IAS-Fellows_2022-Beliv-2022-07-19-WEB

—
Institute for
Advanced
Study
at
Central
European
University
fellows
2022—2023

p.2 IAS CEU Fellows
Clement Emeka AKPANG 4
Patrick ANTHONY 6
Dmitrii ASINOVSKII 8
Myrthe BARTELS 10
Eszter BARTHA 12
Mariana BODNARUK 14
Gergely BUDA 16
Andrii DOSTLIEV 18
James FORSHER 20
Moraa GITAA 22
Maxwell HOLLERAN 24
Gennadii IAKOVLEV 26
Yuka KADOI 28
Scott KENWORTHY 30
Anton LIAVITSKI 32
Levente LITTVAY 34
Peter MARTENS 36
Syeda MASOOD 38
Michiel MEEUSEN 40
Youssef MNAILI 42
Sugata NANDI 44
Pál NYÍRI 46
Adaora OSONDU–OTI 48
Amrita SEN 50
Helene Julia SINNREICH 52
Lina STEINER 54
Tatyjana SZAFONOVA 56
Attila TANYI 58
Constructive Advanced Thinking Team 1: 2020-23 60
Constructive Advanced Thinking Team 2: 2021-23 62
Constructive Advanced Thinking Team 3: 2021-23 64
Constructive Advanced Thinking Team 4: 2022-25 66
Constructive Advanced Thinking Team 5: 2022-25 68

Clement Emeka
Akpang
project
Conceptualizing a Global Postcolonial Museology
for Artefacts: Decolonizing European Museums
and Dewesternizing African Art Scholarship
p.4
Senior Lecturer/Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Visual Arts and Technology,
Cross River University of Technology,
Nigeria
GIAS Fellow
September 2022 – August 2023
African decoloniality advocacy is yet to achieve meaningful
results because European museums continue to
distort African arts by displaying them in suspended
animation. Furthermore, the art curriculum in African
universities remains dominated by Eurocentric
philosophies. Although postcolonial projects have
attempted to address this problem, the current emphasis
on repatriation and restitution as a mechanism
for dismantling European museum hegemony has
hindered the untangling of African arts from colonial
anthropological framing. This research aims to engage
decoloniality from an epistemological standpoint in
two perspectives:
A) By developing postcolonial museology to restage
African art objects in European museums as a global
heritage with new universal significance.
B) By designing a dewesternized art history curriculum
for African universities to delink art theory
studies in the continent from European epistemology.
The project, which adopts Postcolonialism and Epistemic
Contextualism as theoretical frameworks, will
contribute to African and global art scholarship and
contemporary museum dialogues and practices.
p.5
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Patrick
Anthony
project
Science from Below:
Work, Climate, and Mineral Empire
p.6
IAS CEU Fellows
Postdoctoral Fellow
German Academic Exchange Service
(DAAD) PRIME Program,
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
München and Cambridge University,
United Kingdom
Junior Core Fellow
January – June 2023
This book project unearths the labour regimes that
wrought combined sciences of earth and atmosphere
around 1800. It is an archaeology of what humanists
and scientists alike have called the Critical Zone, the
complex and fragile film of earth and air, several kilometres
deep, that spans the globe. This book studies
the global sciences that first constructed the Critical
Zone as an object of inquiry, engaging physique du
monde, physical geography, and Klimatologie as a coherent
set of interrelated practices (or geo-atmospherics).
At its core is a critical revision of the Prussian
savant Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). I locate
Humboldt at the helm of a frontier science based—
and employed—in far-flung systems of metallurgic
industry and military surveillance, what I call mineral
empire. Humboldt’s science was co-extensive with
infrastructures of extraction and governance, from
Prussian Franconia, where he served as a mining officer
in the 1790s, through his travels to New Spain in
1803 and Russian Siberia in 1829. There, his program
of inquiry expropriated workmen’s ways of knowing
and enacted settler colonial enterprises. Science from
Below therefore reimagines Humboldt’s life and travels
as a new social history of the marginal actors—miners,
surveyors, calculators, serfs, and convicts—who made
his global science possible.
p.7
IAS CEU Fellows

Dmitrii
Asinovskii
project
The Soviet Union and the Iranian Revolution:
The Role of Soviet Bureaucratic Culture in
the Foreign Policy Decision – Making
p.8
Israel / Russia
PhD, University of Amsterdam
GIAS Fellow
September 2022 – August 2023
This research project builds on my PhD thesis about
the Soviet reaction to the Iranian revolution. In my
dissertation I concentrated on three aspects of Soviet
misreading of the revolution in Iran, and the Islamic
regime: the ideological restraints, the inability to
foresee the transformation of religion into a political
ideology, and the role of the expert community in
decision-making. In my proposed research I would
like to elaborate on all of these dimensions but also
add a new vision through the study of the bureaucratic
culture of Soviet foreign policy – the very process of
decision making. This became possible thanks to the
mass declassifications of the CPSU Central Committee
documents that are now at my disposal after a year
of working in the Russian State Archive of Contemporary
History (RGANI). These documents will
allow me to trace the decision-making process and will
consolidate the arguments already formulated in the
preceding research.
