Following the implementation of the previous generations of CAS SEE Fellows starting in 2014-2015, 2015-2016 and 2016-2017, CAS SEE is announcing a new annual call for Fellowships for Spring and Autumn 2018. This call is organized along selected thematic foci (see bellow) but also offers the possibility of open applications. The CAS SEE Fellowship Program for Spring and Autumn 2018 will host 14 junior fellows. The Call for Applications closes on December 15th, 2017.
The seventh generation of fellows will assume their positions by February 15th 2018 (from February 15th to July 15th 2018).
The eighth generation of fellows will assume their positions by September 15th, 2018 (from September 15th 2018 to February 15th 2019).
Inspired by the excellent cooperation of the previous generations of CAS Fellows and their work that has created thematic synergies among researchers, CAS SEE Fellowship Spring and Autumn 2018 will stimulate fellows to work on similar topics or different aspects of one particular topic. Fellows will present their work on a bi-weekly basis in Rijeka or other regional centers and will engage more intensively in research in the wider region of South East Europe. All Fellows will spend first two weeks of the Fellowship at CAS SEE premises in Rijeka. They will then according to their research interests spend the rest of the Fellowship in the region, while attending the regular CAS SEE regional conferences and seminars. By implementing flexible regional approach while maintaining the spirit of CAS SEE Collegium, Fellows will be able to pursue their research within wide networks of other scholars and partner institutions in the region perfectly designed to enrich their work.
This Call is inviting applicants to focus on two particular topics:
Risky Thinking: Engagement and Action for Social Change (in Europe)
The emerging political, economic, ecological and social crises pose novel challenges to democracy. For one thing, it seems as if we are witnessing the overall disillusionment with electoral politics. Traditional instruments of representative democracy are in decline, which makes space for specific, even substitutive forms of social engagement and civic participation in the public sphere. Among them, a wide variety of social movements all over the world gather around similar concerns and, ultimately, aim at solving common problems and producing policy makers more accountable to the society.
Examples of – still active – social movements that have played important roles in shaping modern societies are the Labor Movement, the Women’s Movement, the Environmental Movement and the Peace Movement. Since the turn of the millennium, these movements have dispersed in different contexts and many of them, like the Global Justice Movement, the Arabic Spring, the Indignados and Occupy Movements, have invested significant efforts to influence societal developments. Simultaneously, new nationalist, neo-fascist and radicalized religious movements appeared. On the one hand, these movements reveal substantial social frictions and fissures in articulating discontent in daily life and giving it a political expression. On the other hand, they have also been important actors in the development of various (anti)democratic practices.
There is an urgent need to think (of) new forms of social engagement, primarily those movements that could challenge and change the existing social order in the global world today. CAS fellows should focus on different forms of social engagements, particularly on the movements in their local, national and transnational contexts. They should contribute with empirical studies or theoretical developments (or both) to the ongoing discussion on new social movements, as one of the pillars of studies of social engagement.
This broad topic addresses some more specific issues, such as:
- New forms of social engagement that have appeared in the last two decades;
- Various forms of resistance that have taken place, and the way they interweave different voices, groups and communities;
- New protagonists arising from social movements;
- New narratives advocating for social change;
- Rhetoric, methods and discourse that new forms of engagement use to relate to the issues of rights, inequality, space, citizenship, activism, resistance and aesthetics?
- Social movements and the questions of rights and equality in neoliberal world
- Social engagement and development of new practices of democracy
- New forms of social engagement under authoritarian regimes
- (Re)New(ed) anti-fascist movements and resistance
- Social movements and strategies of non-violence
- Beyond the academy/activism divide in social movements
- Social media, digital technologies and social engagements
Cities on the Edge: Resetting the 21st Century through New Urban Agendas (Rijeka ECOC 2020)
How to design open, egalitarian, adaptable, flourishing cities of tomorrow?
The world is changing, and cities are in the forefront of global transformations still insufficiently investigated. The labour landscape is undergoing a shift into automation, precariousness and power asymmetries of “sharing economy” and underdeveloped potentials of “creative industries”. The diversity of artificial intelligences is enabling the massive expansion of data harvesting and processing capabilities offers possibilities of population control of scope as yet not known by human civilization, as well as opportunities for cognitive extensions of intriguing epistemic potentials. The overlap of the digital with the physical remaps the cities into spaces with new meaningfulnesses and surveyabilities. The advent of open source bioengineering promises serious reimagining of bodies, health and physicality. The changes in the social and economic structures, from globally mobile labour force to new forms of communal living, call for rethinking of old models of housing. The unpredictable dynamics of climate change gives rise to threats of deep pressures on organizational and infrastructural capacities of cities, as well as opening up chances for geoengineering and similar environmental interventions present in our public deliberative and media landscapes only in hushed tones. The global communications are overflown with dubious or false materials manipulating street actions and patterns of political participation.
Presently, the changes appear helmed by developers, political elites incetivized for short-term thinking, corporate visionaries and accidents in the “old globalism”, with architects, philosophers and social scientists seemingly retreating into critique and conservation of political programs of 20th century. CAS fellows shoud address some of the following issues:
- Radical positive programs for urban futures;
- The use of smart cities and global communications as emancipatory directives;
- Rethinking and reintroduction of the concept of ‘progress’ into urban politics;
- Social change as a localist and particularist phenomenon;
- ‘Universalisms’ in the design of new social systems;
- Participatory democracy at the urban level – new models and designs;
- The influence of various forms of migrations on the local and urban economy;
- The role of architects in the coming transformations;
- Design practices, typologies, methodologies and theories for occupying the future?