Chers collègues,
Vous trouverez ci-dessous et ci-joint, un appel à participation pour la septième école d'été internationale en sciences sociales en Ukraine, consacrée cette année au thème des frontières, et auquel le Centre d'Etudes Franco-russe de Moscou est associé.
Bien cordialement
AR
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Seventh International Social Science Summer School in Ukraine
Borders in the Post-Socialist Space: Past, Present, Future
Chernivtsi (Ukraine), 3-9 July 2015
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"At that time, the border between Austria and Russia...was one of the strangest areas...Vienna and St Petersburg were already starting to prepare for the Great War. The borderlanders felt it coming earlier... They even profited from these preparations. Any number of them lived from spying and counterspying...But here too, the soldiers drilled, as in any other garrison of the empire...Less than nine miles separated them from Russia. The Russian officers of the border regiment often came across...The two garrisons even maintained a certain camaraderie with each other."
–Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March
PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
In The Radetzky March (1932) Joseph Roth reminds us that borders cannot be understood only as dividing lines. Borders divide, but they also create a community of "borderlanders"; borders may demarcate boundaries, even with guns and guards, but their very existence encourages trespassing.
Yet the Habsburg Empire, so present in Joseph Roth's works, collapsed. World War I ended with the creation of new borders, as European leaders drew new lines according to ideas of self-determination. These, however, proved malleable and contested; throughout the interwar period and World War II politicians, armies and citizens shifted, created, and destroyed these new borders. Borders, in the 20th century, both witnessed and provoked violence. Borders that seemed eternal changed rapidly, and these changes carried administrative, political, and social consequences.
Borders remain today a crucial issue across the post-Soviet space in debate over both contemporary geopolitics and historical legacies, as Russia's seizure of Crimea and the war in Ukraine's East have shown.
Over the last several centuries, an inhabitant of Eastern Europe could be born in one country, grow up in another, die in a third, and yet never leave home. Shifting borders shaped not only place names, but also everyday lives and practices. Establishing, challenging, and guarding borders was inseparable from war, population exchanges, deportations, confinement, imprisonment.
New borders appeared as the collapse of the Soviet Union turned administrative borders into the national borders of new states. Today, migration, displacement, and minorities also pose new challenges to states and societies in the expanded European Union.
Historical legacies, whether imperial, Soviet, and/or national, geopolitics, make imagined borders very real. Though some borders have vanished from the map, they survive in local memory and practice.
Scholarship has moved beyond the concept of nation; engaging the concept, practice and legacy of "borders" directly will produce rich and diverse material for discussion and analysis.
The Seventh International Social Science Summer School in Ukraine welcomes proposals that approach the concept of "Borders" from many disciplines in the social sciences and adjacent fields, such as history, sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, architecture, and urban studies. Our regional focus is the former Soviet Union, Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. While the primary concentration will be on the 20th and 21st centuries, 19th century proposals are welcome.
TOPICS OF INVESTIGATION COULD INCLUDE
Defining and defending borders
- Borders as object and result of power relations
- Nationalism, separatism and new states
- State borders vs. imperial borders vs. regional borders
- Borders and armed conflicts; cross-border violence
- The actors involved: politicians, scientists, intellectuals, military
- Border crossing, border control: enforcing, maintaining, and regulating borders
Living with the border
- Borders emerging, shifting, and vanishing
- Self-identifications, nationalism, separatism
- Borders creating minorities; minorities encountering, negotiating and contesting borders
- Material and social effects of establishing new borders or transforming old ones
- Borders and the natural environment; borders and urban space
- The border in everyday life
- Internal borders: borders between populations inside the country or the city
Mobility
- Migration policies
- Transborder circulation and communication
- Impact of the fall of the Soviet Union, EU enlargement, and local wars
- The effect of the EU border; externalization of EU migration policy; Schengen Area and "Fortress Europe"
Economy
- Transborder trade and business at different levels, from state to private and small business
- Everyday practices, rituals, economies of border-crossing
- Customs and tax policies, transnational agreements.
- Borders: positive or negative impact on the economy?
