Anglo American University, Prague

Letenska 5
118 00, Prague, Czech Republic
 
Anglo-American University is the oldest private institution of higher education in the Czech Republic and provides a personalized and distinctive university education in the English language. Utilizing the best from American and British academic traditions, Anglo-American University educates future leaders and global citizens in a multicultural setting of students and faculty from over 60 different countries.
 

 
With its main campus situated right under the Prague Castle in the historic district of Malá Strana, AAU boasts one of the most attractive locations of any Central European university. The palace offers 16 modern fully-equipped classrooms, a computer lab and a visual arts studio along with a cafeteria, spacious courtyard and modern student lounges for studying and socializing. Located next to the palace and directly accessible from the campus is the beautiful park Vojan Gardens.
 

Prague is a wonderful European city with a very rich history and a vivid passionate intellectual life; a place full of various and inspiring cultural events, sightseeing opportunities, great food, exquisite architecture and of course the city that brings easily to your mind Jan Hus, Franz Kafka, Jan Palach, the Prague Spring, and Milan Kundera. After all these, the unique atmosphere gives anyone a chance for personal memories and reveries. Prague is a city of beautiful moments!

 
See full details for arriving at the conference location:

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Conference participants are fully responsible for arranging their accommodation and travel to Prague.

Conference Program

The Conference Agenda is available in the right sidebar of this page.

The extensive conference program with abstracts and available draft papers is accessible below by clicking on the panel number tabs and links of individual presentations.

Space and Imaginary Geographies of Central and Eastern Europe: From Maps to Mental Mappings in Identity Making Narratives

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  Ioana Zamfir, University of Bucharest, Romania
  Looking towards East on 16th Century Maps The geographic encyclopedias and atlases of the 16th century are giving us some of the first systematic representations of the borders of Europe. We will explore some of the most influential geographic publications of the 16th century that appeared in western and central Europe. Following a classical model of Ptolemy, these first Atlases of the world always start from west so that the discussion of Eastern Europe comes towards the end of the book. And the descriptions given to the people occupying these territories are not always flattering.

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  Péter Balogh, Department of Social and Economic Geography, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
  Clashing Geographical Imaginaries: The Strange Co-Presence of Christian Bulwark and Eurasianism in Hungary A few years ago, the far right explicitly announced a Dugin-inspired Hungarian Eurasianism as its foreign policy program. The Hungarian government invoked Ottoman invasion to justify keeping refugees out in 2015 and has been using a harsh rhetoric and policy against Muslim immigrants ever since.The paper’s preliminary conclusion is that these two orientations can today co-exist for two reasons. As elsewhere, Christian traditions and symbols in Hungary have maintained some pre-Christian (in this case Turanian) elements in order to remain popular among the wider masses. Secondly, and more important for today, the image of a liberal/multicultural West serve as a shared enemy for Hungarian Eurasianism and (political) Christianity alike.

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  Cemre Aydoğan, University of Rome 'La Sapienza', Italy
  Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Hungary, Its Imaginary Occidentalisation Process and Inconsistencies Through the process of mapping its location and construction of occidental identity, Hungary defines itself as a part of central Europe. But what are the legitimated reasons of Hungary to define itself as central European instead of eastern Europe? What are the possible reasons to reject Hungary’s central European self-definition? Moreover, under the shadow of the discussion on central Europe vs. eastern Europe, to what extent does the rise of authoritarianism block ongoing occidentalisation process of Hungary? In this research, I will answer these questions by analyzing modern political history of Hungary.

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  Hilal Atmaca, University of Cologne, Germany
  Mental Mapping of the Western Europe and Its Effects on Public Diplomacy Making: Comparison of Polish and Turkish Public Diplomacy Making Regarding the European Union My prospective research asks whether the mental mapping of the Western Europe has an impact on public diplomacy making as research question. To answer this question, two different cases of Polish and Turkish public diplomacy making regarding the European Union will be compared with the help of method of agreement. Although two countries differ in terms of European Union membership, territoriality and culture, both tries to show their “Europeanness” through public diplomacy. In this regard, my prospective research aims to research effects of the mental mapping of Western Europe on these similar outcomes.

