IAS-Fellows_2021-WEB-07-16

—

Institute for

Advanced

Study

at

Central

European

University

fellows

2021—2022

p.2 IAS CEU Fellows

Clement Emeka AKPANG 4

Nikoloz ALEKSIDZE 6

Hynek ALT 8

Zsófia BARTA 10

Judit BODNÁR 12

András BOZÓKI 14

Roser CUSSÓ 16

Kornélia DERES 18

Laura ERBER 20

Linda ERKER 22

Chaim GANS 24

Harriet HULME 26

Tamás KARÁTH 28

Ayad Yasin Husein KOKHA 30

Diana LEMBERG 32

Ashley MEARS 34

Zuqiang PENG 36

Máté RIGÓ 38

Geoffrey ROBERTS 40

Paul SPICKARD 42

Constructive Advanced Thinking Team 1/ 2020-23 44



Clement Emeka

Akpang

p.4 IAS CEU Fellows

Senior Lecturer/Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Visual Arts and

Technology, Cross River University of

Technology, Nigeria

Junior Core Fellow

October 2021 – June 2022

project

Cultural Ramifications of the Found

Object in European and African Arts

Invented in 1912, the genre of found object art was

the most radical art form of the Euro-American

modernist period. A century after, its artifactuality

still dominates contemporary art space but in a different

context. However, like modernist art history,

the discourse of found object art is Eurocentrically

institutionalized; examples of the genre from ‘Other’

cultures are devalued as belated imitation of Western

avantgardism. Using formalism and iconography

as analytical tools, this research proposes to establish

the cultural ramifications and distinctiveness of

the found object in art by comparatively analyzing

the works of a select number of artists from Europe

and Africa. My study will focus on the following

questions: is the appropriation of the found object in

artistic expression a universal construct? And what

are the cultural ramifications of found objects in

European and African arts? Through this research,

I hope to establish that found object art is culture/

context-specific by differentiating its Euro-American

modernist context from the pre-modern and postcolonial

re-contextualization of waste/found objects

in African art. In a broader humanistic sense, the

findings of this research will contribute to decentralizing

the discourse and history of this art genre

for a wider embrace of its dynamism, eclecticism and

cultural iconography.

p.5

IAS CEU Fellows

Nikoloz

Aleksidze

p.6 IAS CEU Fellows

Professor of the History of

Religion and Political Thought,

Dean of the Department of Social

Sciences, Free University of Tbilisi,

Georgia

Junior Core Fellow

October – December 2021

project

Holy Bodies and Body Politic: Sanctity, Gender

and Polity in Medieval and Modern Caucasia

The book project, with a working title Holy Bodies

and Body Politic: Sanctity, Gender and Polity in

Medieval and Modern Caucasia explores the political

dimension of the cult of saints in medieval Caucasia,

and, in particular, the role of the feminine in the

construction of political cults. For this purpose, the

book explores three chronological eras. The first two

chapters study the origin and development of the

cult of saints in Armenia, Georgia and Caucasian

Albania. They explore several ‘foundational’ saintly

narratives that were rewritten multiple times and readapted

in different rhetorical circumstances. Next,

the formation of the cult of Queen Tamar, St George

and the Virgin Mary is studied with a strong focus

on written sources, visual art and oral traditions.

Finally, the book explores the reception and re-usage

of medieval saintly rhetoric in nineteenth-century

and contemporary ethno-religious discourses in

Armenia and Georgia.

p.7

IAS CEU Fellows

Hynek

Alt

p.8 IAS CEU Fellows

Visual Artist & Head of the Studio

of New Aesthetic, Department of

Photography, FAMU,

Prague, Czech Republic

—

Artist in Residence

—

February – June 2022

project

Empty Newspaper

With declining volumes of printed periodicals (newspapers,

magazines) societies are losing an important

piece of a uniting physical infrastructure. What is a

newspaper when the content moves elsewhere? I want

to develop a new project focused on the materiality

and, metaphorically speaking, the transparency of

the newspaper as a medium. While the eventual end

of the printed newspaper is set, I want to use this

brief period of inevitable future and current availability

to research the state of newspaper printing

facilities, focusing mainly on country-wide dailies but

also exploring various local periodical publications.

