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Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Visual Culture 

Course Director: Andrew Herscher, Harvard Design School, Cambridge, USA

Resource Persons: Conerly Casey, UCLA, USA, Allen Feldman, Institute for Humanities Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia, Uli Linke, Rutgers University, USA/Tübingen University, Germany, Tomislav Longinovic, University of Wisconsin, USA

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, a new international political geography has emerged, with certain areas - such as the Balkans, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, and Israel and the occupied territories - framed as zones of ethnic, religious or nationalist conflict. "Culture" is often invoked as a contributing cause of these conflicts, but it is only recently that the cultural aspects of these conflicts have become central to a range of disciplines, old and new: anthropology, cultural history, studies of visual and material culture, and studies of trauma and memory. On the bases of these new conceptualizations of the cultural, this course will examine political violence not as an adjunct to or a result of cultural activity, but as a fully cultural materialization and performance. The course will thus consider the centrality of cultural issues in ethnic, religious and nationalist conflict, attempting to ascertain the place of political conflict and violence within the field of culture and the status of the experience, representation and interpretation of conflict and violence as cultural phenomena.

The course will introduce participants to a range of perspectives from linguistics, anthropology and history in researching Romany and Gypsy social forms. Participants will learn how Roma issues cannot be treated in isolation as the problem of one ethnic group and yet how, at the same time, Roma cannot just be lumped together with other poor people. Participants will learn that to understand Roma/non-Roma relations is to develop a deeper (and essential) understanding of their own societies.

Romany Studies was dominated through the 20th century by folkloristic, linguistic and then anthropological work. Only at the end of the century, and largely in the Netherlands and Germany, did a historical approach to Romany experience emerge. This course will provide an opportunity, bringing together the leading players in the field, to thrash out some of the differences and explore how an interdisciplinary perspective will provide a rigorous set of academic challenges for the next generation of researchers.

This course uses an interdisciplinary perspective to explore the complex and often contradictory role of religion in shaping identities and advancing or resisting elite agendas in contemporary society. It covers themes such as the interaction of religion and nationalism, religion and transnational networks, religion and state control, religion and civil society. Case material is drawn mainly from Eastern and Southeastern Europe and Asia.

The purpose of this course is threefold. First, it explores the potential of music to articulate personal and group responses to problems of society. Second, it will articulate some of the special problems of the twentieth century as they manifest in music. Third, it will place the musical culture of Eastern Europe within the European cultural milieu by showing the ways in which it reflected both the common anxieties of European art and the particular problems of the region.

Two units of the course will present general problems of music, the first one dealing with nationalism and the second one with the tension between individual and communal expression/demands. The remaining three units will discuss these and other problems in their relation to three countries: the Czech Republic, Turkey and Hungary. In the course of the twentieth century, these countries went through a series of changing self definitions, which in the case of Hungary and Turkey involved also the transition from an imperial statehood-identity to a definition of nation that was based on (real or imagined) ethnic unity. In the case of all of these countries the relation with "Europe" (as an imaginary cultural entity) played a major role. All these issues influenced and were played out in the domain of culture. They manifested themselves in the policy making of music as a social activity as well as in the personal responses of composers and public regarding musical style.

Course director: Margaret Dikovitskaya, University of British Columbia, Canada

Resource Persons: Lisa Cartwright, University of California, San Diego, USA, Mark Cheetham, University of Toronto, Canada, Whitney Davis, University of California, Berkeley, USA, Brian Goldfarb, University of California, San Diego, USA, Dusan Pajin, University of Arts, Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Ruth Phillips, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

This course will examine the status of art-historical knowledge and museology in relation to the recent theoretical developments in the humanities and social sciences. It will explore the new critical methodologies of art-historical interpretation and artwriting, and will discuss the implications of queer studies, postsocialist studies, and new electronic media for the enrichment of college and university teaching and research. The regional cooperation of art theorists and practitioners as part of the transformative process in CEE will be addressed.

Agricultural and rural development is a real challenge for most of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe during their pre-accession to EU stages. The main lesson from the last decade is that the traditional theories and approaches are not enough for explaining the real problems and for building productive practical alternatives. We need a new theoretical foundation and new policy.

