Constructive Advanced Thinking

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, with high political stakes, spaces for dialogue are rapidly shrinking and public spheres are becoming increasingly ‘disconnected.’

Project activities (last update: October 2022):

• Events organized at the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk (in collaboration with the Centre)
• Film screening and discussion: Crystal Swan (2018, dir. Daria Zhuk), 30 September 2022
• Discussion about the experiences and memories of postsocialist transition, and their mediation, in Belarus and Poland with Kacper Dziekan, Sviatlana Rasliakova and Magda Szczesniak, moderated by Agnieszka Mrozik and Andrei Zavadski
• Workshop with people living in Gdańsk "What does the turn of the 1980-90s mean to you?", 1 October 2022

Project presentations 

• June 2021: project presentation at the Zukunftskolleg, Konstanz, June 2021 
• December 2021: meeting and discussion with the Gemeinsinn group, University of Konstanz, (organized and chaired by Gruia Badescu)
• February 2022: project presentaiton at IAS CEU 

Publications

Robbe, Ksenia and Andrei Zavadski. “‘C’mon, Turn Swan Lake on’: Memories of the 1990s at the Belarusian Protests of 2020.” Digital Icons (special issue on the Belarusian protests). Accepted, forthcoming 2022. 

Organized panels/ calls for papers

Call for papers: Dialogic Memories of the 1970-90s Transitions Across the World: Current Practices and Possible Solidarities (the Memory Studies Association 2022 online conference)

 The project addresses this societal issue by engaging with memory practices of the ‘transitional period’ beyond the polarized versions. Drawing on approaches of cultural analysis of discourse and affect, critical memory studies, public history, (digital) ethnography, and intersectional study of gender and generations, we aim to develop strategies for facilitating more cohesive and at the same time more critical practices of remembering that have the potential to lead to dialogue and form reflective communities. The comparative approach will allow for developing strategies and policies on a transnational (European) level based on trans-local resonances rather than top-down scripts.

 The participation of the NGO Dekabristen e.V., Berlin, and close collaboration with the European Solidarity Center in Gdańsk and the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center in Yekaterinburg will facilitate the execution of empirical research and its translation into concrete policy recommendations.

Light exposure is a key driver for synchronising rhythms in our bodies and brains with the external 24-hour light-dark cycle. In turn, light exposure at the wrong biological time of day can disrupt our inner clock and lead to sleep loss, which has knock-on effects on our physical and mental health and well-being. Additionally, light is important for normal development of the eye, with low levels of light exposure being associated with myopia. With increasing knowledge from basic laboratory findings on the wide-reaching effects of light exposure on human health and well-being, it is time to apply this knowledge to the real world, guiding policymakers and other stakeholders. In this interdisciplinary NETIAS CAT project, five internationally recognised early-career scientists come together to address these topics, with a view to (1) develop a unified scientific framework for understanding effects of light exposure on human health and well-being, (2) develop strategies for making the existing and future scientific evidence base as robust as possible and (3) will develop strategies to communicate the complex scientific knowledge to different audiences.

ENLIGHT will ensure a comprehensive and standardized reporting of light characteristics across research using light as intervention. ENLIGHT will be developed in accordance with the EQUATOR toolkit for developing a reporting guideline (https://www.equator-network.org/) through a modified Delphi consensus process consisting of 1) a pre-round where the project team went through a literature review, identifies a set of potential reporting-related items and a group of participants with established track record in light-based interventions; 2) four feedback rounds (three questionnaire-based and one face to face discussion).

Due to its inherent ambiguity and elusiveness, humor can make it particularly difficult to tell where someone’s ‘right to offend’ starts, and someone else’s ‘right not to be offended’ begins. The challenge is even more evident in the case of cartoons, whose high degree of implicitness and condensation can further contribute to blurring the line between lawful and unlawful humor. Significantly, cartoons have been at the center of several legal debates and court litigations in recent years, from the Muhammad cartoon controversy of 2005-2006 to the ongoing lawsuits against Charlie Hebdo.

These legal controversies are particularly topical in the digital age, where potentially offensive material can easily obtain global exposure, often beyond its original context and intention. The juridical problems raised by controversial cartoons are still largely unsolved, with judges finding themselves without solid legal ground when dealing with conflicting interpretations of the same ambiguous cartoon. Such issues clearly pose a crucial test for the democratic negotiation of freedom of expression. Yet, despite their urgency, the following questions remain unanswered by scholars, policy makers and practitioners: How can judges deal with the ambiguity of offensive cartoons? How can a distinction be made between ‘reasonable’ interpretations and contrived misreadings?

Cartoons in Court brings together scholars and stakeholders with the aim to tackle these questions by implementing an unprecedented synergy between humor studies and legal scholarship.

The project “Corruption and Anti-Corruption in Empirical Research: Critical Reflections on Concepts, Data and Methods” aims to address the challenge of sparse communication between the disciplines and strengthen the advantages of interdisciplinary approaches in corruption research, by facilitating an interdisciplinary Handbook on corruption and anti-corruption in empirical research with critical reflections on the link between conceptualizations and methodological approaches in studying corruption, limitations and benefits of particular data and methods for corruption research and ethical and security-related issues in applying different methods of researching corruption.

A video introduction of the group’s endevour is available on Youtube.

This project is led by a team of five young Belgian and Scandinavian researchers in psychology, nursing and gerontology, in collaboration with a Belgian network of nursing homes. It intends, through an interdisciplinary approach, to provide new insights on the issue of “existential loneliness” in nursing homes and its relationship with geriatric depression and to translate the results of this research into educational and training modules for nursing home professionals. This group will spend short residencies at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) in Uppsala, the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, MAK’IT in Montpellier and Scienza Nuova in Turin over the period 2020-2022.

Societies in European cities are faced with environmental problems related to the quality of air and water, biodiversity loss, and advancing climate change, but at the same time need to tackle social-economic issues such as social cohesion and justice or the need to develop sustainable economic and mobility systems. All these challenges place complex demands on the use and functionality of urban space and infrastructures. Nature-based Solutions (NbS), such as Green Infrastructures (GI), are expected to play a major role in solving these issues through a redefinition and amplification of its functionality in urban areas.

Aims and Scope

Based on our broad experience from case studies of NbS and together with stakeholders outside academia, we will cross current frontiers of knowledge regarding key issues of upscaling and mainstreaming of NbS by developing highly innovative ideas for improved multi-functionality, integral cost-benefit sharing and diverse stakeholder engagement.

By connecting various schools of thought with individual research foci of the team members and applying it in an integrated manner to different case study cities at different spatial scales. Socio-ecological transformation processes require different kinds of knowledge:​

• Technical knowledge (evidence base for NbS functionality / efficiency);
• Policy knowledge (governance tools and strategies for upscaling green infrastructure), and;
• Transformative knowledge (leverage points, transformative actions and methods) will be generated.

The integration and transferability of these knowledge dimensions across case studies (e.g. with different climatological, political, social contexts) and spatial scales (building - neighborhood - city-wide-level) will be conceptually addressed and then applied to develop policy recommendations regarding upscaling and mainstreaming of urban GI in European cities.

Stakeholders will be interactively integrated at the network meetings through video conferences and interviews.