Veranstaltungen und News

7. Juni 2024

11:00-13:00 Uhr (c.t.)
AM 203, Audimax

Church and (Post)colonialism: how religion became a tool of colonization in Ukraine

Guest Lecture:

Dr. Andriy Fert

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought to the fore the issue of decolonization. Once a Russian imperial colony, Ukraine seeks to cope with various traumas inflicted by several hundred years of imperial dominance in politics and culture. One particular issue in this decolonization sparks an awful lot of controversy - the Church. One of the biggest religious organizations in Ukraine, the Orthodox Church, has been since the 17th century part of the Russian Church and hence the Russian policy of assimilation. In this lecture, Andriy Fert wants to explore how the Church came to be a powerful yet discreet tool of colonial domination, even after Ukraine gained independence in 1991, and how Ukraine struggles to find a way between banning an institution of the Russian soft power while respecting the right to religious freedom. Dr. Fert will take a look at how the Church crafted history narratives and established veneration practices that ultimately legitimized a “sacral unity” between Russia and Ukraine. 

Dr. Andriy Fert is a UNET non-resident fellow at the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin (ZOiS) and studies the impact of the Russian war against Ukraine on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Since 2017, Andriy Fert has been working for the Institute for International Cooperation of the Deutscher Volkshochschul-Verband e.V. (DVV), coordinating projects related to history education in Ukrainian secondary schools. He is a member of the International Working Group on Lived Religion in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Andriy Fert is based in Kyiv and teaches at the Kyiv School of Economics and the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.  

11.06.2024

18:00-20:00 (c.t.)
HG 201b

Aspect blindness: The problem of migration from Wittgenstein's perspective

Presentation by Witold Jacorzynski  as part of the cultural studies colloquium.

In his presentation Witold Jacorzinsky will examine the problem of the immigrant as an Other. The otherness will be considered in its four different senses: the other as no-I, the other as a stranger, the other as an enemy and the other as a fellowman or a neighbour. As a case study Witold Jacorzinsky will analyse the migrants´ situation on the Polish-Belorussian and Mexican-Guatemalan borders. Those two cases will be compared through the use of wittgensteinian concepts such as seeing- as, aspect blindness and family resemblances.

Witold Jacorzynski studied philosophy and anthropology at the University of Warsaw, Poland, and holds a doctorate in humanities. His research focuses on anthropological theory, philosophy and ethnography of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas and Oaxaca. He has been a guest lecturer at the universities of Notre Dame (USA), Leipzig (Germany) and Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). Witold Jacorzynski has been a senior researcher at the renowned anthropological institute CIESAS (Mexico) since 1998. From April to June 2024, he is a visiting researcher at the Institute for European Studies (IFES) as a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

19.06.2024

14:30-16:00 (s.t.)
GD 07

Remembering transitions across East Central Europe: Preliminary findings from the field research in Poland and Germany

Presentation by Agnieszka Mrozik (MES)  as part of the cultural studies colloquium.

The talk aims to present, on the one hand, the collaborative research project “Reconstituting publics through remembering transitions: Facilitating Critical Engagement with the 1980–90s on Local and Transnational Scales” – its objectives and the methodology adopted, and on the other hand to share preliminary findings from the fieldwork in Poland (Gdańsk and Łódź) and Germany (Berlin and Eisenhüttenstadt). The project investigates how dialogic memory practices can be facilitated and developed around memories of the 1980-90s political, socioeconomic, and cultural transformations in (post)socialist Europe. By “dialogic remembering,” the research team refers to the processes that create a space for sharing varied memories – voicing difference and dissent, relating to stories of others, and potentially creating new narratives that interlink divergent visions of the past. In my talk, I will not only discuss what memories were shared by the participants of the workshops we organized in four locations in Poland and Germany, as well as the participants of the discussions after the film Crystal Swan (2018), which we screened at the museums we collaborated with, but I will also try to answer the question of whether and how the concept of “dialogic remembering” works in practice.