The politics and frictions that emerge through the

essentially empty medium are equally interesting to

me, however unobvious or surprising these may be.

Initially, I want to research large and smaller facilities

where newspapers are printed in Hungary. I plan to

observe the printing technology, make photographic

and video documentation, understand the logistics and

economics of the process. I am interested in the physical

experience of holding a newspaper with two hands,

reading a newspaper in a group, rolling a newspaper

to kill a fly, etc. Partially from the documentation of

printing facilities, partially from other sources, I want

to create new imagery, new content for a proposed new

newspaper. In the final stage of my residency, I will

work on an exhibition proposal.

p.9

IAS CEU Fellows

Zsófia

Barta

p.10 IAS CEU Fellows

Associate Professor

Department of Political Science,

University at Albany,

USA

—

Senior Core Fellow

—

January – June 2022

project

Donning the Golden Straightjacket?

Sovereign Ratings and Governments

in Prosperous Developed Countries

Whether globalized financial markets place governments

in a ‘golden straightjacket’ by making funding

conditional on a circumscribed set of policy choices

has long been a central debate in International

Political Economy. This project delivers evidence to

this debate by focusing on a particular set of market

constraints on governments: sovereign credit ratings,

which crucially influence countries’ access to financing

and have been shown to systematically reward

and penalize certain policy choices. The project

explores whether governments adjust their policies

to reap rewards and avoid penalties, or they might

push back against the constraints by reshaping the

way ratings work. Through quantitative analysis and

country case studies, the project studies the impact

of ratings on policy choice, while it also explores

the only determined (albeit unsuccessful) attempt

to-date to reshape the sovereign rating market (in

Europe after the global financial crisis) to better

understand whether governmental action might be

effective in reshaping the constraints ratings exert on

policy choice.

p.11

IAS CEU Fellows

Judit

Bodnár


Professor

Department of Sociology and

Social Anthropology, Central

European University PU,

Austria

—

CEU Faculty Fellow

—


project

Privacy Goes Public: Airbnb, Home Restaurant

and the Reconfiguring of Public and Private

in the Sharing Economy

Privacy Goes Public is a critical study of two key

phenomena in the so-called “sharing economy,” Airbnb

accommodations and home restaurants. I believe

that they both instantiate an often overlooked aspect

of sharing, and represent a theoretically relevant

reconfiguration of the relationship between public

and private in contemporary capitalism.

p.13

Why would people invite strangers to sleep and eat

in their home, when the home has long been considered

a privileged and protected space of privacy

meant to be separated from the realm of the public?

My research will focus primarily on the cultural

political economy of what seems to be an unprecedented

commodification of everyday life: especially

how that relates to the changing perception, use, and

shifting boundaries of public and private space, the

presentation of the self, and the search for authenticity.

The analysis builds on empirical research carried out

in Budapest and possibly Vienna.

IAS CEU Fellows

András

Bozóki


Professor

Department of Political Science,

Central European University PU,

Austria

—

CEU Faculty Fellow

—


project

The Decade of Intellectuals (1982-93)

The research project aims to examine why and

how intellectuals played a crucial role in the regime

change of Hungary. The rise of dissent led to a series

of anti-regime protests, party formations, political

pluralism, and then to the Round Table negotiations

and pro-democracy movements over the long decade

of 1982-93. The goal of this research is to examine

the role of agency by analyzing identity, strategic

concepts and discourses of different groups of intellectuals

within the democratic opposition.

In contrast to other countries, Hungarian oppositional

political activism, in the given decade, was

largely driven by intellectuals who claimed to possess

moral capital. They were accompanied by those who

enjoyed special status in the Hungarian communist

regime as cultural elite and together they formed a

counter-elite.

