Seminar “Chance Collectors of Refugees”

1 November 2022, 5 pm
Zoom (online)

Institute for Contemporary History CAS, Masaryk Institute and Archives of the CAS and Prague Centre for Jewish History invite you to the seminar Chance Collectors of Refugees: Local and International Humanitarian Interventions in the Bohemian Lands, 1938–1939 with Laura Brade.

The seminar will be held in virtual form only, log in here.

Invitation (PDF)

Crossroads podcast: Peace does not only concern security, it is also about economic and social rights

The podcast Crossroads invites Oksana Dutchak who is the Deputy Director of the Centre for Social and Labour Research (Kyiv) and a co-editor of Commons: Journal of Social Criticism. She is an activist of Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational or E.A.S.T. and one of the initiators of the manifesto “The right to resist”: A feminist manifesto. She holds a PhD in sociology from the Department of Sociology in Ihor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (Kyiv) and an MA in sociology and social anthropology from the Central European University. She is now a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research. She has published extensively on labour issues, labour protests, gender inequality, socio-economic inequality.

Continue reading

Debate “Transnational Feminist Solidarity with Ukraine’s Resistance and Recovery”

8 November 2022, 2 pm
Kampus Hybernská, building A, 3rd floor
Hybernská 4, Prague 1

How do Ukrainian feminists think about the afermath of the war? What are the immediate war-related and long-term gendered insecurities they prioritize? What international responses are crucial for Ukraine’s gender-responsive recovery in and outside of the country? The event will bring together speakers from Ukraine and the Czech Republic to discuss the gendered aspects of the post-war recovery of Ukraine as well as the impacts of the Russian invasion on refugees and the receiving countries.

Register here.

Invitation (PDF)

Seminar “Half Profit, Half Loss – Negotiating Jewish Economic Law in Non-Jewish Courtrooms”

11 October 2022, 5 pm
ZOOM (online)

1785 Hebrew-German side-by-side translation of Jewish legal texts in a court case at the Imperial  Aulic Council, Austrian State Archive

It was common practice that Jewish men and women brought their conflicts before non-Jewish courts throughout the early modern period. This talk explores how, due to this ongoing litigation, the awareness and applicability of Jewish Law in non-Jewish courtrooms reached a peak by the second half of the eighteenth century. Using a case study from the Imperial Aulic Council (Reichshofrat) in Vienna, it introduces questions of cultural mediation, translation, and litigant strategies in the overlapping legal systems of the Holy Roman Empire.

Verena Kasper-Marienberg is Associate Professor at the Department of History at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on the intersection of Jewish and Christian communities in the early modern period in Central Europe. She is especially interested in questions of legal practice, gender relations, and socio-economic structures in early modern societies. She teaches a variety of classes in Early Modern History, Jewish Studies, and Museum Studies/Public History.

The seminar will be held in virtual form only, link here.

Invitation (PDF)

International workshop “Dalit Politics at the Crossroads”

14 July 2022, 2 pm
Seminar room of the Institute of Philosophy CAS
Jilská 1, Prague 1

The results of the recent elections to the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly raise several questions concerning the Dalit politics in India. Does the unprecedented defeat of the Bahujan Samaj Party indicate a failure of the Dalit electoral politics? Or has the idea of upliftment of the unprivileged entered the political mainstream by being effectively dissolved and co-opted by the mainstream political parties, especially by the BJP? How do the traditional caste hierarchies transform themselves, how do they manifest themselves in politics and how are they being accepted by various disadvantaged groups? And finally, what are the future prospects and opportunities of the movements aiming at the emancipation of the marginalized castes and classes in India, be it through politics or through social change?

Invitation (PDF)
Programme (PDF)

Crossroads podcast: Men without care responsibilities are on top in academia

Mariya Ivancheva is a British-Bulgarian anthropologist and sociologist, currently based at the University of Strathclyde. Her longterm research interest is the precarity in academic work. She is currently the president of European Association of Social Anthropologists and she co-founded the Precanthro iniative focused on working conditions of European anthropologists. In the new episode of the Crossroads podcast, she talks about precarity in British academia and elsewhere as well as about her career beginnings in post socialist Bulgaria and how it impacted her career.

Continue reading

International Workshop “Parliaments in Pandemics”

26–27 May 2022
Academic Conference Centre / ZOOM
Husova 4a, Prague 1

Keynote speaker Sven T. Siefken will present first findings of the second wave of a global expert survey ‘Parliaments in Pandemics’.  Conducted in 2020, 2021, and 2022, the survey focused on how the pandemic changed the legislatures’ roles and, in particular, electoral, legislative, oversight, communication- and-representation functions.

For more information, click here.

Continue reading

Crossroads podcast: India is inventing a de facto ethnic democracy

We welcome professor Christophe Jaffrelot, who is the guest of the new episode of the Crossroads podcast. Christophe Jaffrelot is a Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London and Research Director at the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po (Paris) and at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). He is also president of the French Association of Political Science. His research focuses on Hindu nationalism and the role of caste and religion in politics of contemporary South Asia. In 2021, he published a new book Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy (Princeton University Press).

Continue reading

Crossroads podcast: „Neoliberalism limits our ability to cope with societal challenges“

In the podcast Crossroads, we welcome Dr. Alessandra Mezzadri. She is Associate Professor of Development Studies at SOAS University of London. In her research and teaching, she focuses mainly on inequalities and trade, global supply chains and production networks, informal work and work regimes, global labour standards, modern forms of slavery, feminism in development, gender and globalization, social reproduction and reproductive work, or political economy of India. Alessandra actively works with international non-profit organizations such as the ILO, Action Aid, Labor Behind the Label, and War on Want, which focus on gender issues, global labour standards, anti-sweat campaigns, and modern forms of slavery. In 2016, she published the book The Sweatshop Regime: Laboring Bodies, Exploitation and Garments Made in India (Cambridge University Press).

Continue reading