This is the platform for our UNCONFERENCE DAY, Wednesday 10 June.
Unconference Ideas
Please post your ideas for a contribution HERE (as an individual or a group) by Tuesday 9 June 2pm (i.e. after lunch AND before the PM workshop with Fabricio Prado).
The blurb on your contribution can be very brief 100-150 words with your name(s). The assumption is that with your contribution comes the willingness to be a discussion facilitator for one of the sessions (always supported by the organising GRAINES team).
The format can vary:
- reading & discussion group around a core text
- your (brief) input presentation as a kick-off into a wider discussion & sharing group on networks and transnational history
- a playshop – introduce a tool, software related to networks and interconnectedness
- a collaborative writing exercise related to networks and transnational history
Equipment: Ideally have a laptop or some kind of writing device with you for the summer school and unconference day in particular.
Ideally, we get a good number of ideas and proposals that we can run in parallel sessions and smaller groups during the day. Depending on the number of proposals we will vote & decide which ones to run. Votes will be open Tuesday PM and by Tuesday evening of the summer school we will have the unconference schedule standing for Wednesday.
Speed Dating
So, be bold, not shy, take initiative. Look through the project posts, SEE connections, MAKE connections, perhaps find a partner. Unconferences are fun and informal, nothing perfect and polished is expected, nor is the hermetically sealed perfect paper. Bit like SPEED-DATING – find a partner for a short time, do something together (does not have to be for life – but who knows… perhaps these connections will stay and support your project.)
Post your proposals HERE:
…‘The Spirit of Capitalism’: Trading Networks and Religious Groups.
Max Weber argues that the Spirit of Capitalism has developed only in Protestant countries. Whereas the richest and most successful entrepreneurs are mainly Protestants, Catholics historically lacked rational economic behaviour. Undeniably his assumption was groundbreaking; however, recent literature challenges his view and proves how the spirit of enterprise has been a feature of other religions as well, such as Judaism for instance. Therefore, could this rationale be extended also upon other religious denomination?
Moreover, how did religious affiliation affect merchants’ dealings? Huguenot and Quaker merchants defined themselves through strong blood relations and co-religion. Economic partnerships were based on religious beliefs and although these communities acted across national borders, they interacted mainly within the religious community. They disregarded nationality but they dealt primarily with Protestant circles; whereas Catholics seemed to have acted merely for profits, without being affected by their beliefs. Therefore, was Weber right is his assumption of entrepreneurship? Were trading networks communal or merchants moved beyond religious and national borders? We will survey the recent literature on trade and religion, aiming to agree (or disagree) on the latest theory that in trade..it was all merely for money!
(by Giada Pizzoni)
Geographies of social movements
Working on the social movement of unemployed person we are interested discussing on the mapping of decision making, claim-making and the circulation of political ideas through this (trans)national networks. The general definition of social movements is, that they are networks that point towards the transformation of social issues as f.e. child care, women’s rights, ecological themes and also labour relations. Social movements are networks of individuals or organizations. Most of the time social movements are studied through these individuals, mobilizing networks. In my opinion this approach ignores a lot of the political content of the movements. But we think that applying a network and transnational approach can be very fruitful for the research on social movements. We would like to propose three entangled perspectives on such social movements by taking up the discussions on scale:
At first, we like to investigate the interorganizational networks of local, regional, national and transnational movements and organizations. How did individual and collective actors tried to get in contact with other social reformers in other European states or even on a global level? Can detect divergent agendas of social reform that were not translatable into the other context? How did trans-border circulations of concepts change while being circulated? The concrete actions can also transfer into more circulation of ideas, knowledge or even action-forms.
Secondly, we like to narrow our focus on „assembly“ spaces, that means places like conferences rooms where social refomers met and debated their issues. Are is specific cities that were relevant fort he gathering of actors, or not? Which conditions determined the selection of cities and places of meeting? One can for instance can think of language, or the centrality or leader figures/organizations as main influences for the selecting of certain places. As an example the unemployment movement in Switzerland has always chosen a central city in the middle of the language border (french/german) to decide over national problems concerning unemployed persons.
Thirdly, we would like to ask how social movements were entangled with political spaces by taking into account a wider notion of public focusing on media or political areas Where political decisions are taken? Which spaces are chosen for this in social movements? In which spaces does the protest take place? In my project this is very visible through massive street protests on EU-summits from the mid 1990s on, which was the starting point for a transnationalization of the movement. It can be concrete spaces, but also virtual ones.
The aim is to think of movements not as singular events, but of long-time prepared actions, depending from many conditions and influences. The spatial dimension therefore is crucial.
(by Alexander van Wickeren / Anina Zahn)
Transnational history vs. global history
Do conceptual distinctions matter when looking at transfers, comparisons and borders?
