Connectivity and Change Regimes, Conflicts and Revolutions in Global Perspectives

June 30, 2016 - July 02, 2016

Ghent, Belgium

Organized by the European Network of Universal and Global History, Ghent Centre for Global Studies, Ghent University History Department, International Research Centre „Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History“ (re:work), labex TransferS (ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL* et ANR-10-LABX-0099), and the Graduate School ‘Global and Area Studies’, Leipzig University.

> Details on dedicated website

About ten years ago historians began to open up to encounters across borders and entanglements between far-flung parts of the word. Now a lively research on transnational, transregional, world and global history topics exists, which is not only done by senior scholars but also by an ever increasing number of doctoral students. In that course connectivity has become a category for describing and explaining the past, of individual societies as well as of large-scale processes playing out at different places.

The European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH) is happy to introduce – in addition to its regular congresses (the last in Paris in 2014, the coming in Budapest in 2017) – a summer school for PhD students and welcomes the opportunity to organize it together with well-known research institutes from across Europe and this time in conjunction with the meeting of the World History Association in Gent in early July 2016.

The summer school takes up on the above-mentioned trend and addresses one particular aspect, namely the role of actors and interactions in social and political change. To study the destabilization of existing orders in times of globalization asks for a reflection from different angles, including conflict-fraught transformations in urban settings and the countryside, conversions of socio-economic configurations and labour regimes as well as revolutionary changes of political orders and its various ways of legitimization. We invite doctoral students to present on-going research dealing with connections between changes in different places and societies, including :

• the spread and circulation of ideas, vocabulary and practices that seek to alter political structures, legal frameworks and global hierarchies of power
• the cross-references to earlier conflicts and revolutions and the transnational construction of traditions of social and political struggle
• the interrelation of global / foreign and domestic causes, with its related processes of adaptation and appropriation
• the description and comparison of different cultures of protest, of different attitudes and experiences of conflict and revolutionary change
• the identification of actors and groups of actors, who to built up and used entanglements for their purposes, including their capacity to mitigate between different spaces of action and to construct transnational and transregional visions of global reference and connectivity
• and the cross-border effects of social conflicts and revolutions, including the de- and re-stabilization of existing order (state-building processes and global regulation).

Over all the summer school offers an environment to discuss in-depth methodological and interpretative issues of writing connected histories of conflicts and revolutions. Panels will be mixed, composed of doctoral students presenting their works and of senior scholars commenting and introducing the related larger historiographical debates.

Following the summer school participants can attend and profit from the 25th Annual Conference of the World History Association taking place in Ghent July 2-5 2016, which has chosen as its main themes “Global Conflict” and “Transformation of the Global Countryside”.

The Call is open to PhD-students from history and related disciplines, who work in the interdisciplinary field of writing connected stories and histories of conflict.

The language of presentations will be English but papers in French or German are possible as well. Participants are expected to present a paper of 6-8000 words length as the basis for discussion with the whole group.