HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Sociology cordially invites you to the following event: 

 

Michal Frankl: East-Central Europe as a Place of Refuge

 

Date: 13:00, 26th of September

 

Venue: HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Sociology 1097 Budapest Tóth Kálmán utca 4.;  B.1.15 meeting room

Lecturer: Michal Frankl (BIO) (Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences)

Discussants: Róza Vajda (HUN-REN TK KDK); Veronika Kaszás (Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences) 

Abstract

The presentation will share the research conducted as a part of the ERC Consolidator project Unlikely Refuge? Refugees and Citizens in East-Central Europe in the 20th Century (www.unlikely-refuge.eu). The project aims to write refugees back into the history of  region which is often considered a place to leave rather than to search refuge in. The project team has been probing the interactions of civil societies, humanitarian organisations and nation-states with refugees in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and their successor states in the 20th century.

After introducing the project and its results so far, we will discuss our research about the role of refugees and refugee policies in the process of post-communist transformation. The project recorded oral history interviews with humanitarians and state officials in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic and collected other documentation. We will detail the research questions and share the first, preliminary results of a comparative perspective on refugees as a part of the political, social, economic and cultural changes in these three countries.