The research will identify three different epochs of

oppositional activity which required different types

of political activism and behavior:

1. Cultivating the culture of critical discourse in

delegitimizing the old regime;

2. Negotiating the terms of the regime change as

’legislators’ at the round table talks;

3. Returning to a social movement as ’movement-intellectuals’

in the name of basic democratic values

vis-á-vis the professionalization of multiparty

politics.

Methods of qualitative analysis will be used. Those

are based on elite interviews conducted and discourse

analysis of samizdat texts collected.

p.15

IAS CEU Fellows

Roser

Cussó


Professor

Sorbonne Institute of Development

Studies (IEDES), University

of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne,

France

—

Senior Core Fellow

—


project

Rethinking Minorities: Citizenship

and Identity at the League of Nations

This project brings a novel approach to minority

issues through the analysis of arguments, actors and

practices at the League of Nations. The LoN system

of minority protection, along with its influence in

global frameworks (self-determination, specific

jurisprudence), has been analyzed frequently, but

questions of how minority issues were collectively

constructed and debated in an evolving inter- and

transnational arena have not been taken up to the

same extent. Nevertheless, the analysis of intermediate

activities and micro-decisions (responses to

minority petitions, NGO proposals, expert reports)

helps one to better grasp different interpretations

of minority issues and the tensions between them,

notably between those where (national) cohesion

required cultural homogeneity and those giving

minority protection a basic role in reconciling

citizenship and identity. The project is based on

archival work and sociological and historiographical

cross-analysis of practices of League personnel and

selected minority organizations, NGOs, state officials,

and experts. It is aiming at a reconsideration of

scientific approaches to minority questions, as well

as the implementation of a multi-actor methodology,

and more generally at stimulating renewed debate on

minorities and national identity.

p.17

IAS CEU Fellows

Kornélia

Deres


Junior Assistant Professor

Institute for Hungarian

Literature and Cultural Studies,

Eötvös Loránd University,

Hungary

Junior Core Fellow


project

Visuality, Wonder, Science: Popular

Performances in the Nineteenth Century

Recent tendencies in examining performative cultures

and visual technologies recognize the importance

of phenomenological analyses of performing

and spectating bodies, political and material analyses

of the power relations of technological environments,

as well as the socio-cultural relevance of historical

spectatorships. Popular performances often

served as effective means of knowledge transmission,

especially regarding new visual knowledge, offering

interconnections of image technologies, theatricality,

and scientific findings. Therefore, the aim of the

proposed research project is to focus on the contact

zones in which practices of visuality, science, and

magic formed spectatorships in Hungarian performative

cultures during the first half of the long nineteenth

century. Following the routes and impacts

of stage magicians, experimental physicists, and

science popularisers in Pest-Buda, the research is to

be based on the interrelated fields of performative

spectatorships, circulating new visual experiences,

and popular performances’ role in knowledge transmission

as well as in national or imperial identity

building.

p.19

IAS CEU Fellows

Laura

Erber


Writer

Guest Researcher,

Copenhagen University,

Denmark

Writer in Residence

March – May 2022

project

The Multiples of Three

My novel is about a Brazilian writer named Laura Erber,

who receives a grant to spend a few months in Budapest

for the purpose of writing a novel based on the

story of her Hungarian ancestors. There, she intends

to find more consistent information on the Schalinger

and Erber families, joined by the marriage of sisters

Anna, Ilona and Ernestin Schalinger to brothers David,

Éde and Imre Erber, respectively. As soon as she

settles into her new flat, the Covid-19 pandemic breaks

out. The worldwide spread of the pandemic, the dire

news of the coronavirus crisis in Brazil, and the lack

of information about her Hungarian ancestors soon

begins to torment her, hindering her creative process.

