Doctoral students contribute to workshop in Warsaw

On 24th June 2017, Eva-Maria Walther and Andrey Vozyanov contributed to the conference “City, Community and the Transformation of Space in Post-Eastern Bloc societies” at the renowned Łazarski University of Warsaw. During this international workshop both doctoral students of the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg presented and discussed the first findings of their respective doctoral project.

Vozyanov delivered a paper on "Tramways and Trolleybuses in European Peripheries after 1990: Management of Hope Against Fall of the Futures" in the panel on “Cities and Communities”. Walther spoke on "Slovakia’s Tolerance Proponents: Challenging a Hegemonic Discourse on Migration" in the panel dealing with “NGO organisational activity”.

The conference, which gathered young scholars from Poland, Serbia, Romania, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany, predominantly discussed the challenges and chances for civil societies and the development of urban space in Central Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. The British journalist and writer Owen Hatherly, well known for his book Militant Modernism (2009), opened the conference with a keynote on "Landscapes of Capitalism - Architectural Shifts in Central Eastern Europe after 1989". The workshop took place at the Department for Government Studies at the Łazarski University of Warsaw, which is one of Poland’s leading universities with strong international connections.