p.9
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Myrthe
Bartels
project
Democracy and the Common Good
in Ancient Greek Political Thought
p.10
Research Fellow in the History
of Philosophy, Civiltà e Forme del
Sapere, University of Pisa,
Italy
Junior Core Fellow
October 2022 – June 2023
This project seeks to investigate how ancient Greek
intellectuals in the 4th century BC criticized contemporary
democratic political culture for promoting
indulgence and luxury. While most studies of ancient
thinking about democracy focus on the democratic
constitution, this project studies ancient ideas about
democratic political culture. Focussing on two case
studies, the first addressing how thinkers such as
Aristotle and Theopompos of Chios construed the
differences in commercial practices in democracies and
in a harmonious, theoretical society characterized by
“political friendship,” the second on indulgence and excessive
attachment to freedom in Plato’s Republic, the
project explores why ancient intellectuals considered
democracies especially liable to foster a political culture
centred on trade and private wealth, and oblivious
of the common good.
p.11
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Eszter
Bartha
project
Right-wing Populism and Workers in
Eastern Germany and Hungary
p.12
Dr. habil. Associate Professor
Department of Eastern, Central
European and Russian History,
Eötvös Loránd University of
Budapest,
Hungary
Senior Core Fellow
October 2022 – June 2023
The research interrogates the question as to what
extent the newly formed skilled industrial “elite”
workforce, mainly driven by global capital in Eastern
Germany and Hungary, is attracted by right-wing,
populist ideologies and political forces, and what factors
can be identified that account for the decreasing
appeal of the “old left” in this stratum of workers. The
project contends that the specific Eastern European
historical legacies alongside a longue durée perspective
should receive more emphasis in the research.
The German – Hungarian comparative project is
expected to: (a) contribute to an emergent literature,
which seeks to reorient research towards a global
labour history (Linden 2008), namely new directions
in political sociology, labor sociology, social anthropology
and gender studies; (b) facilitate new strategies of
labour revitalization, which are considered to be vital
for a deeper understanding of the mobilizing power
of right-wing populism; (c) generate a wider social
dialogue on labour and democracy.
p.13
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Mariana
Bodnaruk
project
Transfeminist Perspectives on
Premodern Trans Lives
p.14
Ukraine
PhD, Central European University
GIAS Fellow
September 2022 – August 2023
This project analyzes the social and cultural role of
gender-crossing figures in the premodern Eastern
Mediterranean studying transgender narratives and art
c. 150–1500 CE. Trans saints presented hagiographers
and artists with a challenge. How could gender marginalized
people achieve the standards of Christian
piety, let alone saintly behavior? In portraying their
fictional protagonists as exempla of masculine virtues
in the context of Palestinian monasticism, the authors
of the anonymous trans lives, as well as iconographers,
highlight the non-binariness of social identities in
Byzantium, unsettling fixed gender categorization.
Conceiving a trans figure of an ascetic subverting conventional
binaries, the texts and images create a model
for incorporating non-conforming masculinities of
Byzantine society within the normative hagiographic
and iconographic genre. Ideas about nonbinary sex
and gender were a part of how premodern people
defined themselves as Christian, male, female, or
human. This project of transgender history aims to
shed light on how these foundational categories developed,
anticipating our own. By turning to the past
which introduces us to radically different cultures we
are enabled to imagine radically different futures for
ourselves, too.
p.15
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Gergely
Buda
project
What Drives Industrial Symbiosis in Sub-
Saharan Africa? Analysis of the Role of Economic
Incentives in Facilitating Industrial
Symbiosis in Ghana, Mauritius and Uganda
p.16
PhD student
World Economics Subprogram,
Corvinus University of Budapest,
Hungary
GIAS Fellow
September 2022 – August 2023
This exploratory research project focuses on the role of
economic incentives in industrial symbiosis, a model
of circular economy, and the utilization of industrial
waste in Sub-Saharan Africa. Industrial symbiosis
is a type of B2B-synergy whereby one actor uses the
waste or by-products of another actor as a production
input. The main objective of the research project is to
contribute to the understanding of the productivity
and environmental pressures in Sub-Saharan Africa
and to analyse possible solutions for cleaner production.