The multidisciplinary approach of New Institutional and Transaction Cost Economics gives us an opportunity to enrich the analysis of the agrarian and rural sector. Its concept will be applied in: assessment of the role of specific formal and informal institutions (property rights, legislation, trust, informal rules); analysis of comparative efficiency of market, private, hybrid, etc. modes of governance (contracts, organizations, collective actions, illegal forms); efficiency analysis of various forms of Government, international, etc., intervention (assistance, regulation, support, in-house organization, institutional modernization, globalization).

The course participants will receive knowledge and skills for better understanding of the pace, driving factors, and prospects of agrarian transformation. It is expected that they are familiar with mainstream economics, theory of organizations and traditional concepts for agrarian and rural development.

The course explores the dynamic interrelationships between the forces of globalization and governance with specific emphasis on the role of the United Nations system and the European Union. It is organized around five interrelated elements. First, "what is governance and how does governance relate to human security?" We explore the relationship between global and regional systems of governance and the creation and maintenance of democratic open societies at the local and national levels. Second, the course focuses on the evolving meanings of security. It explores the global value dialectic over peace and security and the transition from a narrow definition of security—national security and protection from physical military aggression—to the much broader concept of human security. Third, participants analyze the competing forces and tensions that underpin systems of governance and condition the authoritative allocation of human needs and values. We examine the evolving dialectics between numerous forces and tensions, such as integration and fragmentation, globalization and localization, and universalism and relativism. Fourth, participants are challenged to re-conceptualize international relations and global governance in non-state-centered terms and to explore the resulting implications for understanding the nature and roles of international institutions, such as the EU, the UN, and international financial institutions, as well as transnational civil society organizations in promoting human security. Finally, we explore the nature, plausibility, and possibility of reforms in international institutions that would be required to bring civil society and the private sector more fully and effectively into international policy processes.

This special five-week mixed "in-residence"/distance learning (DL) summer university course is designed to enhance the professional development of young scholars and other young professionals who are interested in or actively engaged in research and teaching about international relations, international institutions, and the future of global governance and human security. It will offer participants an in-depth analysis of the forces that affect and the challenges that confront governance at all levels in the twenty-first century as well as various steps that might be taken to enhance the effectiveness of international institutions and other mechanisms of global governance in responding to those challenges. The course proposed here is designed specifically for young Ph.D.s and advanced doctoral students and other professionals who possess a basic knowledge about international relations and/or multilateral affairs.

The course is organized around one of the late-twentieth century’s most challenging intellectual and practical puzzles - a puzzle that challenges the core of the interstate legal order's foundations in state sovereignty. Individuals and groups acting in the name of states and intergovernmental organizations have generally found the policy mechanisms under their control to be insufficient for responding effectively to war (internal and interstate), poverty, malnutrition, pandemic diseases, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and the multitude of other threats to human security. For their part, civic-based actors seldom possess sufficient resources, authority, or the requisite capacity for launching successful large-scale independent policy initiatives and therefore exert only meager influence on global developments. Yet building and sustaining cooperation between public and civic-based entities has proved to be an elusive objective. The course analyzes the problem of how to overcome the constraints of sovereignty in international institutions in order to create effective partnerships with civil society and the private sector that are needed to promote democratic governance and sustainable human security.

This special five-week mixed "in-residence"/distance learning (DL) summer university course is designed to enhance the professional development of young scholars who are actively engaged in research, teaching, and/or fieldwork in international affairs and are interested in how to create and manage partnerships with diverse elements of society for promoting and sustaining democratic governance and human development and security. It will offer participants an in-depth analysis of the forces that affect and challenges that confront global governance in the twenty-first century and various steps that might be taken to enhance the effectiveness of international institutions in responding to those challenges. The course proposed here is designed specifically for young Ph.D.s and advanced doctoral students who possess a basic knowledge about international relations and/or multilateral affairs.

This course is designed to facilitate the exchange of ideas and cooperative projects among academics, professionals and students in the East and West who are pursuing the study of conflict and conflict resolution processes. The program, set in the context of Central and Eastern Europe’s emerging democracies, will focus both on arbitration and mediation, as well as other consensual methods for addressing and resolving conflict and promoting understanding between peoples.

