Postscapes Matter – SIEF Summer School 2024, 23 - 27 September, Zagreb, Croatia
The local organizer of this year’s SIEF Summer School is the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb.
Theme
The SIEF Summer School 2024 explores how and why postscapes matter; as a lived experience, a historical or temporal condition and as a conceptual tool or a way of knowing. We invite our participants to consider: What comes after post-? What is left of post-, as a concept? Why is it still important to think in terms of diverse postscapes?
We think of, along, and with different and multiple post-s: post-modernity, post-capitalism, postsocialism, post-industrial, post-political, post-city. Our world is post-factual and post-critical, postliberal, post-democratic. We are entangled in post-catastrophic, post-epidemic, and post-crisis, postconflict issues.
Our futures might be post-carbon, post-ideological, post-gendered, and post-human. Our epistemologies must be post-colonial. Our methodologies can become post-extractive.
Exploring the concept of post- thus engages different temporal reasoning within our scholarly fields of ethnology and folklore and encourages us to discuss our contemporary social worlds while advancing our disciplines.
We start by exploring how the idea of post- changes our understanding(s) of the world around us. This small and unremarkable prefix provides us with ways to assess where things come from, where they stand, and in which directions they are moving. Working with post- enables us to address failed and successful projects, as well as allowing us to plan and push new projects to the forefront. The notion of ‘post-‘ complements future horizons through the inevitable passage of time and ideas, just as much as it is a part of those we have inherited. It energizes narratives of survival, new beginnings, and fresh starts.
In order to contextualise limits and potentials of posts- in shaping our understanding of contemporaneity, we will explore the multiple postscapes of Croatia’s capital, Zagreb, the biggest industrial city in the region, and an arena of blooming social and cultural life. We propose to think of Zagreb as a diverse postscape in its own right, a place where we encounter:
- post-industrial capitalism in motion, deindustrialisation and ruination of economic lifeworlds,
- post-catastrophe life, e.g., after the 2020 earthquake and the covid-epidemic,
- post-neoliberal political citizenship after the 2015 migration crisis of humanity,
- the post-socialist politics of aesthetics,
- post-conflict reasoning of peace and hope,
- post-carbon city government and urban planning for and of the future.
Applications
The SIEF Board and the local organizing team cordially invite applications from doctoral students who would benefit from exploring our theme and contextualising the concept of post-. The call primarily addresses current doctoral students, but applications from advanced master’s students and recent postdocs interested in the topic will also be considered. Applications should include:
- - a CV, and
- a motivation letter outlining the applicant’s interest in attending the Summer School, previous research experience, and the link of their doctoral (master’s, postdoctoral) project to the theme (max. 500 words).
Applications should be submitted by e-mail to sief(at)meertens.knaw.nl before 20 April, 2024 They should be written in English, the working language of the programme. Applicants will be informed about the results no later than 1 May, 2024.
More information can be found here: https://www.siefhome.org/summerschool