It operates with two research questions on (1) the
economic factors of industrial symbiosis locally and
(2) the compatibility of potential incentives’ implementation
with the current local regulations. Qualitative
and quantitative data collected in Ghana, Mauritius
and Uganda will be analysed through company and
industrial park mini case studies and the comparison
of the three countries’ relevant regulatory and policy
frameworks. The final research outputs will be policy
recommendations and further research directions.
p.17
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Andrii
Dostliev
project
OST: gesture, landscape, message
p.18
Visual Artist
Ukraine / Poland
Artist in Residence
October 2022 – February 2023
The post-photographic project “OST: gesture, landscape,
message“ explores the archival photographs
and postcards sent by (and to) the forced workers
(Ostarbeiter) from Eastern Europe in Germany
during World War II. It focuses on the ways these
people were appropriating images of hostile landscape
on photos and postcards and also on the ways these
photographic prints were becoming small gestures of
support between the workers and their families back
home and also between workers themselves.
p.19
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

James
Forsher
project
A Paramount Story: The Amazing Life
of Hollywood Mogul Adolph Zukor and
the Media Empire He Created
p.20
Retired Associate Professor
Department of Communication
California State University, East Bay
USA
Botstiber Fellow
January – June 2023
The feature-length documentary explores the century-long
life journey of Adolph Zukor, founder of
Paramount Studios and the American film. The centerpiece
of the film is Mr. Zukor sharing his own story
from our 1967 interview with him. In the documentary,
we look at how Mr. Zukor and the other early film
pioneers made their way from Austria/Hungary to the
US in the late 1880’s and early 1890’s and had the common
vision of taking short films from novelty houses
to becoming a global industry.
p.21
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Moraa
Gitaa
project
Pebbles, Pigeons, Prodigals – A Novel
p.22
IAS CEU Fellows
Novelist, Peace Studies and Conflict
Resolution Researcher,
Kenya
Writer in Residence
January – May 2023
On Yusra and Yasin’s 12th birthday their father—Imam
of the neighbourhood masjid—is assassinated in
Pwani si Kenya (The Coast is not part of Kenya)
separatist protests. The sociopolitical-metaphorical
fiction centers Yusra a young Swahili-Baluchi girl from
Mombasa Island who—after her father is assassinated
and dies in her arms—on a meditation of grief, journey
of witness, memory and protest, is drawn from her
Mji wa Kale (Swahili Old Town) home to Al Shabaab
jihadists online. When Yusra’s twin brother becomes a
victim of enforced disappearance, she—groomed/radicalized—becomes
a jihadi bride and elopes to Somalia
with a Shabaab commander.
After 2 years of self-exile Yusra returns to Mombasa;
her experiences portray how intersections of the war
on terror/secession politics, counter-terrorism agent’s
extralegal/extrajudicial actions, citizenship politics,
existential threats and search for identity by the
marginalized, play into the psychology of children and
women of Mombasa where they are boxed into spaces
whose periphery is vigilance and surveillance in the
form of silence, terror, and a culture of fear.
The novel follows Yusra from 12 years-old to 24. With
ethos of forgiveness and echoes of freedom, focusing
redemption of the self, family, pasts both personal and
collective, the literary novel draws on the unsolved
assassination of 22 Muslim clerics/scholars which
happened in Mombasa—the author’s hometown—
between 2012–18.
p.23
IAS CEU Fellows

Maxwell
Holleran
project
Municipal Land Banking and Controlling
Urban Populations in the Era of Climate Change:
Historical Lessons for the Present Crisis
p.24
Lecturer in Social Policy
School of Social and Political
Sciences ,
University of Melbourne,
Australia
Junior Core Fellow
October 2022 – June 2023
Planned ‘greenbelts’ that buttress cities were essential
to the Victorian Garden City movement and later to
New Deal community experiments. They give urban
areas form and territorial control, while showing where
nature and agriculture end and human-designed settlement
begins. This project considers the diffusion of
19th and 20th century greenbelts, using examples from
the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia.
These projects, with hints of utopian thinking, were
also immersed in Malthusian ideas of selecting an ‘ideal’
population both in number and composition. The
project analyzes how greenbelts were a preserve away
from increasingly congested cities, but the original
intention and form of the communities were subverted
by mass suburbanization. Today, greenbelts have once
again been hailed as a local level means to fight climate
change but given their history they could potentially
function as a tool of exclusion and a way for wealthier
cities to hoard environmental resources.
p.25
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Gennadii
Iakovlev
project
What Causes Authoritarian Backslides?
p.26
Russia
PhD, European University Institue
GIAS Fellow
September 2022 – August 2023
I am aspiring to tease out the structural correlates
of democratic backsliding. I expect that backsliding
starts with the rising inequality that causes the demise
of party systems, bringing populists to power, and
continues with takeovers of constitutional courts. I
believe that to detect backsliding in its earlier phases,
one should rather focus on the less visible events than
those that lead to a decrease in democracy indexes.
