Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Category: Series

Series are sequences of essays on common questions that are addressed from personal standpoints and particular positions. Written in an accessible way, they contextualize and open up the consideration beyond the boundaries of disciplines and areas of expertise.
Series are curated by individual scholars or editorial groups. They are reviewed or peer-reviewed by the editors and/or participants of the series. They can be employed in writing workshops or accompany the work of collective projects. For more information on form see Contributions.

Traumatised Decolonial Transit: Constructing Historical Narrative in Ukrainian Culture in the Early ХХІ Century

By Tamara Hundorova. The Orange Maidan was a form of consolidation of the national community and had distinct signs of anti-colonial protest, but it ended in significant disappointment. The period between the two Maidans, or the two Ukrainian revolutions of the early twenty-first century, revealed past traumas and recorded different models of historical memory, primarily national–Eurocentric and nostalgic–Soviet–centric. The time has come to build historiographical narratives out of fragments, films, and paintings, out of the remnants of the memory erased by the era of colonialism and totalitarianism.

Травмований деколоніальний транзит: конструювання історичного наративу в українській культурі на початку ХХІ століття

від Тамара Гундорова. Помаранчевий майдан був формою консолідації національної спільноти і мав виразні ознаки атиколоніального протесту, який однак закінчився значними розчаруваннями. Період між двома Майданами, або двома українськими революціями початку ХХІ століття, проявив минулі травми і зафіксував різні моделі історичної пам’яті, передусім націо-євроцентричну і ностальгійно-радяноцентричну. Прийшов час розбудови історіографічних наративів із фрагментів, плівок і картин, із залишків стертої епохою колоніалізму і тоталітаризму пам’яті.

Haaland v. Brackeen, Indigenous Sovereignty, and the Ethics of Care

By Dana Lloyd. On June 15, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision in Haaland v. Brackeen. In this case, non-Indigenous foster and adoptive parents argued that the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which gives preference to Indigenous parents in fostering and adopting Indigenous children, is unconstitutional. They said the law discriminated against them on the basis of race. In a 7–2 ruling, the court rejected all of the petitioners’ challenges to ICWA, some on the merits of the case and others for lack of standing. In this essay, Lloyd reads the Brackeen case against the background of two hundred years of federal Indian law and assimilation policy and proposes two notions of care as a framework for thinking about the case: the first, associated with U.S. assimilation policy, sees care as charitable, but it is actually coercive and harmful; the second is based on solidarity and is at the heart of Indigenous sovereignty.

Truths That Hurt: Socialist Affects and Conviviality in the Literary Journalism of Gabriel García Márquez and Ryszard Kapuściński

By Joanna M. Moszczynska. The paper deals with narrative journalistic texts by Gabriel García Márquez and Ryszard Kapuściński about their journeys to the Eastern Bloc and Latin America, respectively, during the first two decades of the Cold War. García Marquez’s crónicas and Kapuściński’s reportages deliver ideas on socialism(s) and engage in affective workings of a travel experience through representations of convivial socialist spaces. By elaborating a philological approach towards socialist affects, the paper concentrates on affective narrative attunements to lived historical moments and aims at comparing both authors as they raise social and political issues pertinent to the conjuncture of the Cold War. The convivial aspect refers here not only to living together with and knowledge production about the Other as represented in the text, but also to the methodological approach with intercultural sensitivity and transregional and transnational awareness of the aesthetic developments in the hybrid field of global literary journalism.

Dichotomy of Methodology Between the American and the French Approach in Frontier/Border Studies: Sloboda-Ukraine in the 18th Century

By Yuliia Koniva. Historical geography as an interdisciplinary discipline offers many of the conceptions for studying space and territory. In this essay, I want to address that there is no common ground on how to apply these conceptions. In every national historiography we can find plenty of historians who utilize the approaches of studying space or territory according to the research goals which were put forward in front of each scholar.