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Persisting Imaginary Dichotomies of Eastern/Western Europe with Its Axiological Categories and Perceptions: Visual and Narrative Dimensions

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  Evelyn Preuss, Yale University, USA
  Home Is A Foreign Country: East German Alterity in Post-1990 Film The Eastern European alterity at issue is thereby doubly informed. On the one hand, it constructs an Orientalist Other within the bounds of the continent. My paper contends that while the Orientalist Other overshadows the Eastern European alterity based on a non-capitalist experience, it is ultimately the latter which makes the East an increasingly popular subject. After all, the crisis of the neoliberalist project does not only affect the East: it is a global phenomenon that already commands the attention of a global audience and will—ultimately, eventually—demand a global perspective.

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  Skaidrite Lasmane, Department of Communication, University of Latvia
  Provinciality in the Construction of the Eastern European Self-Identity in Latvian Media The paper focuses on provinciality in the construction of the identity and self-identity of Eastern Europe. By provincialism is understood the rational and emotional attitude towards Eastern Europe as the periphery of the European metropolis. Provincial thinking and feelings are characterised by a hierarchical approach to the imagined construction of the centre and periphery.Provincial feelings have an ambivalent character. On the one hand, affiliation to Eastern Europe is accompanied by a certain sense of inferiority, detachment and distance, resulting from a comparison with an increased value allocation for Western Europe, its society, art, way of life and values.

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  Anna Novikov, The University of Greifswald, Germany
  The Visual Language of Neo-Nationalism: Patriotic Performance and Fashion in the Post-Communist Central European, Eurasia and Baltic States My assumption is that current development of the Post-Communist neo-nationalist patriotic fashion and performance resembles the 19th century patriotic national self-visualization. Similarly to the 19th century, it is based on imagination and emotions and the progress of nowadays media plays the same role in the visualization of nationalistic ideology which the development of periodicals, photographs and cinema played then. After the idea of nationalism collapsed following the decline of empires, successor states and the Communist bloc in the 20th century, the nowadays neo-nationalism starts to develop.

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  Kamila Kinyon, University of Denver, USA
  Rethinking the East-West Dichotomy: Czech Travel Writing about Portugal, Where the Earth Ends and the Sea Begins Focusing on the relationship between East European Czech culture and West European Portuguese culture as portrayed through Czech travel writing, this paper provides an alternative perspective to the traditional East-West dichotomy. I address ways that Czech travel writing has portrayed Portugal within the context of how this Western European Portuguese nation is seen from its East. From the standpoint of Czech nationalists, the Czech lands are the center while the Western European country of Portugal becomes the periphery, the symbolic end of the world where the earth ends, and the sea begins.

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Art as Cultural Diplomacy: (Re)Constructing Notions of Eastern and Western Europe

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  Ruth Bianco, Department of Visual Arts / Faculty for the Built Environment, University of Malta
  Thinking on Art as a Sustainable Instrument of Cultural Diplomacy The notion of art as an effective instrument of cultural diplomacy is undervalued and not fully explored, even though cultural diplomacy has a long history and has surged over recent years. The focus of this paper is to discuss the role of the contemporary art space as an instrumental tool harnessing new approaches of cultural diplomacy that engender sustainable and advantageous international relations; this whilst embracing curatorial practices that align with notions of alterity to effectively broker collective interests, present European values, and ‘unity in diversity’.

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  Nicola Guy, University of Hull, Heritage Consortium, United Kingdom
  The Berlin Biennale – Curating Cultural Diplomacy in the Unified City This paper will explore the position the Biennale has taken of straddling the art world and being a representative of the state, questioning what political influence is possible within this. Using Forget Fear, the seventh Berlin Biennale held in the summer of 2012 curated by Artur Żmijewski, an artist known for his politically engaged and often highly controversial artwork, as the primary example through which to explore its arguably overdetermined political content. Looking beyond these arguments this research attempts to present a productive analysis of how the Biennale can work as both a diplomatic device in place-marketing the city and still provide a significant contribution to contemporary exhibition-making.

