Events and news

16 July 2024

13:00-14:00 (s.t.)
GD lecture theatre 04, Gräfin-Dönhoff-Building

Border Controls between Frankfurt (Oder) and Słubice - A Scientific Inventory

In cooperation with the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION, this present-day analysis at lunchtime/research factory is dedicated to the ongoing controls at the German-Polish border and their effects in Frankfurt (Oder).

With Dr Markus Engler (DeZiM) and Lea Sophie Christinck (EUV/ DeZiM),
authors of the report on the status of border controls at the German-Polish border

The temporary stationary controls introduced by the Federal Ministry of the Interior at the borders with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland also affect the German-Polish border crossing in Frankfurt (Oder) and Słubice. Since October 2023, the Federal Police have been carrying out the measure at the city bridge, which has been extended several times. The declared aim of the controls is to curb "irregular migration" and combat smuggling by preventing unauthorised entry attempts before they enter the country. The measures have been criticised in various ways. While some criticise the measures for having too little or no effect, others criticise the risk of discrimination and racial profiling during implementation.

What consequences can now be recognised in practice? The Green Party parliamentary group has commissioned an expert report to assess the situation. With our guests and authors of the study Marcus Engler and Lea Sophie Christinck from the Centre for Integration and Migration Research Berlin (DeZIM), we would like to discuss the state of affairs from a scientific perspective. How can the measures be categorised in terms of their effectiveness? How are the discourses on security and migration changing? What impact do the local restrictions have on the understanding of European values and the right to freedom of movement in Europe?

Link to livestream

What role did climate policy play in the EU election campaign? This is the question that our colleague and institute member Amelie Kutter and her students are investigating on the occasion of the European Parliament election on 9 June 2024. A report on the results and insights of the analysis has been published in the Viadrina Logbook. After the end of the semester, the analyses will be published together with reports from the meeting with candidates.

19 June 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 transitions across East Central Europe.

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.

11 June 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.

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30 April 2024

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

20 Years of EU Membership – (Future) Perspectives from East Central Europe  

Panel discussion in cooperation with the Viadrina Center of Polish and Ukrainian Studies (VCPU):

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

Moderation: Susann Worschech (IFES/KIU)  

On 4 May 2024, ten countries will be joining the European Union for the twentieth time. It was the largest simultaneous round of EU enlargement to date. It not only changed the countries that joined, but also the Union itself. The EU accession of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the three Baltic states as well as Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus was celebrated as European unification and was often interpreted, particularly in Poland, as a return to Europe. However, the image of the „return“ obscures the extent to which this enlargement is linked to the successful imitation of Western governance and social models and that the so-called EU enlargement to the east was part of a pan-European transformation process that is still too little recognised and understood today – but which holds important lessons for future rounds of enlargement – especially with regard to Ukraine.

In this panel discussion, Viadrina experts want to look ahead and ask how institutional and social cooperation has developed in a united Europe, how the conditionality of the EU has had an impact and is assessed today, what historical experiences the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have brought to the EU and what political emotions were and are associated with the accession process.

All interested parties are welcome to attend (also with their brown bag lunch…) on site. The event will also be streamed. For the livestream please click here.

In the new issue of the Journal of Illiberalism Studies Anja Hennig addresses questions of the representation of 'illiberal actors' in academic discourse in her essay "The Ambivalence of the Liberal-Illiberal Dynamic". Against the background of specific experiences with the 'Monday demonstrations' in Frankfurt (Oder), Hennig explains, among other things, which actors and statements should be given a platform in the academic context, where and which red lines should be drawn if necessary, and how the academic discourse in general can relate to 'illiberal' actors - questions that are central to the self-positioning of academics.