Borders, space, and the imagination
- Borders shaping political, economic, social belonging and representation
- Imagined borders, remembered borders, forgotten borders:
east, west, central, home, ours, theirs
- Vanished borders in practice and representation (Habsburg / Romanov border; Soviet / non-Soviet border)
FORMAT: WORKSHOP AND FIELDWORK
The Summer School is interdisciplinary and follows a workshop format. Each participant will present a pre-circulated paper and receive comments from a group of international faculty, as well as from other participants. Participants are expected to contribute actively to discussions and to participate in the extracurricular program. Throughout the week we will include roundtables, field visits, local interviews and excursions within the region. These off-site activities will contribute to our seminar discussions.
Location: Chernivtsi (Ukraine)
The International Social Science Summer School in Ukraine takes place in a different city of Ukraine every year. Previous schools have been held in Uman (2009), Dnipropetrovsk (2010), Ostroh (2011), Zhytomyr (2012), Mykolaiv (2013) and Lviv (2014).
Chernivtsi is a quintessential border city. Nestled in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains on the Prut River, Chernivtsi is the gateway to the Bukovina region, an area contested, conquered, and lost by multiple empires and nations. Today the region is split between Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. The Romanian and Moldovan borders are only kilometers away from Chernivtsi. Chernivtsi, Cernăuți, Czernowitz, טשערנאָוויץ (Tschernovits if Hebrew letters don't work), Chernovtsy -- the city's name echoes its multilingual and multiethnic heritage. The city was known as a cosmopolitan center, where the local population spoke at least six languages and enjoyed a rich and diverse cultural life. Austrians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Germans and Jews lived in this city, dubbed "Little Vienna." It was also, however, known as "Jerusalem upon the Prut," and at a conference in 1908 Jewish writers declared themselves for Yiddish as a literary language. Czernowitz native Paul Antschel, better known as Paul Celan, was a Jewish poet who chose to write in German, and the city now hosts a yearly international poetry festival in his name. Control of the city shifted constantly. During the First and Second World Wars its German, Jewish, Romanian, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian inhabitants saw the city change hands several times, often at dramatic human cost. Claimed by the USSR in 1940, Chernivtsi fell to Nazi forces in 1940 and experienced Romanian occupation until 1944, when it became part of Soviet Ukraine until the USSR's collapse in 1991. Today, it is in independent Ukraine, but traces of its multi-ethnic past as a city on the border of national and imperial projects remain. Its beautiful architecture preserves much of the heritage of previous generations, and it features one of the region's largest Jewish cemeteries. Our summer school will take place in the Chernivtsi National University, whose main building is an architectural gem recognized by the UNESCO World Heritage List.
DURATION
One week, July 3-8.
ELIGIBILITY
The Summer School is open to PhD students (or students enrolled in a kandidat nauk program) and young researchers (up to six years removed from their PhD or kandidat nauk degree). Proposals strong on theory and empirical research are particularly welcomed. The working language of the Summer School is English. Participants must be comfortable working in English.
PROGRAM COSTS
There is no program fee. The organizers will cover accommodation, meals, workshops and all excursions. The participants (or their institutions) must pay travel expenses from their home country to Kyiv; the transfer from Kyiv to Chernivtsi will be covered by the summer school budget.
HOW TO APPLY?
To be considered for the Summer School, candidates must complete an application form (that includes a 500 word project proposal) and add a CV. They can also send an additional written sample, such as a conference paper, a dissertation chapter, or a publication (optional). The application must be sent by e-mail to
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by 1 April 2015.
The application form can be requested at
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or downloaded on the following address: http://socialsciences.uottawa.ca/ukra.../ukraine-summer-school
THE SUMMER SCHOOL IS SPONSORED BY
The Wolodymyr George Danyliw Foundation (Canada)
And the Embassy of France in Ukraine
in partnership with
The Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi State University
The Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa (Canada)
The Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales [EHESS] (France)
The Centre d'Etudes Franco-Russe de Moscou
The University of Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense (France)
The Centre for Slavic History (CRHS) of University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne
