Bordering the Monster? Creative Destruction and De- and Re-Bordering of Established Structures/Borders

Bordering the Monster? Creative Destruction and De- and Re-Bordering of Established Structures/Borders

Veranstalter
IRTG Baltic Borderlands: Shifting Boundaries of Mind and Culture in the Borderlands of the Baltic Sea Region; Dr. Alexander Drost; Dr. Maare Paloheimo, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald
Veranstaltungsort
Folkets Hus Conference Centre, Umeå
Ort
Umeå
Land
Sweden
Vom - Bis
19.10.2014 - 21.10.2014
Von
Alexander Drost

We live in an ordered world where categories, hierarchies and boundaries were constructed to help us to comprehend the complexity of live. Conflicts, creativity and contacts, among others, stimulate his-torical processes which result in continuous change of established structures, institutions and systems of meaning. Thus, elements of change and reconstruction are crucial for progress. This workshop will address these topics by inviting participants to contribute with innova-tive thinking about how various actors on various levels and times engaged and shaped these processes. There has been already intel-lectual engagement with these kind of processes by theorizing the emergence of “monster culture” and the very famous approach of “creative destruction”. This will be our starting point to think about concepts, ideas and processes of bordering and the emergence of borderlands.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (English philology) has argued that monsters are hybrid creatures marking the edges of conceptual and physical frontiers. He also mentions that the monsters body is a cultural body which incorporates fear, desire, anxiety and fantasy. Furthermore the monster is a first sign (harbinger) of category crisis. Elizabeth De Palma Digeser (History) writes, the monster is visible “difference” and can be understood as an exaggeration of a cultural difference made monstrous. It represents any kind of alterity. The identification of monsters, then, signals that persons in the interior or center perceive at some distance from themselves either a frontier or a borderland region. Digeser continues, “in other words, monsters occupy regions where attributes of ostensibly settled region overlap with attributes of something other.” In this context we would like to have a discussion on the border and borderlands of categories, the shifting of categories and their borders as well as on the “objects” which have to fit within the borders or may be located in the borderlands.

We would like to combine this research on monster culture with an approach that derives from economics and the concept of creative destruction but, we hope, it can also be applied innovatively by other disciplines in the project. Creative destruction draws on Joseph Schumpeter´s (1883-1950) thinking of economic innovation and business cycles which relies very much on entrepre-neurs/entrepreneurship and the re-evaluating of established econom-ic structures and models.

Both ideas concern very much the issue of de- and re-bordering in the sense that established categories do not fit new developments and behavior. Thus established structures, borders, boundaries and con-cepts have to be re-evaluated and re-defined. In this context many borders and boundaries have to be re-drawn.

Programm

Sunday (October 19th)
19:00 – Introdcution

Alexander Drost (Greifswald)
Bordering the Monster?, or Coping with change at the boundaries in life

Monday (October 20th)
09:00 – Key Note I
Introduction by Michael North (Greifswald)

Samuel Truett (Albuquerque)
Globetrotters, border crossers, and the tangled tales of borderlands history

10:15 – Panel I
Collaborative Discussant and Chair Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (Lund)/ Alexander Wöll (Greifswald)

Tatsiana Astrouskaya (Greifswald)
An intellectual as l’enfant terrible of Pere-stroika: Re-definition of Belorussian intellectual field in the late 1980s-beginning of 1990s

Marta Grzechnik (Gdańsk/ Greifswald)
Ten centuries of struggling with the monster. The Germans as the “Other” in the post-Second World War Polish historiography

Rune Brandt Larsen (Lund)
Shadows in the East

Sune Bechmann Pedersen (Lund)
Eastern escapes: Selling communist Europe in Scandinavian cold-war guidebooks

13:15 – Panel II
Collaborative Discussant and Chair Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (Lund)/ Alexander Wöll (Greifswald)

Alberto Sevillano (Greifswald)
The discovery of a Monstrous Goya in Germany in early 20th century

Katja Will (Greifswald)
Everybody a man-eater? The Danish film De grønne slagtere and the motif of cannibalism

Berit Glanz (Greifswald)
Monstrous patients: Alterity in contemporary Scandinavian novels

15:45 – Panel III
Discussant and Chair Jens E. Olesen (Greifswald)

Madis Maasing (Tartu)
Monsters on the border of Christendom: The Russian threat in 16th-Century Livonia

Baiba Tetere (Greifswald)
‘Latvian types’: Hybridized visions of rural life in Latvia in 1890s

Alina Baravykaitė (Greifswald)
How foreign can your native language be?

Toomas Schvak (Tartu)
De- and Re-bordering in 19th century Estonia and Latvia: Orthodox Church and schools as enablers of social changes

Tuesday (October 21st)
09:00 – Key Note II
Introduction by Riho Altnurme (Tartu)

Jari Ojala (Jyväskylä)
Creative destruction, path dependence and organizational longevity: how and why history matters?

10:15 – Forum, Collaborative Chair Volha Sasunkevich (Vilnius)/ Alexander Drost (Greifswald)

Alexandra Fried (Gothenburg) – opponent Kilian Heck (Greifswald)
The bunge master reconsidered

Inge Christensen (Greifswald) – opponent Bo Petersson (Malmö)
Visions of Western depravity and bourgeois hedonism in a post-soviet setting

Elisabeth Heigl (Greifswald) – opponent Andreas Önnerfors (Malmö)
Incompetent professors? The deconstruction of the economic autonomy of the University of Greifswald in the second half of the 18th century

Mihkel Mäesalu (Tartu) – opponent Mathias Niendorf (Greifswald)
Livonia’s (un)involvement in the Hussite Wars (1419-1434). The reaction of an established borderland to the emergence of a new enemy in “the centre”

Cynthia Osiecki (Greifswald) – opponent Anti Selart (Tartu)
Hells angels or the devil for dummies? Depictions of hell in medieval sculpture

13:15 – Panel IV
Discussant and Chair Jan-Henrik Nilsson (Lund)

Maare Paloheimo (Greifswald)
The emergence and assimilation of Rus-sian-born businessmen in early-nineteenth-century Finland

Sebastian Nickel (Greifswald)
The mercurial monster: Re-bordering migration routes from Sub-Sahara Africa to the EU

Matthias Müller (Greifswald)
The monsters of luck: Lottery as a threat to the traditional order in the eighteenth century

Nicholas Prindiville (Helsinki/London/Greifswald)
Finland's 'Trolls': Johan Bäckman and the Finnish Anti-Fascist Committee as Dissidents of Finnish Historiography

Closing Remarks (Stephan Kessler (Greifswald))

Kontakt

Alexander Drost

IRTG Baltic Borderlands/ Historisches Institut
Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität
+49 (0) 3834 863341

alexander.drost@uni-greifswald.de

http://www.phil.uni-greifswald.de/fk/borderlands.html