Towards a Global History of War, Disability and Gender

By Natalie Tongue. Only in recent years has the history of disability become a focus of global history. This essay seeks to examine the connection between disability and masculinity, particularly in relation to histories of war. This will be achieved through a review of a series of books, articles and edited collections to piece together a full picture of the trends in this intersection of the respective fields and to understand where a global history approach would enhance disability histories. A global history approach would highlight the diverse and complex ways in which disability and masculinity interact in contexts of war. Further, as war, conflict and colonialism are inseparable, racialised understandings of how masculinity differed across colonial epicentres and peripheries would be undeniable. This is essential for a meaningful and committed undertaking of the field.

Ukraine and Ukrainians in the Panels: Global Comics Perspectives on the War

By Svitlana Pidoprygora. Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014 and the subsequent full-scale invasion in 2022 have brought Ukrainian issues to international headlines and sparked extensive reflections in various genres of fiction and non-fiction, with documentary comics and graphic reportages being no exception. International authors bring varied perspectives to Ukrainian historical and contemporary issues, striving to explain to their audience what is happening right now – why there is war, why the Russian Federation attacked Ukraine. I am focusing on arguably the most significant documentary comics that emerged after the beginning of the full-scale invasion and primarily focus on depicting the war experience. In this essay, I will delve into several key aspects of how these comics depict Russia’s war against Ukraine.

‘Acting Like a Law’: Regulating ‘Care’ Through Germany’s Anti-BDS Resolution

By Sophia Hoffinger. In May 2019, the German Parliament (Bundestag) passed a resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a campaign initiated in 2005 by Palestinian civil society actors to pressure Israel into complying with international law. The resolution passed with the support of all major political parties, except for Die Linke and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The story of the anti-BDS resolution in Germany raises pertinent questions about the relationship between law, the state, and the mobilization of antiracist principles: what does the application of a non-legally binding resolution as quasi-law reveal about the underlying norms shaping perceptions of history, Palestinians, Jews, and their relationships with Germany? Whilst laws are coercive, I suggest that quasi-laws like the BDS resolution present a site where we can follow the iteration and sedimentation of norms, which gives insights into how care is distributed between racialized subjects in Germany.

Reading Public Space through Masculinities in a Maghrebian Context – 5in10 with Khadidja Boussaid

Khadidja Boussaïd holds a Ph.D. in Urban Sociology from the University of Algiers 2 and is a senior researcher at CREAD (Research Center for Applied Economics for Development). She is part of a research team focused on the socio-economic dynamics of families, with a particular emphasis on the transformations of gender identities within Algerian households, but also focusing on the issue of Gender inequalities to access to public space. She is a short-term fellow at MECAM (Merian Centre for advanced studies in the Maghreb, Tunis University), where she is conducting a study about urban public space and its reading through masculinities in a North African context. Khadidja Boussaïd is accredited to supervise research (HDR) and is a member of the LASADET Laboratory (Socio-Anthropological Analysis of Territorial Development). She is also an associate member of the Gender Studies Center (CEG) at the University of Lausanne, contributing to research on the intersection of gender, space, and power.

When Conviviality Hides Inequality. Lélia Gonzalez on Brazilian Racial Democracy

By Rúrion Melo. The idea of racial democracy, also known as the myth of racial democracy, is not just a mistaken belief. In fact, it encompasses a set of mechanisms that regulate social practices, power relations, forms of social interaction, and collective thinking within a historically established system of ethnic-racial domination. Based on Lélia Gonzalez’s analysis, we will investigate which social actions concretize, support, and at the same time hinder the perception of everyday racism. How can we explain the widespread acceptance and propagation of the myth of racial democracy? And what does the myth of racial democracy hide, apart from what it reveals? The purpose of this text is to understand the paradigmatic issue of Brazilian racial democracy by assuming indirectly the conceptual framework of the relationship between conviviality and inequality. How does conviviality hide inequalities?