The narrator ultimately develops a superstitious and

paranoid behavior. Seemingly trivial details and names

found in home-brand products in local supermarkets

appear to be secret messages from the past which, try

as she might, she can’t seem to decode. Anguished and

suffering from writer’s block, worried about running

out of time before she can complete her project, the

narrator immerses herself in the local poetry scene.

Thus begins another search that leads her to experience

unusual and mysterious situations, transforming

the novel into a kind of tour of the contemporary literary

and poetry scene in Budapest, with its bookstores

and its passionate readers of long-dead poets.

p.21

IAS CEU Fellows

Linda

Erker


Post-doctoral Fellow

Department of Contemporary

History, University of Vienna,

Austria

Junior Botstiber Fellow


project

Austrian Scholars in Latin American Exile.

Transatlantic Migration, Transfer of Knowledge

and Transnational Relations Between 1930 and 1970

For my second book I am studying Austrian scholars

and their scientific work and relations in Latin

American exile from 1930 to 1970. Exile in this

context is understood primarily from the perspective

of self-perception, a long-term stay outside the

homeland which these scientists and academics had

to leave due to banishment, expatriation, persecution

by the state or the (democratic) criminal justice

system. In my research, I analyze who was able to

regain an academic foothold after (forced) migration,

and under what conditions. The main focus of my

study is on Argentina and Chile. The period 1930

to 1970 includes at least three different cohorts of

scholars and their interactions in their destination

countries: (1) politically displaced persons from 1933-

38 onwards, (2) persecuted Jews who could manage

to escape Europe and the Holocaust, (3) National

Socialist scientists who fled after the end of World

War II. After 1945, they were all simultaneously part

of scientific communities far from their homeland.

Their work, the transfer of knowledge, their transnational

networks, and the transatlantic relations

with Austria and Germany are integral part of my

research.

p.23

IAS CEU Fellows

Chaim

Gans


Professor Emeritus

The Buchmann Faculty of Law,

Tel Aviv University,

Israel

—

Senior Core Fellow

—

April – June 2022

project

Cosmopolitanism, Ethno-Cultural Nationalism,

and the Distribution of Cultural Rights

The research project consists of three parts. Part I

mainly expands on a distinction underlying my book

A Political Theory for the Jewish People between

two types of nationalism: Proprietary and Liberationist

as exemplified by several contemporary and

historical cases of nationalist ideologies and movements.

This is done in order to examine the relationship

between nationalism and cosmopolitanism on

the one hand, and multiculturalism on the other, in

the three major spheres in which they are generally

considered to be mutually exclusive or conflicting

—their ethical presuppositions regarding the nature

of the individual as a moral agent, their visions

regarding individuals' cultural horizons, and in the

realm of justice (specifically, in the distribution of

ethno-national and cultural rights).

p.25

Part II develops a cosmopolitan account of justice

regarding the distribution of national and cultural

rights.

Part III analyzes the alleged conflict between nationalism,

cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism

with regard to the desirable vision of the individual's

cultural horizons.

IAS CEU Fellows

Harriet

Hulme


Independent Researcher

—

Junior Core Fellow

—


project

On the Threshold: Hospitality,

Translation and Telling Tales

On the Threshold: Hospitality, Translation and Telling

Tales explores the relationship between narrative,

translation and hospitality in both theory and

practice. Taking a geo-literary approach which maps

questions of physical location and movement onto

questions of textual location and movement, I locate

an ethics of hospitality on the threshold between the

said and the unsaid, the translated and the untranslated,

the tales we tell and those we leave untold

or deliberately silence. The project engages with a

series of contemporary narratives of movement and

migration and brings these into conversation with

theoretical discourses on hospitality drawn from

continental philosophy, translation studies and postcolonial

studies. Alongside this theoretical and literary

analysis, I develop a public engagement project,

The Babel Collective, which works with refugees and

asylum seekers to explore the intersection of storytelling,

translation and hospitality via the creation of

a collaborative translation project.

