UKRAINE, Dnipro, Transregional Academy: apply by 14 January 2019

The research program Prisma Ukraïna invites scholars to apply for the participation in the Transregional Academy “After Violence: The (Im-)Possibility of Understanding and Remembering”, that will be held 10–17 June 2019 in Dnipro, Ukraine.

The Transregional Academy will address issues related to the understanding and remembering of traumatic experiences of physical and symbolic violence that occurred during the 20th and 21st centuries. This violence was prolonged by the erasure of memory, through silence, oblivion, fear, indifference, and manipulation of the public consciousness. The Academy will consider problems of representation and the silencing of traumas in various kinds of narrative texts (memories, fiction, journalistic texts, historiography, cinema, graphic arts, paintings, monuments and other symbolic structures). The Transregional Academy will predominantly focus on Ukraine, which became one of the main battlefields of the 20th century, profoundly affected by revolutions, the two world wars, and the Holocaust. Ukraine now represents a space of both military and symbolic conflict. The Academy additionally wants to explore studies covering the wider Eastern-European region, seeking original and productive comparisons with similar phenomena beyond Ukraine. Researchers engaged in interdisciplinary work in the humanities and social sciences are highly welcomed.

The Academy will not only include lectures and discussions on the participants’ projects, but also organize anthropological fieldwork in various urban areas. This part of the Transregional Academy is aimed to encourage ref lection on the possible reasons behind the exclusion of certain actors and traditions from the urban collective memory. It also aims to direct participants to thinking of how the past becomes a concern of the present through the planning and opening of different memorial sites.
The Transregional Academy will gather 18-20 doctoral and postdoctoral scholars from various social sciences and humanities disciplines (including, but not exclusive to, history, literature, social anthropology, social psychology, sociology and political sciences) whose studies relate to the Academy’s above-mentioned topic(s) and questions.
The Transregional Academy will take place at the “Tkuma” Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies and the Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine”, located at the Menorah Dnipro Multifunctional Center.

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