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  Beata Ociepka, University of Wrocław, Poland
  Can Art Save the World? How “Old” and “New” Europe Performed Cultural Diplomacy Events with Russia at the Time of War in Ukraine 2014-2015 Cultural diplomacy is seen as a subnetwork of public diplomacy, framed both by foreign and cultural policy. The presentation, while focusing on the structures (nodes of cultural diplomacy network), goes back to neo-institutional approaches and to foreign policy analysis. The author asks the question which role was ascribed to the artists and cultural industry in the debates about the events. The answer to the latter comes from the analysis of government documents and reports, debates in parliaments, but also from the content analysis of media outlets, covering the events.

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  Galina Dekova, Sofia City Art Gallery / National Academy of Art, Bulgaria
  The Political Background of a Failed Idea: Peter Ludwig Collection in Bulgaria The paper will discuss the political background of the rejection of Peter Ludwig’s donation and the Bulgarian authorities’s refusal to participate in the creation of a Peter Ludwig Collection of Contemporary Art in Bulgaria. The story sank into oblivion and was never made public or discussed afterward. In 2018 I had the chance to work with the archive owned both by Svetlin Roussev and the St. Cyril and St. Methodius International Foundation in Sofia. It allowed me to trace the history back to its main protagonists and decision-makers, and it revealed selection mechanisms, as well as other practices of cultural politics in a moment of harsh political changes.

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Readings of the Past: On Memory, Remembrance and Memorialization in Central and Eastern Europe

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  Hikmet Çağrı Yardımcı, Hasan Kalyoncu University, Gaziantep, Turkey
  A Trauma of Committee of Union and Progress: Reconsidering the First Balkan War (1912 – 1913) As Ottoman Empire was collapsing many nations who had lived under Ottoman rule began to riot underway to establish their own independent states. Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which was an opposed group founded to transform the monarchic Ottoman system into constitutional democracy, undertook the protector status of the state at these times. This study is twofold: Firstly it aims to reexamine the Balkan Wars regarding to CUP and its centralized policies. On the other hand, as a different perspective, this work focuses on emotional cues of CUP that are contains contradictory feelings, especially ‘love and hate’. Based on this, an inter-disciplinary approach of the Balkan wars history will be reevaluated by linking centralization policies of CUP and traumatic results of these moves.

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  Ahmet Kaan Ketboga, University of Cologne, Germany
  Faith in Philosophy: Patočka and the Spiritual Foundation of Europe Jan Patočka is one of the prominent figures of both twentieth-century European philosophy and Czech political history. He was one of the last pupils of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, while at the same time he was one of the original signatories and main spokespersons for the Charter 77 human rights movement in Czechoslovakia. In addition to his influence on youth -one among them was Václav Havel, the first president of Czechia-, he extensively wrote on the concept of Europe. My intent in this study is to take some first steps towards elucidating Patočka’s conception of Europe in order to bring a comprehensive understanding on both his interpretation of Europe and its importance regarding theoretical background of Czech dissident movement known as Charter 77. Keywords: crisis, Charter 77, Europe, responsibility, sacrifice.

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  Klejda Mulaj, University of Exeter, United Kingdom
  From War to Fragile Peace in Bosnia: The Quest for Statehood and National Identity The quest for statehood and national identity remains a hot pursuit in Bosnia two and a half decades after the official ending of the war (1992-1995). Centered on contested narratives pertaining to the causes of—and parties’ conduct in—the Bosnian War, as well as the redistribution of power and the re-organisation of the postwar polity, the quest for statehood and the national identity exposes interesting dynamics of alterity making both without and within the Bosnian polity. This paper unpacks these dynamics with particular reference to the effects of war violence on the constitution and contestation of Bosnia’s statehood and its fragile national identity. It shows that representations of war violence remain active in the efforts to construct, or contest, the Bosnian polity and its political community. Such representations particularly with reference to genocide are part of a broader struggle over issues of identity, authority, legitimacy and security.

