Paul Vickers, CITAS Center for International and Transnational Area Studies, Universität Regensburg
International academic conference of the Regensburg Center for International and Transnational Area Studies (CITAS) and the Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America in the Modern World
Regensburg & hybrid via Zoom, 19 - 21 May 2022
Please register via info@europeamerica.de to attend the panels in person or via Zoom.
The keynote lecture is open to all in person and via the link in the program below.
Names and titles in italics and underlined indicate online participants in the conference.
Preliminary program
Thursday 19 May
H44, University of Regensburg
12:00-12:15 Introduction
12:15-14:00
Panel A: Expert Discourses and Counter-Narratives
1. Dirk Dalberg (Institute of Political Sciences, Slovak Academy of Sciences) - Expert panels in the Covid-19 pandemic. The Czech Republic and Slovakia
2. Anelia Kassabova (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum – Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) - “The Kingdom of the Anti-Vaxxers”. Debates on Covid-19 vaccination in Bulgaria
3. Önder Küçükural & Merve Aktar (Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul) - Dynamics of Vaccine Skepticism Among Turkish Youth
4. Rahmi Oruç (Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul) - Swinging Between Two Pending Narratives: The Reception of Covid-19 Narratives Among Freshmen Students in Turkey
Chair: Robert Austin (University of Toronto)
Coffee break
14:15-15:45
Panel B: Reframing State-Citizen Relations
1. Christopher Ankersen (New York University) - This Means War! The Ramifications of Framing the Response to Covid19
2. Owen Kohl (Indiana University, Bloomington) - News of “Shitlibs” and Other Dramatis Personae in American Crisis Storytelling
3. Iymon Abdul Majid (University of Kashmir) - Covid-19 Pandemic as a Weapon of the State against the Citizen
Chair: Gerlinde Groitl (UR)
Coffee break
16:15-17:45
Keynote lecture – via Zoom webinar with public viewing in H44
Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell Orenstein (University of Pennsylvania) - Taking Stock of Shock: Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions.
Coffee break
18:00-19:30
Panel C: Dis/located Narrative Spaces
1. Alexander Pittman (Ohio State University)- The Power of Same Race Mentoring: Creating Space at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI) for Students of Color to Speak Their Truth During the Dual-Pandemics of Covid-19 and Racism
2. Yamini Agarwal (Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies, New Delhi) - Gender and Education: Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic in an Unauthorized Colony in New Delhi
3. Avishek Ray (University of Minnesota / National Institute of Technology, Silchar) - Walking as a Metaphor: COVID Pandemic and the Politics of Mobility
Chair: TBC
Dinner in beer garden – self pay
Friday 20 May
H2, University of Regensburg
09:00-10:45
Panel D: Everyday Crisis Narratives
1. Jelena Markovic (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies, Zagreb) - Homo Narrans and the “Indescribability” of the Post-Covid Syndrome: Fear, Pain And Convalescents in Croatia
2. Milos Jovanovic (University in Niš) - Narratives on Holy Communion in Serbia During the Pandemic
3. Galina Gostrer (Munich University of Applied Sciences)– “I’m in a really bad mood today..“: Covid Talk at Work as a Relational Super-Strategy
4. Katrin Herms (CNRS/Centre Marc Bloch) - An empirical Case Study on Crisis Narratives within Social Media during 2020
Chair: TBC
Coffee break
11:00-12:45
Panel E: Transregional Narrative Spaces
1. Nina Pilz (University of Greifswald) - Regions as Pandemic Actors: Narratives on the Baltic Sea Region in Times of the Pandemic
2. Martina Drescher (University of Bayreuth) - A discourse analytical perspective on Covid-19 narratives from Cameroon
3. Lorella Viola (University of Luxembourg) - “Italy, for example, is just incredibly stupid now”. European crisis narrations in relation to Italy’s response to COVID-19
4. Jana Sverdljuk (University of Agder) & Bastiaan Bruinsma (Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg) - COVID-19 vaccine narratives on Twitter: discrepancies between the Global North and the Global South?
Chair: Paul Vickers
Lunch – provided by organizers for panellists and chairs
14:30-16:15
Panel F: Refiguring Europe
1. Gábor Egry (Institute of Political History, Budapest) - Swimming against the current of history? The relative failure of anti-Western official Hungarian Covid-19
2. Matthias Morys (University of York, UK) - Can a new Covid-narrative make the euro more sustainable?
3. Lukas Novotny (UJEP, Usti nad Labem) – Difficulties for tight-knit border communities during the COVID-19 pandemic: the case of cross-border commuters
4. Ines Prica (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb) - Political Identity and Its Comorbidities: Croatia as the Liberal Balkans of Pandemic Europe
Chair: Ulf Brunnbauer
Coffee break
16:45-18:30
Panel G: Cultural Crisis Narratives
1. Anne Brüske (University of Regensburg) - Spatializing the Pandemic. Graphic Narratives of Crisis in Latin America
2. Susanne Grimaldi (TU Dresden )- Iberian Crisis Narratives
3. Oleksandr Zabirko (University of Regensburg) - Post-Soviet “Zombification”: Between Literary Trope and Media Cliché
4. Jochen Mecke (University of Regensburg) – Re-Making and Re-Spatializing Narratives of Crisis, Catastrophe and Everyday Life
Chair: Birgit Hebel-Bauridl
Reception and buffet
Saturday 21 May
H2, University of Regensburg
09:15-10:45
Panel H: Pandemics, Biopolitics and Posthumanism
1. Raul Cârstocea (Maynooth University) - Othering a Pandemic: The Scapegoating of Jews and Roma during Epidemics
2. Romana Radlwimmer (Tübingen University) - Biopolitics and the Narrative of Colonial Illness
3. Minerava Peinador (University of Regensburg) - A Feral Matter: Attempting to figure out the paradigm of Anthropocene through its strange creatures
Chair: Anna Steigemann
Coffee break
11:15-13:00
Panel I: Apocalypse, Atrocity or Utopia? Prospects beyond the Pandemic
1. Richard Newell (Sarajevo) - COVID-19 and the Global Threats of Genocide and Mass Atrocity
2. Thomas Lynch (University of Chichester) - Crisis and Apocalypse: Narrating the Pandemic
3. Danielle Heberle Viegas (LMU, Munich) - COVID-19, utopia and socio-spatial dynamics in Brazil
Chair: Jochen Mecke