p.27

IAS CEU Fellows

Tamás

Karáth


Associate Professor

Department of English Language

and Literature, Comenius University

in Bratislava,

Slovakia

Institute of English and American

Studies, Pázmány Péter Catholic

University,

Hungary

Senior Core Fellow

—


project

All Souls Matter: Debates on Universal

Salvation in Late Medieval England

Christianity has provided various answers to the

question of the accessibility of salvation, ranging

from universalism (salvation of all human souls)

to special election by God. In medieval Western

Christianity, the idea of universal salvation (of all

Christian souls, let alone all human souls) remained

peripheral and deemed heterodox. The most significant

heterodoxy of late medieval England, shaped

by John Wyclif and his followers, did not challenge

the exclusive aspect of salvation as it emphasized

election. At the same time, several vernacular religious

and mystical texts make a case for or against

universal salvation, outlining an extended debate.

The preliminary hypothesis of my book project is

that universal salvation had wider currency in late

medieval England than assumed by scholarship. I

intend to reconstruct this debate on the basis of its

manuscript witnesses, focusing on its social implications,

especially the interrelations of universalist

claims and social inclusion.

p.29

IAS CEU Fellows

Ayad Yasin Husein

Kokha


Assistant Professor

College of Law, Salahaddin

University Erbil, Kurdistan Region,

Iraq

Junior Thyssen Fellow


project

Prosecuting ISIL Fighters in Iraq:

The Available Judicial Mechanisms

The study investigates the judicial choices of prosecuting

ISIL fighters, i.e. the extent of ascribing

individual criminal responsibility to those who are

implicated in committing serious international offenses.

Methodologically, the study employs analytical

and empirical approaches to analyze international

and domestic criminal legal texts, and compare

them with the on-the-ground situation. Overall, the

study is restricted to the core international crimes

perpetrated against minorities and civilians in some

Iraqi provinces under the ISIL influence during

2014-2017, in the period of armed conflict between

Iraqi and Kurdistani regular armed forces together

with the international coalition forces against

ISIL fighters. The main objective of this research,

however, is to find the best judicial measures for intensifying

internal and international cooperation in

prosecuting perpetrators and implementing the rules

of criminal law effectively, eventually to prevent the

future recurrence of commission of such offences.

p.31

IAS CEU Fellows

Diana

Lemberg


Associate Professor

Department of History,

Lingnan University,

Hong Kong

Junior Core Fellow


project

"The Weapon of Words": Language

Training in U.S. Foreign Relations, 1941-1991

This interdisciplinary project provides the first

archival account of how language training shaped

and was shaped by U.S. international engagements

from World War II through the end of the Cold

War. Scholars of U.S. international history have

infrequently addressed language-related issues. This

is a surprising lacuna given the powerful players--the

federal government; major foundations; prestigious

American universities--that became invested in the

creation and dissemination of linguistic expertise in

the mid-twentieth century. The project tracks two

of the defining language phenomena of the “American

century”: the rise of global English, and Washington’s

growing involvement in language-training

initiatives both at home and abroad. By analyzing

the place of language training and applied linguistics

in U.S. foreign relations, the project will speak to

scholars of U.S. international history, decolonization

and development, and the history of the social

sciences, particularly linguistics. The project’s main

outcome will be a completed book manuscript.

p.33

IAS CEU Fellows

Ashley

Mears


Associate Professor

Department of Sociology and

Women's Gender and Sexuality

Studies, Boston University,

USA

Senior Core Fellow


project

Comparing Strategic Intimacies: Romance,

Gender, and Class in Global Context

Romance in late capitalism is both more and less

economically motivated than in the Industrial past

as partners now search for “pure” romance among a

staggering rise of digital platforms enabling matches

across class and social positions like never before. This

project maps the changing contours of intimacy and

commerce and empirically systematizes transactional

romances. I examine how partners transact emotions,

time, resources, money, and sex; how they negotiate

the terms of exchange against the widespread middle-class

ideal of pure relations and the stigma of sex

work, and how they manage and contest class and

gender power inequalities. Based on the systematic

comparison of “aspirational dating” in two contexts,

the U.S. and the Balkans, I seek to identify patterns

of transactional romance across a range of cultural

norms, gender constraints, and economic opportunities.