Once I have created a database of backsliding, I will
address three questions: why, who, and how. First and
foremost, I am planning to tease out the structural
correlates of democratic backsliding. Second,
I want to explore what politicians are most likely to
commit autocratization. Third, I want to understand
how exactly autocrats engage in backsliding.
p.27
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Yuka
Kadoi
project
Politics of Representation: Muslim Cultural
Heritage in Central European Museums
p.28
Project Leader
Institute of Art History,
University of Vienna,
Austria
Senior Core Fellow
October 2022 – June 2023
This project explores the cultural politics of representation,
with special reference to contemporary museological
and sociological challenges in Central Europe,
where none of state and public institutions allocate
galleries dedicated to the world of Islam. While overviewing
the anachronistic image of Islamic art galleries
that dominated the museum field worldwide during
the twentieth century, this project seeks alternative
modes of display to suit current regional sociopolitical
circumstances. Addressing multifaceted issues
of display and curation in Austria, Czech Republic,
Slovakia, Hungary and Poland, each case study offers
an innovative approach and methodological proposition
so as to recontextualise the current exhibitory
trends in the public presentation of material remains
from Muslim-majority societies, including the Arab
lands, Iran, Turkey, and South Asia. Taken together,
this project sheds light on possibilities as well as limitations,
while provoking academic debates as to how
Muslim cultural heritage could be showcased in the
context of Central European museums.
p.29
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Scott
Kenworthy
project
Patriarch Tikhon and the Orthodox
Church in Revolutionary Russia
p.30
Professor
Department of Comparative Religion,
Miami University,
USA
Senior Core Fellow
October 2022 – February 2023
This project will be the first complete biography of Patriarch
Tikhon Bellavin (1865-1925), who became head
of the Orthodox Church during the Russian Revolution
and played a decisive role in guiding the church
in the face of a militantly hostile atheist regime. Based
on extensive new primary sources, it follows his career
in the Russian Empire and in North America before
1917, which played a formative role on Tikhon as a
leader, as well as his role as head of the church from
1917 onward. Although the Soviet authorities labeled
him a counter- revolutionary and repeatedly arrested
him, Tikhon sought to defend the church against
Bolsheviks’ assaults while at the same time was open
to negotiation in a way that prepared the church for
surviving in the hostile environment. The pattern of
church-state relations during the revolutionary period
not only shaped the entire Soviet period but became
paradigmatic for other communist countries.
p.31
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Anton
Liavitski
project
Minority Faith: The Electoral Politics
of Post-Soviet Democrats, 1989–97
p.32
Belarus
PhD, Ludwig-Maximilians-
Universität
GIAS Fellow
September 2022 – August 2023
This project offers a new perspective on the political
life of post-Soviet societies. It analyzes the rhetoric
and electoral tactics of democratic movements in
Ukraine and Belarus in the late 1980s and early 1990s
by using the methods of historical anthropology and
the history of political ideas. Based on a systematic
analysis of vote tallies, the project provides insights
into the geographical distribution of the democratic
electorate and the degree of its consolidation over
several elections. Further, it looks into how the leaders
of the democratic forces perceived their position as
political minorities and how this awareness influenced
their public rhetoric and collective action. Finally, it
explains the territorial distribution of democratic
coalitions in a broader context of class cleavages and
cultural-geographic divisions. By doing so, the project
should rethink the relationship between the political
practices of Eastern Europe and notions of the region’s
“backwardness,” prevalent among local elites since the
nineteenth century.
p.33
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Levente
Littvay
project
Conspiracy Beliefs
and Government Rule Compliance
p.34
Professor
Department of Political Science,
Central European University PU,
Austria
CEU Faculty Fellow
October – December 2022
Conspiracy theories are increasingly a visible part of
political life. Vaccine conspiracies were widespread
even before COVID-19 and conspiratorial thinking
has been tied to populist attitudes. During the
pandemic, how people responded to conspiracies was
literally a matter of life and death for both themselves
and their surroundings. For its 2020-2021 (10th) wave,
the European Social Survey included questions on the
pandemic, trust, and conspiratorial thinking. Conspiracy
items included general conspiratorial thinking,
science conspiracies and COVID19 specific conspiracies
allowing for a nuanced dissection of the relevant
conspiracy attitudes.
With this data, I propose to follow through the empirical
pathway from trust in scientists, through conspiratorial
thinking, to pandemic rule compliance. With
an environmental block included in the same survey,
the results can be cross-validated with pro-environment
behaviors as the outcome of this pathway. Given
the large number of countries’ participation in the
ESS, the study utilizes multilevel structural equation
modeling that allows for the influence of country-contextual
factors to interact with the individual level
behavioral-attitudinal relationship structures.
