Multilayered identities, memory politics, environmental conflicts, and mobility in the Czech - Polish - German borderland

The German-Polish-Czech borderland landscape, in both physical and social understanding of the term, represents a fascinating laboratory of multilayered identities, reflected in constant power games about the identity and memory of the region (or regions). Often perceived as periphery to their respective nation states, these places had been constantly reshaped at the important milestones (1918,1945, 1968, 1989, 2007, 2014, 2022) of the “big” European history, bringing ongoing changes of the populations and of the economical use of the physical landscape (agricultural landscape, surface coal mining, tourism, protection of the nature, residential landscape etc.) These also led to constant reshaping and re-negotiations of often overlapping and sometimes conflicting identities (citizenship, ethnicity, class, religion, gender, environment etc.). The central politics of the national states as well as of the European Union suggest (and finance) different labels and understandings of the region - while different groups of the local people negotiate and strive to enforce their own understanding. Our project brings the young researchers from the three countries to try to understand this puzzle and reflect on the biases brought to the fieldwork.

classroom: online +field
time: online Friday 9.30 - 11.30 (see schedule), offline 5 - 11 May Hrádek nad Nisou

teachers: Barbora Spalová, Lucie Trlifajová, Zuzanna Bogumil, Helena Patzner, Sabine Stach, Asta Vonderau

Participating universities: Institute of Sociological studies at Charles university Prague, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Warsaw University, Poland, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Leipzig Universität