Humans are in constant motion, and so are things and ideas. Three trilateral workshops in Vienna, Prague, and Budapest bring together junior and senior scholars working on human movement & migration and the circulation of goods and ideas to explore the development of new transnational perspectives on the history of Central and Eastern Europe in its global context. They link up and deepen existing collaborations between the partners on the topics of connections and movement in the socialist world and on trade during the Cold War, tying them in with new formats of doctoral education at the University of Vienna.
The workshops bring together different scholars working on the issue of mobility in a broad sense of the term: mobility of people, goods, and ideas. They relate to a broader trend in recent transnational and global historiography, which seeks to connect different strands of research on cross-border movements and connections of human and non-human actors and agents. The geographic focus is mainly on Central and Eastern Europe, embedded in global and comparative contexts.
The core teams of researchers from the three partner universities include a group of PhD students who present their ongoing research in the workshops alongside more senior scholars, offering their comments and advice. In addition to the core teams of this application travelling to the workshops, we involve other scholars from our respective institutions to participate on-site (without need for funding), both as paper-givers and to act as chairs and commentators. At the University of Vienna, this enables close integration of the workshop with the Doctoral School for Historical and Cultural Studies (DSHCS), the new FWF doc. funds project "The Dynamics of Change and the Logics of Transformation", and the Migration Reading Group (a RECET research group funded by the dean's office). At Charles University, we draw on further scholars from the Institute of International Studies and the Ukraine in A Changing Europe Research Centre.