p.35
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Peter
Martens
project
Habits of Attention: How Early Christians
Encountered Their Scriptures
p.36
Professor of Early Christianity
Department of Theological Studies,
Saint Louis University,
USA
Senior Core Fellow
October 2022 – June 2023
Early Christians encountered their scriptures in many
different ways. My book offers an innovative account
about how these authoritative religious writings
were read, heard, seen, and touched in the opening
centuries of Christianity. I order a vast archive of
textual and visual sources by the habits of attention
that individuals and communities directed toward
their sacred literature. These habits of attention were
customary ways of relating to scripture, comprised of
physical, social, affective, dispositional, and attitudinal
components. My study examines eight of these
habits: conserving and transposing, clarifying as well
as solving, both regulating and amplifying, and finally,
dramatizing and identifying. No one has approached
the topic in this way. It opens a window onto the lives
of early Christians, but also advances current debates
across the humanities about how we are forming our
students for more rewarding modes of life.
p.37
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Syeda
Masood
project
Self-Making under U.S. Occupation in
Afghanistan: Literary Kabul’s Engagement with
Segregation, Surveillance and Withdrawal
p.38
PhD candidate, Brown University
USA
GIAS Fellow
September 2022 – August 2023
This project is based on my dissertation, Coloniality
and Self-Determination in Afghanistan: Literary
Kabul’s Engagement with Segregation, Surveillance and
Withdrawal. First, it will be revised for submission as
a book manuscript to an academic press. Second, I
will write and submit two stand-alone articles to top
tier journals for peer-review. The book and articles
are based on the ethnographic data I collected in 90+
interviews and 15 months of participant observation
in book clubs in Kabul, Afghanistan. I will use the
time at Global Institute for Advanced Study and
European Humanities University primarily for writing
and revision. The book manuscript would develop the
argument from my dissertation further. I argue that
despite the gains made by the urban middle classes
in a country like Afghanistan under U.S. occupation,
symbolic violence perpetrated by the technologies
of American empire eroded a confident sense of self
for them. My findings contribute to the study of
self-making under empire by showing the ways this
happens under the U.S. empire.
p.39
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Michiel
Meeusen
project
Literature of Hypochondria in
the High Roman Empire
p.40
Research Fellow
Institute of Classical Studies,
Research Unit Greek Studies,
KU Leuven,
Belgium
Senior Core Fellow
October 2022 – June 2023
Medicine was held in high regard in the High Roman
Empire: numerous eminent literary authors (including
sophists, philosophers, scholars, politicians, even
emperors) wrote extensively about medicine and
health related topics, both in Greek and Latin, and
expected their readers to share that interest. Within
this fascinating, and still under-explored field, my interest
is specifically in the literary expression of health
anxiety broadly defined, its many psychosomatic manifestations,
and its underlying cognitive motivations,
as being symptomatic more precisely of what seems
to be a heightened awareness, if not alarmism, about
physical and mental well-being in a time often contemptuously
referred to as an ‘Age of Hypochondria’.
The time is right for a revaluation of this fascinating
phenomenon based on a more sensitive and contextual
reading of the available sources, taking into account
both ‘patient’ and ‘doctor’ oriented perspectives, and
also by raising a range of transhistorical questions
still very relevant today.
p.41
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Youssef
Mnaili
project
The Political Dynamics of Settlement
Projects: The Central State – Settler
Relation in Israel and South Africa
p.42
Morocco
PhD, European University Institute
GIAS Fellow
September 2022 – August 2023
This project engages with the analogy of the Israeli
Settler movement and Afrikaner nationalism.
Despite commonalities between the two movements,
only the latter has attempted to decolonize, resulting
in the end of the apartheid. Thus, how did the leadership
of Afrikaner nationalism come to see a democratic
state as a better guarantor of their interests than
domination through separation? And relatedly, what
can the South African ‘moment’ inform us regarding
the Israel settlement movement? The research is
grounded on a fieldwork inquiry based on interviews
with the movements elites combined with a processtracing
methodology to reconstruct the concept of
political reform beyond the ethnic state.
p.43
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Sugata
Nandi
project
Subversive Orient: Globalization of Indian
Magic and the West, c.1790-1940
p.44
Assistant Professor
Department of History,
West Bengal State University,
Kolkata,
India
Junior Core Fellow
January – March 2023
Indian magic, meaning inexplicable tricks of Indian
magicians and feats attributed to Indian holy men,
was globalized by the West from late eighteenth to
the mid twentieth century. It challenged the modern
western project of disenchantment because a large
number Westerners believed that India magic was
truly supernatural being rooted in Hinduism and
beyond the grasp of modern science. Accounts written
by Europeans and Americans who had been to India,
which appeared in popular print in ever larger numbers
from the early nineteenth century affirmed such a
view, leading gentleman magicians, who appropriated
Indian magic for fame and money from the 1840s, to
debunk it as a set of lowly hoaxes. While their efforts
resulted in anthropological and ethnological studies of
Indian magic, they could not prevent western Spiritualists,
intellectuals and cultural rebels from seeking the
knowledge of the highest form of magic in Hinduism
for salvation of the soul.