In the first two weeks of the program, CEU participants will be joined by approximately thirty American law students and scholars to explore mediation theory and skills, as well as other processes to foster democratic dialogue. All of the offerings will include multi-national perspectives and examples. This program will enable students to critically examine the challenges of the design and delivery of ADR initiatives in multiple contexts, including countries where the "rule of law" still is being established.

CEU participants will finish the sequence by participating in a one-week intensive course centered on arbitration, particularly as that process is used in the context of labor and employment matters.

The course intends to explore a most topical issue connected with the Middle Ages: its "use" and "misuse" in the political and cultural discourse–as well as activity - of our times, with special reference to Central and Eastern Europe. The notion of a "new Middle Ages" has a slightly different meaning in this region. Here national self-identification is heavily leaning on the medieval past, as for several nations that was the (real or legendary) age of "greatness" followed by decline, incorporation into multinational empires, dismemberment and "foreign rule". Conversely, events of cooperation in the region, fruitful in the remote past, are called upon to justify and underwrite recent attempts at the same. Finally, the diverse attitudes to surviving (or unearthed) remains of the medieval past have acquired crucial symbolic value for internal and external forces alike. Just as totalitarian governments have destroyed or glorified monuments according to their preference (at home and abroad), so contemporary ones make a show of ancient jewels or castles or bomb the bridges of their enemies. In a less violent and manipulated manner, the presentation, (re)construction of past edifices and objects serve definite political and ideological aims.

Without opting for some idealistic "objectivity", the seminars and round-tables of this course will explore the bases of this kind of "instrumentalization". It will discuss the performance of experts in this field, supportive or critical, and the implications of governmental and non-governmental policies in respect to the future of cultural heritage, history-writing and teaching in the region. A comparative perspective, including Western Europe, may be able to place all this in a wider historical and intellectual context.

The purpose of the course is to explore how western models of dealing with ethnocultural diversity can be adopted in Eastern Europe. From the point of view of Eastern European countries interested in European integration, Western European countries are not simply offering such models for possible consideration, but rather are pressuring Eastern Europe to respect pan-European standards. The decision of Western European organizations to insist on respect for pan-European standards is a serious test-case for the feasibility and desirability of "exporting" western standards to the rest of Europe.

Given this background, the course will focus on two important topics. First, it will attempt to clarify the theoretical basis of western models of dealing with ethnocultural diversity so as to distinguish the underlying principles from the myriad of local variations in the way that these principles are institutionalized. The course will distinguish the fundamental principles from the contingent practices and ask questions about the extent to which those principles are applicable elsewhere. Second, the course will attempt to involve participants, scholars, advanced students and practitioners, in a transnational and intercultural dialogue on problems of self-determination, federalism and minority rights and on how these problems are linked to democratization.

The course will concentrate on the relationship of philosophy and scientific thought in the Greco-Roman world, from the Presocratics through the Hellenistic age up to the close of classical antiquity. We would like to investigate how mathematics, natural sciences, astronomy, and medicine influenced philosophy, and on the other hand, how philosophy and its methods and techniques framed science and scientific knowledge. Our intention is that the course should address basic questions of interrelatedness, and should show how questions asked and methods used either in science or in philosophy fertilized other areas of intellectual activity. The focus will be on questions concerning the structure of knowledge, methodology, second order theories, argumentativity, demonstrational techniques, and polemics.

The course will highlight the interrelationships between the politics of market making and the reshaping of industrial relations in Europe. The nineties were the decade of market making both in the Eastern and the Western parts of Europe. In the post-communist countries this was the decade of attempts to build up market economies. In Western Europe, this was the decade of the creation of the Single Market and the preparation for the European Monetary Union (EMU). Market making, both at the national level and at the supra-national levels went hand in hand with a dramatic reshaping of the political and social relations among key national level economic actors in both parts of the continent and the consolidation of supranational (European) actors. In Central and Eastern Europe the changes resulted largely in the marginalization of organized labour, combined in some countries with the capture of national states by a small group of winners and the impoverishment of an important segment, if not the majority of the population.

Within the EU, on the other hand, while traditional national industrial relations systems got increasingly under strain, only exceptionally become labour marginalised. The majority of member states searched for labour inclusive policies in coping with the challenges of the single market, and hitherto a number of member states witnessed the revival of social pacts.

The highly divergent fate of post ’90 Europe and European states both in terms of market making and in terms of pursuing labour inclusive or exclusive policies calls for investigating the interrelationship between market making and societal regulation of business and labour markets embodied in industrial relations systems.

