaginary institution by

Castoriadis), my own notes and memories of the

events in the institution I was curating (varying in

quality from anecdotal to political ones), documents

I was granted access to (contracts, e-mails), as well

as fictional chapters containing pseudo-manifesto

monologues in which the role of such an institution

is described from the different perspectives of employees,

cultural journalists, citizens and politicians.

The National Theatre represents the values of the

national state. In 2019 in Serbia, while the capital

city had constantly been “under reconstruction,”

the repertoire, the working conditions and ethics in

the theatre mirrored the state of precarity, insecurity

and alert of the country. And yet its 150-year

long history is a guarantee for transforming nonart

into art for a primarily bourgeois audience.

IAS CEU Fellows

Róbert

Somos


Full Professor

Department of Philosophy,

University of Pécs, Hungary

Senior Core Fellow

October 2020 – February 2021

project

The Theology of Origen's Homilies on the Psalms

The discovery and critical edition (2015) of Origen’s

Homilies on the Psalms were one of the most important

events of patristic scholarship of the last years.

The text of these twenty-nine homilies sheds new

light on various aspects of the Alexandrian master’s

oeuvre. The aim of my research project is to study

the theology of Origen’s Homilies on the Psalms in

its wide context. Principal tasks are the registration

of the similarities and differences of the thoughts in

relation to the Homilies of the Psalms and the other

Origenian works and the analysis of these ideas.

There are two pillars of the project: theology in its

narrow sense and theological anthropology connected

to theologia moralis. The focal point of the

first theme is the relation between natural theology

and theologia revelata. The study of the second

topic focuses on the source and the role of rational

thinking and irrational instincts in Origen’s thought.

p.37

IAS CEU Fellows

Somogy

Varga


Professor of Philosophy

Department of Philosophy and

History of Ideas, Aarhus University,

Denmark

Senior Core Fellow


project

Embodied Personal Autonomy

and the Goals of Medicine

As part of a larger project on the aim of medicine, I

want to focus on the notion of personal autonomy

and its relationship to health. For this, a number

of challenges that the idea of personal autonomy

faces need to be confronted. For example, recent

research in psychology and neuroscience seems to

indicate that minor situational influences can play a

determining role in what we think and do. Instead

of concluding that such findings undermine the idea

of personal autonomy, as many do, a better option

is to recognize that they offer valuable insights

that can be used to rethink personal autonomy and

to develop a less “intellectualistic” view that can

be rendered compatible with the findings. While

hierarchical accounts (i.e. accounts that link autonomy

to structural relations between desires and

values in the agent’s psychology) are less suitable

for this task, recent relational approaches that

allow relationships beyond the reflective control of

individuals to be constitutively relevant for autonomy

seem much more promising. Developing a more

complex relational account of personal autonomy

that can accommodate situational influences will

not only help delineate the complex relationship

between autonomy and health, but will also carry

implications for any practice that depends upon

it (including criminal justice and medicine).

p.39

IAS CEU Fellows

Petr

Vašát


Senior Researcher

Institute of Sociology of the Czech

Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic

Junior Core Fellow


project

The Politics of Designing Poverty in a

Contemporary Globalised World: A Study

of Macro-Murals in Colombia

The project explores the global operation of social

interventions that tackle urban poverty. Various

schools, collectives and studios use architecture, art

or design to help poor communities of the global

South through improving their material environment,

but this trend is visible in the global North,

too. In this, macro-murals represent the most

ambitious and visible form. However, regardless of

their positive or negative impacts, interventions,

including macro-murals, are very often locally decontextualised

and isolated from the urban politics

that make poverty. As a result, they may not eliminate

poverty, but rather redesign it. The project

will compare several macro-murals in Colombia

to establish a novel understanding of how macromurals

globally emerge and travel, how they are

locally implemented and with what impact. Rather

than fully embracing or rejecting macro-murals, the

project inquires why they are adopted and whether

the context of adoption determines their outcomes.

p.41

IAS CEU Fellows

Ildikó

Zakariás


Research Fellow

Centre for Social Sciences, Institute

for Minority Studies, Hungary

Botstiber Fellow

October 2020 – March 2021

project

Solidarities Reconfigured: Central-Eastern

European Migrants Working in Refugee

Accommodation Institutions in Austria

In the last decade, Western European national policies

of legalisation of irregular migrants have shifted

focus from frames of vulnerability and humanitarianism

towards conditionality related to economic

performance, that is participation in education

and the labour market. A great variety of institutions,

organisations and projects have been created

accordingly, intended to implement these policies.

While having the mandate to channel newly arriving

workforce towards already existing and supposedly

empty positions on the labour market, the birth

of these institutions also created further needs for

labour. These positions (for example in language

teaching and social work) have been at a significant

extent filled with migrants, some of them arriving

from Central and Eastern European countries. My

research aims to explore how do such encounters

of Middle Eastern refugees with intra-European

Union migrants, themselves struggling to solidify

their positions in Western European labour

markets, reconfigure institutionalised patterns of

inclusion and exclusion, and existing frameworks of

solidarity and rejection. It takes the case of Austria,

and builds upon research findings from a previous

study exploring similar phenomena in the case of

Hungarian migrants working and volunteering in

refugee accommodation institutions in Germany.

p.43

IAS CEU Fellows

Constructive Advanced

Thinking (CAT) Team

2020–23


March 29 - April 11, 2021

Alberto Godioli, Principal Investigator

Senior Lecturer in European Culture

and Literature, University of

Groningen;

Program Director of the Netherlands

Research School for Literary Studies

(OSL), the Netherlands

Vicky Breemen

Assistant Professor

Centre for Intellectual Property

Law (CIER), Utrecht University, the

Netherlands

Andrew Bricker

Assistant Professor of English

Literature

Department of Literary Studies,

Ghent University, Belgium

Ana Pedrazzini

Researcher in Communication and

Semiotic Studies

ECyC IPEHCS CONICET, Comahue

National University, Argentina

Tjeerd Royaards

Award-winning editorial cartoonist

NRC, the Netherlands

project

Cartoons in Court: Towards a Forensic

Analysis of Visual Humor

Due to its inherent elusiveness, humor can make

it particularly difficult to tell where someone’s

“right to offend” starts, and someone else’s “right

not to be offended” begins. The challenge is even

more evident in the case of cartoons, whose high

degree of condensation can further contribute

to blurring the line between lawful and unlawful

humor; significantly, cartoons have been at

the center of several legal debates and litigations

in recent years, from the Muhammad cartoon

controversy of 2005-2006 to Charlie Hebdo.

p.45

The juridical problems raised by controversial cartoons

are still largely unsolved, with judges finding

themselves without solid legal ground when dealing

with conflicting interpretations of the same cartoon.

Such issues pose a crucial test for the democratic

negotiation of freedom of expression – yet, despite

their urgency, the following questions remain unanswered

by scholars, policy makers and practitioners:

How can judges deal with the ambiguity of offensive

cartoons? How can a distinction be made between

‘reasonable’ interpretations and contrived misreadings?

Cartoons in Court aims to tackle these questions

through an unprecedented synergy between humor

studies and legal scholarship, with a view to

providing concrete policy advice concerning the

relation between humor, offence and free speech.

IAS CEU Fellows

notes

notes

notes

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