Some argue argue that a transnational perspective implies the reification of the nation. Others, that over-conceptualizing difference in approaches that go beyond traditional, national approaches reifies artificial borders between perspectives that could normally find their place under one umbrella.
Global historians look at large-scale circulations and transfers according to local needs. But focuses less explicitly on borders, mental or material. Could the term “transborder” be an alternative?
Without necessarily ending the debate, bringing together different people interested in cross-border phenomena may point to interesting alternatives.
Working on the social movement of unemployed person we are interested discussing on the mapping of decision making, claim-making and the circulation of political ideas through this (trans)national networks. The general definition of social movements is, that they are networks that point towards the transformation of social issues as f.e. child care, women’s rights, ecological themes and also labour relations. Social movements are networks of individuals or organizations. Most of the time social movements are studied through these individuals, mobilizing networks. In my opinion this approach ignores a lot of the political content of the movements. But we think that applying a network and transnational approach can be very fruitful for the research on social movements. We would like to propose three entangled perspectives on such social movements by taking up the discussions on scale:
At first, we like to investigate the interorganizational networks of local, regional, national and transnational movements and organizations. How did individual and collective actors tried to get in contact with other social reformers in other European states or even on a global level? Can detect divergent agendas of social reform that were not translatable into the other context? How did trans-border circulations of concepts change while being circulated? The concrete actions can also transfer into more circulation of ideas, knowledge or even action-forms. Secondly, we like to narrow our focus on „assembly“ spaces, that means places like conferences rooms where social refomers met and debated their issues. Are is
specific cities that were relevant fort he gathering of actors, or not? Which conditions determined the selection of cities and places of meeting? One can for instance can think of language, or the centrality or leader figures/organizations as main influences for the selecting of certain places. As an example the unemployment movement in Switzerland has always chosen a central city in the middle of the language border (french/german) to decide over national problems concerning unemployed persons. Thirdly, we would like to ask how social movements were entangled with political spaces by taking into account a wider notion of public focusing on media or political areas Where political decisions are taken? Which spaces are chosen for this in social movements? In which spaces does the protest take place? In my project this is very visible through massive street protests on EU-summits from the mid 1990s on, which was the starting point for a transnationalization of the movement. It can be concrete spaces, but also virtual ones. The aim is to think of movements not as singular events, but of long-time prepared actions, depending from many conditions and influences. The spatial dimension therefore is crucial.
Alexander van Wickeren, Anina Zahn
This proposal suggests the exploration of appropriate methods in analyzing knowledge transfers. Simple biographies of agents involved in knowledge transfers seem not to be enough. Instead, a combination of perspectives could work.
Might linking prosopography with networks reveal how groups reify over large areas? Or one should first define a group from an analytical perspective and then visualize the networks formed by different actors facing common challenges? Genealogy clearly impacts elites’ original socialization. But what motivates elites to connect professionally?
One possible understanding of prosopography is offered by the Modern History Research Unit of the University of Oxford. In this reading, prosopography is a perspective that focuses on four established methods: biography, onomastics, genealogy and sociography (or how groups form). To what extent could this take on actors and networks provide a comprehensive framework for research dealing with knowledge transfer?
In order to apply the prosopographic-network approach, one can concentrate for instance on one particular scientific community in Russia in the early 19th century. The University of Dorpat in Livonia is central to group formation among Russian astronomers. Looking at names reveals their Baltic origin. Genealogy reflects family ambitions in sons following fathers’ professional track. Finally, sociography shows how local relationships translate into imperial professional networks.
At the same time, different networks – e.g. family, profession – influence the life-path, socializing and choices of individuals. How can one reconcile different layers of networks impacting the same agent? What is the hierarchy of competing networks and how is it connected to the overarching research question?
Martin, Matthaeus, Petru and Pablo
My post comes in response to the inspiring suggestions of Konrad and Jordan. Both topics – (1) maps and (2) travelers – are of key interest to my project on the remote borderland of Greater Hungary called the Szeklerland. Likewise, these appear to tie in to other participants’ topics as well.
(1) Concerning maps, I would really be interested in learning how to use them as a category of analysis from a researcher’s perspective. How should the historian map the region he/she studies? It appears to me that recent scholarship on cartography focuses more on maps as categories of practice. These are insightful studies that explore categorizations of peoples and territories, setting borders and rationalizing space according to grids – from above.