Through a comparative sociology of romantic

markets, I develop a theory of the social creation of

sexual morality.

p.35

IAS CEU Fellows

Zuqiang

Peng


Visual Artist

USA

Artist in Residence

February – June 2022

project

Elisions, Silences, and Some Opaque Voices

My current project looks at the history of the

8.75mm film - a unique film format that was

produced and circulated exclusively in China from

the late 60s. As one fourth of the 35mm films, the

8.75mm film was invented partly for its portability,

so that it could be used for mobile screenings in the

mountains, islands, and the countryside. Slightly

bigger than the super 8mm film that emerged in the

US around the same time, the 8.75mm was eventually

discontinued in the mid-80s. I take this medium

as an entry point, to think about the relationship

between the technical invention and the construction

of an ‘other than urban’ spectatorship in Chinese

celluloid film history. During my fellowship, I will

continue my research while working on footages

collected prior to my arrival for a film installation

project.

p.37

IAS CEU Fellows

Máté

Rigó


Assistant Professor

Department of History,

Yale-NUS College,

Singapore

Affiliated Fellow


projects

Capitalism in Chaos

The first project I will be working on at IAS CEU is

a follow-up research on my first book, Capitalism in

Chaos (to be published by Cornell University Press

in 2022). The book follows industrialists and policymakers

in Central Europe and explores the clashes

between nationalism and material interest between

1870 and 1929; it also argues for long-standing continuities

among ethnic minority business elites in the

successor states of Austria-Hungary and Germany.

Related to this book project, I will be working on

an article that places the post-1918 predicament of

ethnic minorities in broader discussions on statelessness

and explores to what extent not belonging

officially to any state was also an opportunity to

avoid ethnic discrimination.

p.39

From Aid to Trade

My second project, From Aid to Trade, explores the

multifaceted commercial and cultural connections

between the Global South and the Eastern Bloc,

focusing on Vietnam and Hungary between 1945 and

1990. It starts with East European fugitive teenagers

who ended in the French foreign legion after 1945

and perpetrated genocide in Algeria and Indochina

in the 1950s; subsequently, the manuscript shifts

gears to document how East European states cast

themselves as supporters of socialist Vietnam, and

how this generated actual social and economic connections

as diplomats, filmmakers, foreign traders,

students, and goods travelled across Eurasia in the

1960-80s.

IAS CEU Fellows

Geoffrey

Roberts


Emeritus Professor of History

School of History, University

College Cork,

Ireland

Affiliated Fellow

April – June 2022

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.41

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. The role of the peace movement

in Central and Eastern Europe is an important dimension

of this project. That will be its focus during

the course of this fellowship, including research in

various Budapest archives.

IAS CEU Fellows

Paul

Spickard


Distinguished Professor

Department of History, University of

California, Santa Barbara,

USA

Senior Core Fellow


project

Changing Race: Morphing Identities in History

Changing Race: Morphing Identities in History is a

book about people whose seemingly permanent racial

identities change. Sometimes the cause is changing

racial rules: Hanni grew up in Colombia. She

went to school and works in the US. She is viewed

as White when she is in Colombia, but as Latina in

California. Sometimes people make a racial choice:

W.E.B. Du Bois had both White and Black ancestry,

and he had racial options, but he chose to be Black.