p.45
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Pál
Nyíri
project
Migration and Values in Postwar Europe
p.46
Professor of Global History from an
Anthropological Perspective,
Department of Social and Cultural
Anthropology / Department of
History ,
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam,
Netherlands
Senior Core Fellow
October – December 2023
My earlier research on Chinese lifestyle migrants in
Hungary, carried out jointly with CEU PhD student
Fanni Beck, indicated that the Orbán government’s
militant anti-immigration rhetoric, coupled with the
selective liberalisation of immigration policies, actually
attracted Chinese immigrants looking for a culturally
and racially “pure” Europe. Since then, tightening authoritarianism
in China and Russia has triggered a new
exodus of the middle class from both countries. Both
developments foreground the rather neglected question
of values – as distinct from economic interest – as a
driver of migration. I am interested in the way in which
values, whether conservative or liberal, motivate middle-class
lifestyle migration within and to Europe in
the wake of the Ukraine war. In addition to developing
a conceptual framework, I intend to conduct follow-up
fieldwork on the way the Ukraine war has affected Chinese
immigrants In Hungary and start baseline studies
of Russian middle-class immigrants and Western
European lifestyle migrants to rural Hungary.
p.47
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Adaora
Osondu–Oti
project
Conditional Cash Transfers as Poverty Reduction
Strategy in Nigeria: A Gender Perspective
p.48
Associate Professor
Department of International
Relations and Diplomacy,
Afe Babalola University,
Nigeria
Junior Core Fellow
October 2022 – June 2023
The poverty situation in Nigeria is worrisome. In
2016, the Federal government of Nigeria established
the National Social Investments Program (NSIP),
including the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) to
tackle poverty across the country and prevent vulnerable
households from falling further down the poverty
line. The CCT program targets the poorest of the
poor by giving 5,000 Naira (N5000) monthly to “poor”
households in selected States/Communities. Main
questions to be addressed in this research project are:
what is the efficacy of this conditional cash transfer as
a poverty reduction strategy in Nigeria, and to what
extent has this social investment program considered
“gendered poverty” in its coverage?
p.49
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Amrita
Sen
project
A Political Ecology of Non-human Subject
Making in Conservation Landscapes of India
p.50
Assistant Professor
Department of Humanities and
Social Sciences,
Indian Institute of Technology
Kharagpur,
India
Junior Core Fellow
January – June 2023
Political ecology has often been considered as humancentric
and critiqued for its human exceptionalism,
since it analyses interplays between nature conservation
and social justice. In this work, I argue that
political ecology has significant scope in enhancing
environmental justice frameworks. To this end, the
proposed project aims to explain how non-humans
are constituted as political subjects in the processes of
forest conservation. Drawing on observations from the
Indian Sundarbans, the project aims to use a political
ecology framework in elucidating how, like humans,
tigers, the chief wildlife species in the Sundarbans are
also subjectified within a network of regulation, control
and subjugation and how justice frameworks in
political ecology can situate framings on interspecies
subjections. I argue that political ecology can enhance
the scope of justice frameworks by accounting for subjective
representations of non-humans in a political
process embedded not only in power relations but also
coproduced ideological practices.
p.51
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Helene Julia
Sinnreich
project
Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?
p.52
Associate Professor
Department of Religious Studies,
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
USA
Affiliated Fellow
January – June 2023
This research project is a study of selection at Auschwitz
concentration camp. Using the testimonies of
40 individuals who witnessed these selections, this
project examines a series of three selections which
took place during the fall of 1944 at Auschwitz
concentration camp. This microhistory which focuses
on a group of 2,000 young boys from predominantly
religious backgrounds between the ages of 12-16 who
arrived in the Auschwitz quarantine camp in the
summer and fall of 1944 from Poland and Hungary
and their experiences during a period of weeks covering
September through November 1944. In addition
to reconstructing these events from a multitude of
perspectives, this project interrogates how memories
of these events have been preserved, mythologized,
and understood, especially within the most religious
Jewish communities.
p.53
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Lina
Steiner
project
Tolstoy's Enlightenment: Religion,
Philosophy and Art, 1840s-1910
p.54
Associate Professor
Institute of Philosophy,
University of Bonn,
Germany
Senior Core Fellow
October 2022 – January 2023
This book examines Leo Tolstoy’s unique artistic and
intellectual legacy as a case study for understanding
Russia’s prolonged transition toward modernity.
