Remembering
transitions
From 10 to 15 June 2024, we welcomed the Constructive Advanced Thinking (CAT) group of Ksenia Robbe (PI, University of Groningen), Andrei Zavadski (TU Dortmund University), Agnieszka Mrozik (Polish Academy of Sciences) and Nora Korte (Transition Dialogue) to the Zukunftskolleg. They participated and were successful in the CAT call in 2020.
During their stay in Konstanz, they collaborated on their research project “Reconstituting Publics through Remembering Transitions: Facilitating Critical Engagement with the 1980-90s on Local and Transnational Scales” and presented it at the Jour fixe on 11 June.
The project engages with the possibilities and specific strategies of facilitating critical remembrance of the 1980-1990s ‘transitions’ in countries of Eastern Europe, which have been a site of contention and contestation, especially lately as far-right parties in the region have exploited this recent past in their political visions of the future. The group members introduced their experimental approach to conducting public and small group discussions focusing on memories of this past, which they have developed and tested in different locations in Germany and Poland. This approach aims to bring out and investigate the processes and strategies of building connections across and through differences without avoiding conflict – the practice that they have conceptualized as ‘dialogic remembering.’
After their trip to Konstanz, they reported on their stay at the Zukunftskolleg:
“The week we spent at the Zukunftskolleg in Konstanz was our group’s last research stay at European Institutes of Advanced Studies, following the stays at IAS CEU Budapest and SCAS Uppsala in 2022, NIAS Amsterdam in 2023 and IAS Paris in early 2024. In fact, this series of stays was planned to start in Konstanz but had to be delayed twice due to obstacles related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of a stay in December 2021, we had an online discussion with the Gemeinsinn group, organized by Gruia Badescu. This discussion helped us a lot in shaping the project, and it was very rewarding to ‘return’ to Konstanz at the (official) end of project to share our findings and further developments.
Our visit started with a welcome dinner with Gruia Badescu after our arrival on Sunday evening. On Monday, Renate Krüssmann welcomed us to the ZuKo and introduced us to the institute’s history, structure and academic life. Renate and Gruia gave us a tour of the university building, the library and an exhibition related to one of the fellows’ research projects. After preparing our presentation for the next day, we enjoyed a dinner with a group of ZuKo fellows.
Tuesday was the day of the Jour fixe, during which we presented our project to a large group of fellows and university staff and received valuable feedback from different disciplinary perspectives. In particular, we discussed our preliminary findings from the fieldwork that we had conducted in four cities in Poland and Germany, in collaboration with four different museums. Following the presentation, we had a meeting with Pavel Kolář’s Eastern European History research group, which was a good opportunity to get to know each other better. During the dinner that evening, we continued discussions with several participants of the colloquium.
The next three days provided us with a perfect opportunity for ‘quiet’ work on the project as a group. We spent this time discussing and analyzing the data from the last part of our fieldwork, conceptualizing our findings and planning our co-authored article, which will be part of a special issue on ‘dialogic remembering’ that we are currently preparing for the Memory Studies journal. During these days, we also focused on planning a follow-up project with the Transition Dialogue network (represented by Nora Korte). This new project will involve consultations with the partner organizations of our current project (museums) and preparing a toolkit based on our findings and recommendations. At the core of the project will be a wider application of the method of dialogic remembering that we have developed as part of the current project.
We alternated intensive work sessions with walks in the park on the university campus as well as lunches and coffee breaks with Milica Popovic, a fellow of the Eastern European History group, and colleagues in Slavic and Latin American studies (Maria Zhukova and Sandra Rudman respectively). Our visit was rounded off by a trip to the beautiful town of Meersburg, organized by Gruia Badescu. We are extremely grateful to Renate, Gruia and all those at the ZuKo involved in making our stay enjoyable and productive.
For further information on our project, please consult the website.”
Experiences of another CAT group
Another former CAT group - of Manuel Spitschan, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and Technical University of Munich, Germany; Laura Kervezee, Leiden University Medical Center, the Netherlands; Renske Lok, Stanford University, United States; Elise McGlashan, Monash University, Australia; and Raymond Najjar, National University of Singapore - that participated in the CAT call in 2020 and visited the Zukunftskolleg in November 2022 have recently summarized their experiences in the CAT programme in an article that was published in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44323-024-00010-4
This adds to their main publication on the ENLIGH guidelines, which they developed within the programme: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964(23)00455-3/fulltext
New CAT groups selected
CAT is an open international call designed to foster interdisciplinary research teams of young promising individuals from different European backgrounds wishing to address emergent societal issues with fresh ideas. CAT provides teams of early career researchers (three to five persons, possibly including a stakeholder) time and space for thought and discussion in the best research environments Europe has to offer. These teams have not collaborated on a regular basis before but are initiated in the frame of a CAT group and meet several times at different institutions over three years.
Together with our sister institutes in Europe organized within the Network of Institutes for Advanced Studies (NetIAS), we launched the 2023 CAT call for proposals for research groups. The deadline was 15 October 2023. We received a total of eight submissions, all of which were eligible. Five were shortlisted. At the Selection Meeting, three groups were finally chosen. Here are the selected groups and the IAS that have agreed to host the groups during the next years of their programmes:
- Jonatan Kurzwelly Group: “Over their dead bodies: Underlying axioms and contemporary use and handling of human remains from institutional collections”
Hosting IASs: NIAS Amsterdam; Scienza Nuova Torino; CAS Stockholm; FRIAS Freiburg; Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; HIAS Hamburg - Philipp Reick Group: “Democracy at Work: Historical Perspectives and Future Challenges for Employee Representation in Europe”
Hosting IASs: HIAS Hamburg (2 visits, one week each); Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) Delmenhorst; IAS Paris (2 visits); Montpellier Advanced Knowledge Institute on Transitions - Tom Vaughan Group: “Theories of Change and Nuclear Disarmament (TCND)”
Hosting IASs: CAS Stockholm; IAS Paris (2 visits); Zukunftskolleg Konstanz, Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) Delmenhorst; IIAS Jerusalem
The Zukunftskolleg is looking forward to hosting the Vaughan Group in Konstanz in the early summer of 2025. The exact date and possible local partners have yet to be confirmed.
More information online.