[spectre] Media Globalization and Post-Communist European Identities (Modified by Geert Lovink)

[asca-fgw]

Central European University Summer University: Media Globalization and 
Post-Communist European Identities      
July 2 - 13, 2007      

Course coordinator: Huub van Baar

Co-sponsored by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, 
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, ASCA.

Course directors: Aniko Imre, University of Southern California, John 
Neubauer, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Ginette Verstraete, 
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands     

Faculty:  Andaluna Borcila, Michigan State University, Humanities, 
Culture and Writing, US Aida Hozic, University of Florida, Political 
Science, US Slawomir Kapralski, The Centre for Social Studies, Poland 
Lisa Parks, University of California, Film Studies, US Miklos Sukosd, 
Cental European University, Hungary

website:   <http://www.sun.ceu.hu/3Courses/courses.php>.

The course examines the transformation of identities in the former 
socialist region in the wake of the transition from state-controlled 
cultures to those permeated by global multimedia practices. Issues of 
political and cultural representation, the role of different 
technologies in identity constitution and social control, historical 
legacies and aesthetic questions will be addressed as integral parts of 
the same problematic rather than as issues to be examined within 
particular disciplinary confines.

Bringing together specific case studies and a multi-disciplinary 
theoretical apparatus, we ask how the post-socialist, globalizing order 
has produced needs and opportunities for creating new modes of 
transnational culture beyond the nation and its ethnic, sexual and 
religious exclusions. In addition, we will explore how the region's 
post-Soviet geopolitical reconstitution and the politics of the EU's 
enlargement have resulted in new migrations and diasporic formations 
and have solidified or contested actual and metaphorical borders within 
the new Europe. The course also provides an introduction to a range of 
research foci and methodologies related to globalization and the media 
across the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, including 
cultural geography, history, comparative cultural studies, film and 
media studies, anthropology and sociology.

We welcome advanced graduate students and researchers in the humanities 
and social sciences who intend to pursue comparative, interdisciplinary 
research on globalization, identities and the media with a geographical 
emphasis on the post-communist transitions, European integration, or 
the cultural and political role of the United States in current 
European economic, political and cultural transformations. We also 
intend to facilitate future networking and publish selected papers 
resulting from the course in a book collection and/or special issue of 
a journal.