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Identity and the City: Visual Urban Transformations: Transition and Change in Urban Image Construction in Central and Eastern Europe

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  Ágnes Györke, Department of Literary and Cultural Studies, Károli Gáspár University, Budapest, Hungary
  Postcolonial Europe? Eastern European Cities in Hungarian Expatriate Literature Relying on a postcolonial theoretical framework, East-Central Europe might be conceptualised as a “blind spot” of Westocentric conceptions of modernity as well as a peripheral region characterised both by an asymmetrical relationship with the West and the rise of conservative ideologies of the nation state. Relying on Sandra Ponzanesi’s recent work on the peripheries of postcolonial Europe (Postcolonial Transitions in Europe, 2017), my presentation will explore the urban memorialization of traumatic historical events in the region, primarily the Second World War, the 1956 Revolution in Hungary and the 1968 Prague Spring, in expatriate narratives such as Kristóf’s The Notebook (1986) Tibor Fischer’s Under the Frog (1992) and Bánk’s The Swimmer (2002).

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  Ksenija Martinovic, Central European Initiative, Trieste, Italy
  Tivat’s Trajectory – From Arsenal to Porto Montenegro This paper examines how and to what extent urban regeneration works in practice through the lens of Tivat’s regeneration. The paper enlightens Tivat’s economic and physical transformation from the town know as a base of the Naval-shipyard “Arsenal” to the nautical-touristic complex “Porto Montenegro”. In the modern history urban development of Tivat was related to the Naval-shipyard “Sava Kovacevic”, most often referred to by its old name “Arsenal”. Since its development in 1889, Arsenal became the main employer in town and shaped the town’s identity. The paper enlightens Tivat’s economic and physical transformation from the town know as a base of the Naval-shipyard “Arsenal” to the nautical-touristic complex “Porto Montenegro”. In the modern history urban development of Tivat was related to the Naval-shipyard “Sava Kovacevic”, most often referred to by its old name “Arsenal”. Since its development in 1889, Arsenal became the main employer in town and shaped the town’s identity.

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  Dalia Čiupailaitė-Višnevska, Vilnius University, Lithuania
  Housing the New Identity: Images of a Good Life in the Post-Socialist City In this paper I’ll present the analysis of the new housing estates built after 2000s in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, as the locus of the new urban identity in a post-socialist city. The image of a city in the temporally and spatially post-socialist site is constructed via the new urban structures. As an exemplary place to look for the cultural notions of what constitutes a good city and how to properly live in it in post-socialist circumstances, I explore the images of the city that are implicated in new housing projects, since housing, or even further – the idea of house and home, express social values: they incarnate general ideas about society and how to live in it. I address housing estates as narratives, first, as material narratives suggesting the way of proper living in the new conditions and second, symbolical narratives, stories suggested by the real estate developers about a good life in a post-socialist city. I claim, that the relation of the space in post-socialism to socialism is in fact twofold: it is a paradigm of breakage and continuity.

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Central East European Economies: Trade, Development and Structural Change in the Region

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  Sebastian Kinder, Tübingen University, Germany

  Jan Peter Kosok, Department of Economic Geography, Tübingen University, Germany
  Please Close the Gap! New Development Models of CEE Economies? This paper therefore aims to focus on the topic of ‘capability development’, by approaching it more holistically and investigating its current state in East Central Europe. It focuses on three central aspects of capability development, namely the import of capabilities by foreign actors, the endogenous development of capabilities within the region, and efforts to govern their improvement. The paper shows that capability development in ECE faces many challenges. Firstly, the import of capabilities is slowing down noticeably, as foreign actors are embracing the status quo. Secondly, endogenous capability development is still insufficient due to feedback loops between highly diverging individual capabilities and little interaction. Thirdly, efforts to govern the capability development have had limited success so far.