Agnieszka Mrozik is an Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a guest professor at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) in the summer semester of 2023/24. She is the author of Architektki PRL-u: Komunistki, literatura i emancypacja kobiet w powojennej Polsce [Women architects of the Polish People’s Republic: Communist women, literature, and women’s emancipation in postwar Poland] (Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2022) and Akuszerki transformacji: Kobiety, literatura i władza w Polsce po 1989 roku [Midwives of the transformation: Women, literature, and power in post-1989 Poland] (Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2012). She has co-authored and co-edited several collective volumes, including Reassessing Communism: Concepts, Culture, and Society in Poland, 1944–1989 (CEU Press, 2021), Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond (Routledge, 2020), and Historical Memory of Central and East European Communism (Routledge, 2018). Together with Dr. Ksenia Robbe (University of Groningen, PI), Dr. Andrei Zavadski (TU Dortmund) and Nora Korte (“Transition Dialogue” network, Berlin) she is working on the research project “Reconstituting Publics through Remembering Transitions: Facilitating Critical Engagement with the 1980–90s on Local and Transnational Scales” (2021–2024), awarded by the Network of European Institutes for Advanced Study (NetIAS) as part of the Constructive Advanced Thinking (CAT) Programme.

In der neuen Ausgabe des Journal of Illiberalism Studies widmet sich Anja Hennig in ihrem Essay "The Ambivalence of the Liberal-Illiberal Dynamic" Fragen der Repräsentation 'illiberaler Akteure' im wissenschaftlichen Diskurs. Vor dem Hintergrund spezifischer Erfahrungen mit den 'Montagsdemonstrationen' in Frankfurt (Oder) erläutert Hennig u.a., welchen Akteuren und Aussagen im akademischen Rahmen eine Bühne geboten werden sollte, wo und welche rote Linien dabei gegebenenfalls zu ziehen sind und wie sich der wissenschaftliche Diskurs im allgemeinen auf 'illiberale' Akteure beziehen kann - Fragen, die zentral für die Selbstverortung von Wissenschaftler*innen sind.

30. April 2024

13:00-14:30 Uhr (s.t.)
GD 102, Gräfin-Dönhoff-Gebäude  

20 Jahre EU-Mitgliedschaft – (Zukunfts-)Perspektiven aus Ostmitteleuropa  

Podiumsdiskussion in Kooperation mit dem Viadrina Center of Polish and Ukrainian Studies (VCPU):

Timm Beichelt (MES)
Wojciech Gagatek (Warschau)
Anja Hennig (IFES)
Sonja Priebus (IFES)
Falk Flade (VCPU)

Moderation: Susann Worschech (IFES/KIU)  

Am 4. Mai 2024 jährt sich die Aufnahme von zehn Ländern in die Europäische Union zum zwanzigsten Mal. Es war die bis dato größte zeitgleiche Erweiterungsrunde der EU. Sie veränderte nicht nur die beigetretenen Länder, sondern auch die Union selbst. Der EU-Beitritt Polens, Ungarns, Tschechiens und der Slowakei, der drei baltischen Staaten sowie Sloweniens, Maltas und Zyperns wurde als europäische Einigung gefeiert und vielfach, insbesondere in Polen, auch als „Rückkehr nach Europa“ gedeutet. Doch das Bild der „Rückkehr“ verdeckt, wie sehr diese Erweiterung mit der erfolgreichen Imitation westlicher Governance- und Gesellschaftsmodelle verbunden ist und dass die sogenannte EU-Osterweiterung Teil eines gesamteuropäischen Transformationsprozesses war, der bis heute zu wenig erkannt und verstanden wird – der aber wichtige Lehren bereithält für zukünftige Erweiterungsrunden – gerade im Hinblick auf die Ukraine.

In dieser Podiumsdiskussion wollen Viadrina Expert*innen den Blick vor allem nach vorn richten und fragen, wie sich institutionelle und gesellschaftliche Zusammenarbeit im geeinten Europa entwickelt haben, wie die Konditionalität der EU sich ausgewirkt hat und heute beurteilt wird, welche historischen Erfahrungen die Länder Mittel- und Osteuropas in die EU eingebracht haben und welche politischen Emotionen mit dem Beitrittsprozess verbunden waren und sind. 

Alle Interessierte sind gerne eingeladen (auch mit ihrem Brown Bag Lunch…) vor Ort teilzunehmen. Die Veranstaltung wird auch gestreamt. Für den Livestream bitte hier klicken.