It examines Tolstoy’s indebtedness to different branches
of the European Enlightenment and humanistic
traditions. The book argues that Tolstoy’s philosophical
perspective cannot be properly understood
without taking into account the influence of Spinoza
and his eighteenth and nineteenth-century followers,
including Lessing, Rousseau, Herder, Goethe, Schiller,
Feuerbach and Berthold Auerbach. Tolstoy’s Enlightenment
shows how Tolstoy’s experimentations with
didactic art reflect his religious-philosophical conception
of enlightened humanity as a symbiosis of logos
and love. At the same time, the book presents Tolstoy
as a non-dogmatic thinker, whose rational insights and
mystical illuminations never silenced his inner skeptic.
p.55
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Tatyjana
Szafonova
project
Central Asian Turn and the Reinvention
of Turanism in Hungary: Anthropological
Study of Self-Orientalising Praxis
p.56
Russia / Hungary
PhD, Central European University
GIAS Fellow
September 2022 – August 2023
Within the frames of the proposed project, I want to
look at how a populist regime assembles a specific
ideology. This process is tricky because one of the
premises of populist appeal is its vagueness, which
attracts very different groups not connected by
common interests or shared values. Populist ideology
should contain contradictory elements. We are
witnessing how Hungarian populist government is
reviving Turanism, a theory originally popular in the
first half of 20th century. It suggested that Hungarians,
Finns, Estonians, Kyrghyz, Kazakhs, Bashkirs, various
Siberian people, Turks, Finno-Ugrians, Samoyeds,
Mongols, Manchu-Tungus, Koreans and Japanese belong
to the same Turanian race. In recent years Central
Asian people got a prominent position among ‘Turanic
relatives' of the Hungarians. Turanism is revived in
contemporary Hungary with the emphasis on the
relations with Central Asia. Why did this happen, and
how can we explain such a selective re-enactment of
an old ideology?
p.57
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Attila
Tanyi
project
Health, Healthcare and Reasons: The Role of Reasons
in the Ethics of Health Care Resource Allocation
p.58
Professor of Ethics
Institute of Philosophy,
UiT: The Arctic University of Norway,
Tromsø, Norway
Affiliated Fellow
October 2022 – June 2023
The aim of the project is to develop a new framework
for the investigation of allocation issues in healthcare.
Any agent who makes a claim on health-care resources
must provide reasons that support their claim. I propose
that distributive justice in health-care resource
allocation is therefore best seen as an attempt to
maximize reason-based claims of agents on healthcare
resources. But ought we to make such priority-setting
– often called ‘rationing’ – decisions? I propose that the
answer to this query also depends on our account of
the relevant reasons. In short, the most promising way
to approach this area of applied ethics is to focus on
the reasons that are relevant to our inquiry. This is a
promising way also because in recent years there has
been an upsurge in research on reasons. At the same
time, this discussion has not made its way into medical
ethics. This project aims to fill this gap by fusing
the fields of applied, normative and metaethics.
p.59
IAS CEU Fellows
IAS CEU Fellows

Constructive Advanced
Thinking (CAT)
Te a m 1: 2020-23
project
Cartoons in Court: Towards a Forensic
Analysis of Visual Humor
p.60
November 2-10, 2022
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
On the one hand, the right to freely express oneself
through humor and satire is vital to democracy. On the
other, humor might sometimes be used as a vehicle for
less desirable forms of speech, such as defamation or
incitement to violence. Due to its inherent elusiveness,
humor can make it particularly difficult to draw a line
between lawful and unlawful expression; this is all the
more evident in the case of visual humor, whose high
degree of implicitness and condensation generates
specific interpretive challenges.
p.61
IAS CEU Fellows
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
Director of Cartoon Movement, the
Netherlands
Cartoons and other comparable forms of predominantly
visual humor (such as memes) are often at the
center of legal cases revolving around free speech and
its limits. Yet, even within comparable judicial systems,
courts still lack a consistent approach to the following
questions: How can judges deal with the ambiguity of
visual humor, i.e. the fact that the same cartoon or meme
can be interpreted in different ways by different people?
And to what extent can the author/cartoonist be considered
responsible for different (reasonable) interpretations?
In collaboration with free speech associations,
lawyers and artists’ platforms, our project addresses
these questions through an innovative dialogue between
humor studies and legal scholarship, with the
aim of contributing to a more consistent (and fairer)
approach to visual humor in courts of law.
IAS CEU Fellows

Constructive Advanced
Thinking (CAT)
Te a m 2: 2021-23
project
Reconstituting Publics through Remembering
Transitions: Facilitating Critical Engagement with
the 1980-90s on Local and Transnational Scales
p.62
IAS CEU Fellows
[Non-residential]
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
Postdoctoral Researcher at
the Centre for Anthropological
Research on Museums and Heritage
(CARMAH), Humboldt-Universität
zu Berlin
Alexander Formozov
Project Coordinator
Transition Dialogue Network
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, spaces for
dialogue are shrinking and public spheres are becoming
increasingly ‘disconnected.’
The project addresses this societal challenge by engaging
with memories of the ‘transitional period’ beyond
the polarized versions. Drawing on approaches of critical
memory studies, public history, (digital) ethnography,
and intersectional study of gender and generations,
the project develops strategies for facilitating 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.