Sometimes an outside agency—a government, a

social institution—enforces a change. In the ninth

century, the Khazar Kingdom converted en masse

to Judaism. None of these is an instance of racial

imposture—of a person who is really X pretending

to be Y. It is just how their identities worked out in

fluid circumstances. Changing Race explores many

such instances of racial change, for both a scholarly

and a popular audience. It explains in what circumstances

such changes tend to take place and explores

what is the work that racial change is doing.

p.43

IAS CEU Fellows

Constructive Advanced

Thinking (CAT)

Te a m 1/ 2020-23


Not in residence during 2021/22

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


Thinking (CAT)

Te a m 2/ 2021-23


February 21 - March 6, 2022 [tbc]

Ksenia Robbe, Principal Investigator

Senior Lecturer in European and

Russian Literature and Culture

University of Groningen, the

Netherlands

Agnieszka Mrozik

Assistant Professor

Institute of Literary Research of the

Polish Academy of Sciences (ILR

PAS), Poland

Andrei Zavadski

Independent Researcher, Editor at

The Garage Journal: Studies in Art,

Museums & Culture, and Guest

Lecturer at the Moscow School

of Social and Economic Sciences,

Russia/Germany

Alexander Formozov

Project Coordinator

DRA / Deutsch-Russischer

Austausch – German-Russian

Exchange, Germany

project

Reconstituting Publics through Remembering

Transitions: Facilitating Critical Engagement with

the 1980-90s on Local and Transnational Scales

Three decades after the transformations of the

USSR and its satellites, the topic of ‘transitioning’

from socialist states to liberal democracies remains

highly contentious in Central and Eastern Europe.

Over the last decade, the transitional past has been

increasingly instrumentalized, by national-populist

actors and in the counter-memories of their

opponents. In the context of heated contestations

of memory, with high political stakes, spaces for

dialogue are rapidly shrinking and public spheres are

becoming increasingly ‘disconnected.’

The project addresses this societal issue by engaging

with memory practices of the ‘transitional period’ beyond

the polarized versions. Drawing on approaches

of cultural analysis of discourse and affect, critical

memory studies, public history, (digital) ethnography,

and intersectional study of gender and generations,

the project develops strategies for facilitating

more cohesive and critical practices of remembering

that have the potential to lead to dialogue and form

reflective communities. The comparative approach

will allow for developing strategies and policies on a

transnational (European) level based on trans-local

resonances rather than top-down scripts.

p.47

IAS CEU Fellows


Thinking (CAT)

Te a m 3/ 2021-23


May 23 - June 5, 2022 [tbc]

Jochen Hack, Principal Investigator

Assistant Professor for Ecological

Engineering

Technical University of Darmstadt,

Germany

Maria Manso

Universidade de Lisboa Instituto

Superior Técnico, Portugal, Portugal

Rieke Hansen

Professor for Open Space and

Ecological Urban Design

Hochschule Geisenheim University,

Germany

Andrea Nóblega Carriquiry

Ph.D. Candidate at the Department

of Geography

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona,

Spain

project

The Socio-ecological Reshaping of

European Cities and Metropolitan Areas

The project addresses pressing societal challenges

of well-being and ecology in urban areas. Societies

in European cities face environmental problems

related to the quality of air and water, biodiversity

loss, and advancing climate change, but at the same

time need to tackle social-economic issues such as

social cohesion and justice, and need to develop

sustainable economic and mobility systems. These

challenges place complex demands on the use and

functionality of urban space and infrastructures.

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are expected to play

a major role in solving these issues. Based on broad

experience from case studies of NbS and together

with non-academic stakeholders, new knowledge of

key issues of upscaling and mainstreaming of NbS

will be advanced by developing innovative ideas for

improved multi-functionality, integral cost-benefit

sharing and stakeholder engagement. By connecting

various schools of thought and applying it in an integrated

manner to case study cities at different spatial

scales, the project will generate new technical, policy,

and transformative knowledge. The project conceptually

addresses integration and transferability of

these knowledge dimensions across case studies and

spatial scales to develop policy recommendations

regarding upscaling and mainstreaming of NbS in

European cities.

p.49

IAS CEU Fellows

COPYRIGHT

Institute for Advanced Study,

Central European University, 2021

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