Transregional Dynamics in Eastern Europe and the Americas: New Empirical Approaches

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Transregional Dynamics in Eastern Europe and the Americas: New Empirical Approache

Organizer
Katja Castryck-Naumann and Corinne Geering (Leibniz-Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, Leipzig), Paul Vickers (CITAS, Universität Regensburg) in cooperation with the Leibniz ScienceCampus “Eastern Europe – Global Area” (EEGA) in Leipzig and the Leibniz ScienceCampus “Europe and America” in Regensburg
Venue
Tagungslounge, Katharinenstraße 6, Leipzig
ZIP
04109
Location
Leipzig
Country
Germany
From - Until
03.03.2022 - 04.03.2022
By
Connections Redaktion, Leipzig Research Centre Global Dynamics, Universität Leipzig

For several years now, there has been lively discussion on how East European studies and other area studies can make fruitful use of the theoretical and methodological debates in global studies for comparative research and research exploring entanglements. This workshop seeks to address this discussion by inviting researchers to present current book and habilitation projects that combine area studies research with approaches inspired by global and/or comparative area studies.

Transregional Dynamics in Eastern Europe and the Americas: New Empirical Approache

For several years now, there has been lively discussion on how East European studies and other area studies can make fruitful use of the theoretical and methodological debates in global studies for comparative research and research exploring entanglements. A whole host of conceptual options have emerged, from "Comparative Area Studies” to "Transregional Studies”. East European studies have proven particularly adept at integrating transregional contexts into new approaches in area studies. What also becomes evident in existing discussions is that programmatic ideas on methods and approaches have been connected with empirical research only to a limited extent. Thus, what still remains underexplored is how actors adapted and circulated practices and discourses in different spaces, the extent to which actors were aware of these entanglements and their impact on their own actions, how different ideas supplemented, complemented or competed with each other, and which restrictions shaped historical and present-day experience.

This workshop seeks to address these questions by inviting researchers to present current book and habilitation projects that combine area studies research with approaches inspired by global and/or comparative area studies. There is general consensus, on the conceptual level, that area studies should take into account both intra-regional relations as well as transregional entanglements, with this turn ensuring that regions and subregions (such as East-Central or Southeast Europe) have also acquired more refined contours through their inclusion in global processes. In this workshop, we would like to examine and discuss collaboratively how ongoing projects have implemented new conceptions of area studies and space, which difficulties arise in the course of such efforts, but above all which new questions and research foci can emerge from this. How suited are the established and emerging conceptual and analytical frameworks within area studies to empirical research on the regions under investigation? How can the boundaries between sites of theory-production and locations of empirical knowledge and source material be more fluid?

The workshop will be concluded and rounded off with an evening event that explores transregional dynamics in curatorial practice.

To attend the, workshop please register in advance with corinne.geering@leibniz-gwzo.de

Programm

Thursday, March 3
13:15
Welcome
Maren Röger (GWZO, Leipzig)

13:30–14:00
Insights from Transottomanica: Eastern European-Ottoman-Persian Mobility Dynamics
Stefan Rohdewald (U Leipzig)

14:00–14:15
Coffee break

14:30–16:00
(Un)Learning Eastern Europe: Transregional Perspectives on Post-Socialist Epistemologies
Elisa Satjukow (U Leipzig)

Women as Co-Producers of the Global (Socialist) Condition
Réka Krizmanics (Imre Kertész Kolleg, Jena)

16:00–16:30
Coffee break

16:30–18:00
Black Women Performers and the Making of Space in Interwar Paris: Critical Reflections on Cultural Transfer and the Workings of the Archive
Carmen Dexl (U Regensburg)

Transregional Actors and Dynamics in the North American Entertainment Industries, 1880s to 1920s
Antje Dietze (U Leipzig)

Friday, March 4
10:00–11:30
Trans' as a Methodological Approach towards Ryszard Kapuscinski's Literary Journalism in Latin America
Joanna Moszczynska (U Regensburg)

Bridging Regional and International Histories through Biographies – Connecting Lines and Separations
Katja Castryck-Naumann (GWZO, Leipzig)

11:30–13:00
Lunch break

13:00–14:30
The Translocal Connectivity of Peripheral Groups: Researching International Naturism as Humanistic Idea and Transnational Practice
Jacqueline Nießer (U Regensburg)

Locating the Periphery: A Transregional Approach to Rural Home Industries
Corinne Geering (GWZO, Leipzig)

14:30–15:00
Coffee break

15:00–16:30
The Poetics of Industrial Landscapes: Donbass and Upper Silesia in Literature and Film
Oleksandr Zabirko (U Regensburg)

Doing Gender in Historical Reenactment. Case Studies from the US and Poland
Juliane Tomann (U Regensburg)

16:30–17:00
Coffee break

17:00–19:00
Curatorial and Artistic Research: Exploring Transregional and Gendered Trails in Recent East European Art History
Guests: Przemysław Strożek, Kristóf Nagy and Márton Szarvas, Simone Wille
Moderation: Beáta Hock (GWZO, Leipzig)

As the major focus of the event, three recent research-based exhibition projects will be presented. Left Performance Histories (2018, ngbk Berlin, curated by Hock et al) took a fresh look on performance art in the 1970s/80s in CEE exploring, among other things, the New Left’s connection to the art scenes and forms of gender role transgression. Both thematic strands took issue with prevailing narratives assuming that both leftist politicial criticism and “gender insubordination” were missing from the East-Central European cultural scene of the period. Left Turn, Right Turn (2019, OSA Archives Budapest), co-curated by Kristóf Nagy and Márton Szarvas, also zooms in on artistic and political radicalism in late-socialist Hungary. Przemysław Strożek’s Ahmed Cherkaoui in Warsaw: Polish-Moroccan Artistic Relations, 1955-1980 (2020, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art Warsaw) inserts Polish art from the same period in transnational and transcontinental relations.

The subsequent discussion will be co-moderated by Simone Wille and will create connections between curatorial research and her own scholarly project “Patterns of Trans-regional Trails: The materiality of art works and their place in the modern era. Bombay, Paris, Prague, Lahore, from ca. 1920s to the early 1950s“. Speakers shall address overarching themes, among them the possibility of writing transcultural histories of art and will share their insights on the methodological particularities and underlying challenges of producing and transferring knowledge via the medium of the art exhibition. As one important thematic strand, we want to gauge the absences and presences of female actors in the related dominant narratives and in the concrete empirical material the guest speakers have tapped. What are ways to uncover and appreciate formerly hidden and overlooked material and how will such discoveries be turned into transformative knowledge? The event discussion thus combines aspects of mediating research results for broader audiences, questions of gender and positionality in transregional area studies as well as a conscious reflection on bridging gaps in received knowledge.

19:00
Reception

Contact (announcement)

Corinne Geering
corinne.geering@leibniz-gwzo.de