The participation of the Transition Dialogue Network,
connecting NGOs across Central and Eastern Europe,
and collaboration with the European Solidarity
Center in Gdańsk facilitate the execution of empirical
research and its translation into policy recommendations
for remembrance projects.
p.63
IAS CEU Fellows

Constructive Advanced
Thinking (CAT)
Te a m 3: 2021-23
project
The Socio-ecological Reshaping of
European Cities and Metropolitan Areas
p.64
IAS CEU Fellows
[Non-residential]
Jochen Hack, Principal Investigator
Professor for Digital Environmental
Planning
Leibniz University of Hannover,
Germany
Maria Manso
Architect & Researcher in Civil
Engineering
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
PhD Candidate at the Department
of Geography
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona,
Spain
Joana Guerrin
Researcher in Political Sciences
French National Research
Institute for Food, Agriculture and
Environment, France
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.65
IAS CEU Fellows

Constructive Advanced
Thinking (CAT)
Te a m 4: 2022-25
project
Challenges for the Development of Fair
Language-Based Assessments of Health,
Education, Behavior, and Beyond
p.66
[Non-residential]
Damián Blasi, Principal Investigator
Harvard Data Science Initiative Fellow, Branco Weiss
Fellow, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of
Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, USA
Research Associate at the Department of Linguistic
and Cultural Evolution Department at the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany
Camila Scaff
Postdoctoral Researcher
Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zürich,
Switzerland
Adolfo García
Co-Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Center,
Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina
Senior Atlantic Fellow at the Global Brain Health Institute,
University of California, San Francisco, USA
Linguistic behavior serves as a reliable, inexpensive,
and increasingly automated resource to assess different
aspects of individuals and societies. Speech helps
detect incipient health issues; newspaper corpora are
used to identify stereotypes and societal biases; and
wordlists are the basis to determine verbal development.
However, these and other relevant developments
(which we label language-based assessments or
LanBAs) have been concocted, tested, and deployed
primarily on a handful of large and commercially
central languages, with English dominating the scene.
Since the 6,500 extant languages can and do vary
substantially, transferring LanBAs from English to
them is fraught with technical and linguistic challenges.
The consequence of this bias, which we are
only starting to understand, is that users of minority
languages have at their disposal more expensive, less
efficient, and potentially biased LanBAs. A novel
source of worldwide inequity looms large across
multiple social arenas.
p.67
IAS CEU Fellows
Joseph Dexter
Harvard Data Science Initiative Fellow, Co-director of the
Quantitative Criticism Lab
Harvard University, USA
Amber Gayle Thalmayer
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology, University of Zürich,
Switzerland
We propose to address this issue by gathering a
diverse set of experts with three main tracks of activity:
(1) critically synthesizing the scientific evidence
revealing the Anglophone bias in LanBAs, (2) engaging
policy-makers, experts on language technologies,
and other non-academic agents, and (3) transferring
knowledge to the general audience through diverse
media strategies.
IAS CEU Fellows

Constructive Advanced
Thinking (CAT)
Te a m 5: 2022-25
project
Screening European Populisms (2008-2020):
Audiovisual Fiction, Social Media, and Political Affect
p.68
IAS CEU Fellows
[Non-residential]
Valerio Coladonato, Principal
Investigator
Assistant Professor, Sapienza
University of Rome
Marc Guinjoan
Associate Professor, Universitat
Oberta de Catalunya
Dominic Holdaway
Assistant Professor, University of
Urbino Carlo Bo
Elena Pilipets
Research Associate, University of
Siegen
Lidia Valera Ordaz
Associate Professor, University of
Valencia
Populist forces have transformed the European political
landscape, challenging the legitimacy of institutions
and representational systems. Frequently aligned
with reactionary platforms, these actors emphasize
ethnonationalist and exclusionary societal views.
The mainstream media, politicians, and migrants are
demonized, and mistrust in the system is a widely
circulated currency. In the digital media environment,
affect plays a central role in the success of this
worldview: anger at perceived victimization and loss of
social status, resentment against elites, and attachment
to leaders who defy political correctness. Narrative
work is a crucial element of populist mobilization, yet
the role of audiovisual fiction remains significantly
understudied: grasping this relationship is necessary
to disentangle populisms’ capacity to transform affect
into democratic erosion. The project aims to trace and
re-connect the different dimensions in the circulation
of populist affect, by analyzing narrative and stylistic
aspects of key films and TV series, tracing their reception,
interactions, and appropriations in social media
content and online political conversations. The project
will focus on the impact and circulation of these case
studies between the onset of the 2008 financial crisis
and Brexit. The collaboration with two organizations
working in political participation and in media
literacy (SALTO Participation & Information; Media
& Learning Association), will enable a better understanding
of the role of fiction in creating and spreading
populist affect in this political conjuncture.
p.69
IAS CEU Fellows

notes
notes
p.70
IAS CEU Fellows
p.71
IAS CEU Fellows