Workshops 2026/2027

Summary of the proposal:

Labour history has undergone significant renewal, moving beyond institutional and economic narratives to analyse labour as a social relation embedded in changing political, social, and spatial contexts. Periods of transformation in politics, the economy, technology, and shifting social orders have reshaped working conditions while opening new arenas of negotiation for workers and institutions.

Our workshops bring together scholars exploring labour as both an object and an agent of transformation. Participants examine how labour relations are constituted, experienced, and contested across historical moments and spatial scales, from transregional entanglements to everyday workplace practices.

The aim is to foster dialogue across historiographical traditions and rethink labour history in Central Europe through interconnected transformations and multi-scalar experiences of work

Summary of the proposal:

Within the CENTRAL project (annual workshops since 2016), we will organize "Topographies of Memory in East Central and Southeastern Europe" at the University of Vienna in April 2027. Building on Lefebvre and Nora, we understand space as a social product interwoven with collective memory cultures and imaginaries.

The workshop examines how places in East Central and Southeastern Europe construct memory communities, promote disintegration, or surface marginal memories, and discusses narrative strategies that construct topographical situatings of memory and uncover suppressed spatial memories. Given the region's disproportionate exposure to territorial contestations, violence, and displacement, we explore how space is remembered and which memories spaces produce as consolidations or negotiations of collective identities and memory-cultural imaginaries that reinforce or counteract geopolitical positionings.

Summary of the proposal:

Emotions are increasingly recognized as a key dimension of social policy, yet they remain understudied in Central European public policy. This two-day hybrid workshop, hosted in Prague by Charles University, in collaboration with the University of Warsaw, and Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, brings together researchers, doctoral students, and early-career academics from across the region, with participants also joining remotely from other countries.

Participants will compare national case studies, identify shared regional patterns, and discuss how emotions shape — and are shaped by — social policy. Through presentations, moderated discussions, and collaborative group work, the workshop builds a common foundation for a comparative research report and an open-access typology of emotional strategies in housing policy.

The event strengthens cross-border cooperation and supports more inclusive, emotionally informed approaches to policymaking across Central Europe.

Summary of the proposal:

The growing political, social and cultural significance of Ukraine calls for broader and more multidisciplinary Ukrainian Studies in Central Europe. This workshop will bring together scholars, doctoral candidates and early-career researchers from Charles University, Eötvös Loránd University, the University of Warsaw and the University of Vienna.

Building on two previous CENTRAL workshops, it will discuss curriculum reform, interdisciplinary approaches, practice-oriented teaching with NGOs, think-tank and media organisations, and joint initiatives such as online courses and summer schools. The workshop aims to strengthen academic networks, engage junior researchers, and develop concrete proposals for collaborative teaching and research, offering a Central European perspective to the wider international debate on Ukrainian Studies.

Summary of the proposal:

This workshop brings together sociologists, anthropologists and historians to explore plural identities and ethnic/religious mixing. In doing so, it connects studies on gender and minorities, centering the phenomenon of mixed families.

Participants include established scholars and junior researchers from Central European hubs, facilitating knowledge transfer and future collaborations. Key goals include planning joint publications (edited volume or a special issue) and developing capacity for joint project applications.

Through thematic panels, the workshop posits Central Europe as a rich site for transdisciplinary study, while situating it in a global context. It provides a platform for early career researchers to network and refine their research profiles. The event concludes with a collective discussion on scholarship trends and concrete steps for future project cooperation.

Summary of the proposal:

László Krasznahorkai was awarded with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2025 “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre“, according to the official statement of the Academy. His style is characterised by long, seemingly endless sentences with complex syntax, that poses a challenge when translating into other languages.

This workshop explores the linguistic, stylistic, and philosophical challenges of translating his trademark “endless” sentences across several languages, including English, German, Polish, and Czech.The aim of the workshop is to enable the participants to have a deeper understanding of how syntax works in a literary text and how it affects translation. They can see what strategies are used by translators to re-create not just the meaning, but also the form of the text in the target language.

In the preparatory phase, participants will get acquainted with the source text (short stories of Krasznahorkai and their translations in the analysed languages), analyzing them from a linguistic and stylistic perspective, and they will familiarize themselves with the literature of translating Krasznahorkai and translating complex syntax.

During the workshop, the groups will use the system of translation strategies to analyse how translators re-created the complex and innovative Hungarian syntax of Krasznahorkai in the target language. During the workshop, they will also have the opportunity to meet (on-line or in-person) with translators who translated Krasznahorkai’s works and gain an insider’s perspective on the task of a literary

translator.

As an additional aspect, the participants will also test how AI translation tools are handling the complexity of Krasznahorkai’s language through translating a short story with an AI translation tool and identifying the differences between AI and human translation. This will enable them to build on the results of a previous workshop on AI

translation in literature, connecting the subject to a modern-day phenomena.

Summary of the proposal:

As a continuation of our collaboration since 2022, the aim of our present proposal is to further strengthen international academic exchange between postgraduate students and senior researchers by organizing a thematic workshop on the history of formative social and political processes in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and 20th centuries, using comparative and transnational approaches.

We designed the event to give equal emphasis to the presentation, feedback, and the discussion of specific issues.

Four main objectives are identified.

1) to enhance the quality of PhD programs in modern history and related social sciences by strengthening the international exchange of knowledge and skills among PhD students and researchers in the field;

2) to promote cooperation between CEE universities (Charles University in Prague, University of Vienna, University of Warsaw, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest);

3) to further strengthen this cooperation by developing joint educational programs on both MA and PhD levels, as well as by initiating a new Erasmus Mundus program (see below).

4) to give valuable feedback to students to turn their submitted papers into journal publications.

Summary of the proposal:

The proposed workshops explore modern approaches to lexicography in Slavic languages, combining corpus linguistics, digital methods and artificial intelligence with cognitive and pedagogical perspectives. The project addresses how large language datasets and new technologies are reshaping the way word meanings, phraseology and culturally embedded concepts are described across languages such as Polish, Russian and Czech.

The workshops will be held online and will bring together researchers at different career stages, with a strong focus on PhD students.

Participants will engage in practical sessions (e.g. corpus analysis and lexicographic design), collaborative work and mentoring activities, supporting skills development and international networking. The project will also foster long-term cooperation between CENTRAL universities, leading to joint publications and future funding applications, as well as the development of shared research agendas and digital lexicographic resources.

Summary of the proposal:

Social sciences have spent the past decade confronting a credibility crisis. Although awareness of its causes has grown, and concrete countermeasures exist, improvements remain slow, held back by misaligned institutional incentives and the rigidity of established workflows. In addition, advances in large language models now threaten to compound these problems, enabling the production of low-quality or fraudulent studies at scale.

The same technology, however, makes feasible many previously impractical innovations like automated protocol-fidelity and reproducibility audits, and even entirely new forms of scientific work and evaluation. In this critical time, the workshop brings together Central European researchers to co-design the practices, norms, and workflows that will turn AI into a force for more credible science.