The problem of multicultural and multiethnic states has become of increasing importance, nowhere more so than in Russia and in Eastern and Central Europe. Minority cultures and groups are increasingly making claims for autonomy, group rights and representation, and for toleration. Both politically and philosophically, this is now an urgent issue. This course aims to introduce students to the problems of multiculturalism and toleration, in terms of both theory and practice. Furthermore, the aim is to examine and contrast the Russian and Western approaches to these problems. This will encompass both the history of the idea of toleration and its contemporary application to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Is a ‘clash of civilizations’ inevitable between Islam and the West? This renewed debate following the terrorist attacks of September 11 on the USA, which brought up the issue of Islam's encounter with the West, will be the subject-matter of this course. To explore this question further the course will take part in the debate concerning the "formation of identity" in relation to the "other" with reference to Islam and the West. As sharp ideological competitions have faded away by the end of the cold war we are told to face tensions along civilizational/cultural lines. Islam and the West, given their centuries old competition and confrontation, and the presence of a militant anti-Westernism among some radical Islamic groups, are cast as the most likely candidates to clash. In an age of globalization it is impossible to draw lines among civilizations and cultures. They are bound to co-exist contributing to interdependence of faiths and civilizations breakdown of which may result in a total destruction of "global civilization". Thus the course will examine the relationship between Islam and the West from historical, political and sociological points of view, and question the myths of conflict to foster civilizational/cultural understanding among the peoples of Eastern Europe and former Soviet space where Islam and Christianity meet and interact.

This course offers an analytical framework for understanding and implementing fiscal decentralization: improving assignment of functions and responsibilities and the fiscal relations between the central, regional, and local governments.Fiscal decentralization is closely related to the "restructuring of the public economy", meaning rethinking the role of the state in different sectors, such as social policy, education, housing, communal services, etc. The process of restructuring took much more time than it was originally planned. Furthermore, the process involved little if no coordination at all among the sectors, and therefore has not taken into consideration the effect this may have on fiscal decentralization. In fact sectoral reform has often not organized itself along the lines of fiscal decentralization principles at all.

The course will start with six distance learning modules introducing participants to the principles and legal framework of decentralisation, expenditure and revenue assignment and intergovernmental transfer.

The one-week workshop style course will include an advanced discussion and analysis through exercises and case studies from the region, in the following areas: 1) worldwide trends in fiscal decentralization and the concept and practice of the assignment of expenditure responsibilities and revenue authority; 2) the design of various forms of central to sub-national transfers and local own-source revenues; creditworthiness and the financial risks of local authorities; and 3) the emerging topic of budgeting and local public management.

Attuned to new teaching techniques, the workshop aims to achieve the right mix of exercises, lectures, and interactive learning methods. This includes the dissemination of materials prior to the course presentation (in paper form and electronically). The course will use distance learning techniques to teach the basics, and during the course the group will focus more on the case studies and exercises.

The course offers an interdisciplinary approach to contemporary catastrophes and their relation to globalization processes. Contemporary catastrophes ("complex humanitarian – or political – emergencies") are multi-dimensional events that transcend national boundaries, defy traditional ways of containing the rapid dissemination of their destructive effects, activate trans-national mechanisms of relief and intervention, and give rise to new forms of political and moral discourse. The course analyzes catastrophes as a sort of laboratories for the study of certain aspects of globalization (global civil society, multi-national corporations, perceptions of and preparations for environmental global disaster), and examines the effect of the latter on the experience and representation of catastrophes.

The course is offered to junior faculty and advanced graduate students in the humanities and social sciences, and to NGO’s activists with appropriate academic background, who are interested in cultural, sociological, political, and moral aspects of the way contemporary societies cope with recent, foreseeable or imaginary catastrophes.

The design of the summer program is based on a peer-type of cooperation. Instructors of the course are practising energy regulators with significant and noteworthy regulatory experience and expertise. The course is designed to assure the transfer of practises and information from experienced regulators to new or young regulatory staff. At the same time, the course ensures that practises and lessons accumulated by energy regulators of the Central-Eastern European region are transferred to recently established organizations of other regions. The course is jointly supported by the Central European University and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Additional support was provided by the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners of the United States.