SCAS News - 14 November, 2022

SCAS Hosts a CAT Research Group

This week, we are delighted to welcome a new group of scholars of the Constructive Advanced
Thinking (CAT) programme to Uppsala. With their research project Reconstituting Publics through
Remembering Transitions: Facilitating Critical Engagement with the 1980-90s on Local and
Transnational Scales, Principal Investigator Ksenia Robbe (Senior Lecturer in European and
Russian Literature and Culture, University of Groningen) and her group, consisting of Agnieszka
Mrozik (Assistant Professor, Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences);
Andrei Zavadski (Postdoctoral Researcher, Institut für Kunst und Materielle Kultur, Technische
Universität Dortmund); and Nora Korte (Project Coordinator, Transition Dialogue Network), will
meet at the Collegium for a week-long research stay.

The focus of the project is as follows:
“Three decades after the transformations of the USSR and its satellites, the topic of ‘transitioning’
from socialist states to liberal democracies remains highly contentious in Central and Eastern Europe.
Over the last decade, the transitional past has been increasingly instrumentalized, by national-populist
actors and in the counter-memories of their opponents. In the context of heated contestations of
memory, spaces for dialogue are shrinking and public spheres are becoming increasingly ‘disconnected.’

The project addresses this societal challenge by engaging with memories of the ‘transitional period’
beyond the polarized versions. Drawing on approaches of critical memory studies, public history,
(digital) ethnography, and intersectional study of gender and generations, the project develops strategies
for facilitating practices of remembering that have the potential to lead to dialogue and form reflective
communities. The comparative approach allows for development of strategies and policies on a trans-
national (European) level based on trans-local resonances rather than top-down scripts.

The participation of the Transition Dialogue Network, connecting NGOs across Central and Eastern
Europe, and collaboration with the European Solidarity Center in Gdańsk facilitate the execution of
empirical research and its translation into policy recommendations for remembrance projects.”

Previously, the group has spent time at the CEU Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest. After
SCAS, research visits at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social
Sciences in Amsterdam, the Institut d’Études Avancées de Paris and the Zukunftskolleg in Konstanz
are being planned .

SCAS is one of twelve participating institutes of the CAT initiative, which was developed within the
framework of the Network of European Institutes for Advanced Studies (NETIAS), and launched in
2019. The programme aims at supporting small groups of excellent early-career researchers conducting
fundamental research dedicated to developing new ideas to understand and to tackle current or emerging
societal challenges. The selected groups work on their project for a duration of up to three years and
during this time they are invited to meet for short stays at some of the participating institutes, where
they also get the opportunity to get in contact with the Fellows in residence at the institutes as well as
local research communities.

Read more about the CAT programme >>
Read more about the Network of European Institutes for Advanced Studies (NETIAS) >>