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  Andrei Radulescu, Transylvania Bank and Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania
  Economic Convergence in Central and Eastern Europe The economic convergence represents the main rationale of the EU integration process. Over the past decades the CEE economies have been confronted with several structural changes. In this paper we apply standard econometric tools and use the Eurostat database, in order to analyze the EU economic convergence process across CEE (Visegrad and Romania) during 2000-2018. According to our results these countries should address the structural problems (labor market, banking sector, R&D, infrastructure, in order to improve the regional integration and to increase the resilience of the region during the incidence of a crisis.

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  Marta Drabczuk, University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska in Lublin, Poland
  Ukraine’s Economic Marathon for EU Membership The presentation will be devoted to the analysis of the economic transformation process of Ukraine in the context of the implementation of the Association Agreement between the European Union and Ukraine. Ukraine does not have a systemic strategy of economic transformation breaking the deadlock in terms of macroeconomic stability. Economic changes in Ukraine are reactive to changes taking place inside the state (in the conditions of the Russian-Ukrainian war) and in the international environment, especially in the EU. The article will contain both formal and practical dimensions of economic transformation.

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  Mariam Jikia, Georgian Technical University, Tbilisi, Georgia

  Irakli Gabisonia, Georgian Technical University, Tbilisi, Georgia
  Approximation of the Legislation of Member States to EU Tax Policy: The Case Study of Estonia The aim of EU Tax Policy is the approximation and harmonization of Tax Systems of Member states to EU Tax directives. This process serves the economic integration of member states into the EU and the facilitation of trade relations. This paper discusses the long and difficult transition trajectory of Estonia (one of the EU Member States) from communist regime to independence that was followed by various reforms, including transition to market economy and fundamental transformation of Taxation system.

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The Process of Europeanization in CEE: Assessing the Political Dynamics of an Invented Region

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  Andrej Rendic, University in Zadar, Croatia
  The Conflict of American and Russian Influence on the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia The territory of former Yugoslavia has historically been marked by a lasting conflict of civilizations and religions, to which nowadays the conflict of geopolitical interests of Russia and the USA, respectively, adds its share. With the fall of communist regimes in the 1990’s and the ensuing dismemberment of former Yugoslavia, new national states came into existence, destabilizing the whole region and ultimately leading into chaos which took the shape of the sanguinary Yugoslav Wars. This paper analyzes the momentary relationships and potential future developments concerning the American and Russian influence on the territory of former Yugoslavia. With respect to this, it poses several questions. What are the ways in which Russia attempts to keep its influence in the region? Who are the main actors in related struggles for political power? What are the principal instruments by which the USA and Russia, respectively, seek to promote their interests?

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  Christopher Reeves, Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow, Poland
  On the Edge of ‘Europe’? A Polish Bridge Between East and West? The paper will consider the extent to which Poland’s geographical position on the edge of the Euro-Atlantic security community influences its relations with its neighbours in both east and west. It has been observed that Poland’s eastern policy is its ‘specialism’, and that it can potentially act as a bridge between Eastern Europe and the European Union. While Poland has clearly been supportive of Ukraine’s efforts to regain control over its eastern territories, differences between the way the two countries’ view their respective histories, and disputes over the way each other’s minority communities are being treated, has complicated their relations. From the perspective of many Western European countries, Poland’s potential for promoting democracy in Eastern Europe has been weakened given the controversies that have surrounded the current government’s constitutional reforms.

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  Lia Tsuladze, Tbilisi State University / Center for Social Sciences (CSS), Tbilisi, Georgia
  European Integration Through Pragmatic Considerations: A Complex Relationship Between its Wanted and Unwanted Aspects The paper discusses political and intellectual elites and populations’ discourses on European Integration in Georgia. It focuses on Georgians’ pragmatic expectations related to European integration in terms of protecting human rights and safeguarding the country against Russian threats. The research is based on the mixed-method approach integrating both qualitative and quantitative components. The target group consists of, on the one hand, political and intellectual elites who have been inquired based on in-depth interviews, and on the other hand, population residing in the capital and main cities of Eastern and Western Georgia, who have participated in focus group discussions.

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