But what about mapping heterogeneous territories such as border regions? How should the scholar set boundaries to her/his object of study? Borderlands elude strict mapping, in spite of opposite claims by political entrepreneurs. I’m still under the spell of Kate Brown’s A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (2003). Her case-study is indeed a “no place”. She calls it simply “kresy” (borderlands, in Polish). She doesn’t map it; instead, the author assumes the region’s heterogeneity and elusiveness. I would like to quote at length her description, for it might be useful as a starting point to the discussion during the forthcoming unconference:
“Because of the region’s ambiguous and marginal characteristics, describing the kresy in terms traditionally used by the geographer and historian presents problems. For example, it is difficult to give the exact location of the region because it has no definite boundaries, as margins are rarely defined by latitude and longitude. No landmarks set the region off—no mountains or vast seas. Rather, wandering streams and bogs, forests and intermittent plains shaped the land into an enigma—untidy, formless, eluding definition. The region is best described as a fringe which threaded in and out of what today is central Ukraine. In general terms, it lies between the Dniestr and Dnepr rivers, west of Kiev, south of the Pripiat
Marshes, and east of Novograd-Volynsk in the former tsarist provinces of Volynia, Podillia, and Kiev in what is today portions of the Kiev, Zhytomyr, Khmel’nitskii, and Vinnytsia provinces.”
Next, she goes on exploring briefly how the region has been defined in the last 200 years by diverse political actors. Also, she looks at the impact on the local population resulting from the kresy’s perennial in-between status. In this respect, her account could fit many other borderlands. My problem is that such a history pays little respect to environment and symbolic geography. If one argues that nature also impacts local destinies, then a kind of mapping might be necessary. Or?
(2) I am not too much into travel literature at this point. I plan to engage with the works of Alex-Drace Francis on travel writing about Eastern Europe. But I’d love to find out more on the change from traditional travel to tourism. Generally, I’m concerned with commodification of landscape imagery. As part of my doctoral thesis, I see this as a phenomenon stemming from the political and intellectual elites, in their aim to monopolize the representation of their native region. To what extent does outside enterprises, like travel writing, influence the endeavor of local elites? Or, the other way around, how does local imagery impacts what travelers see and write? Does the imagery produced by local elite arouse intended images in the eyes of the beholder, outside the community? Applying a network perspective to this problem sounds particularly appealing. It might help visualize interactions that ultimately homogenized, at least partly, fragmented discourses envisioning a particular space.
Generally, I am concerned with the relationship between symbolic geography and politics of space. I regard the production of landscape imagery as an attempt to moralize a particular space by those who intend to appropriate it. So, I think both maps and travelers are crucial in this process. Looking forward to the discussions!
Hand-on Session on Digitized Sources: More and more memory institutions are digitizing their holdings and making them freely available. Simultaneously border transcending initiatives like DARIAH https://www.dariah.eu/ or CLARIN http://clarin.eu/ are working on infrastructures to provide digital tools for researchers in the humanities.
I would like to propose a collaborative hands-on session, in which we will have a look at multinational, multilingual digital source collections (like European Newspapers at The European Library http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/newspapers or available collections in research.europeana.eu) and the technical challenges and limitations that influence our work with the available material. However I would like to propose to apply an historian’s point of view in order to critically examine the material’s usability for high-quality historical research. Thus the guiding questions will be: Do we, as historians, really need to become programmers, as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie famously claimed in 1968? Does the available data live up to the quality of “analogue sources” in terms of reliability and contextualization? In which way can we use digitized sources to help our research or in other words which tools are we missing?
As a base for discussion I would like to propose the following reading: Ian Milligan, Mining the ‘Internet Graveyard’: Rethinking the Historians’ Toolkit, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association/Revue de la Société historique du Canada, 23, 2012.
Travellers in (Hi)stories: unauthentic actors or constructive visitors? Based on my current PhD project on travel in the Alps, I would suggest a workshop on how to discuss the contributions of external visitors and of people on the move. Travellers are by essence visitors and they are constantly given the opportunity to interact with regions they are not always familiar with. This is an exciting process which allows us historians to identify particular networks and dynamics along their itineraries.
The issue we have to discuss, however, is how authentic and relevant our analysis can be. What can we learn from travellers? How do we make sure that local populations aren’t left aside in the narrative? Should travel history belong to the field of literature? Let’s discuss these issues in the lens of network analysis and social studies.
Maps that Communicate – I suggest a discussion session that focuses on thinking about the use of maps in historical scholarship. Beyond the basic map for identification, the, “Here is the geographical area or country that this article or section discusses,” map, what are some of the more or less effective ways to use maps to complement a historical argument? When is it better to use a map than plain tabular expression of data? Or some other visualisation? What are some things to avoid in creating or using maps? How should our texts engage with included maps? When geographically visualising flows or networks, what works and what doesn’t? If this session is chosen, I’ll bring two or three maps that do I think do this well, or not well, and encourage participants to (optionally) bring a map of their own choice for discussion. The goal is to exchange ideas about good practices.