Ukrainian-German-Polish moving seminar 2015

Borders and encounters between people, goods, cultures and knowledge along the via regia

The aim of the project is to promote an intercultural dialogue and a mutual understanding. We emphasize on the perspective of ‚borderwork‘ and carry on discussions with actors in the fields of civil society, politics, economy and science, who shift, erase or even perpetuate borders.

(1) Participants should expand their competences in confidence, understanding and long-lasting structures of cooperation between future decision-makers and multipliers from Ukraine, Germany and Poland through discussions with others and through discussions about demarcation and exchange processes.

(2) The project is intended to impart knowledge about possibilities and current examples of abolishing borders through citizens and civil society actors. The aim is to show students and citizens opportunities of action and perspectives for common pluralist and democratic actions across national boundaries.

(3) The dialog should advance one another's understanding and provide a decisive impulse for cross-border exchange, setting up further projects and partnerships- both in Ukraine and countries of the European Union. Furthermore the dialog should provide an impulse from Lwiw to other parts of Ukraine to stabilize democratic structures.

(4) The intention by this event - with academic, governmental and civil society actors - is to create a permanent network for the development of democratic structures, stabilizing democratic structures as well as a permanent exchange within the network.

Organization Einklappen

Prof. Dr. Martin Doevenspeck (Bayreuth, Chair of Political Geography)

His research interests are embedded at the interfaces between political and social geography in the context of developing countries. The focus of his researches are risk and disasters, society-environment relations (politics of climate change, environmental governance), political geography of Africa (violent conflict, territoriality, borders) and migration and mobility.

The geographical area is west- and central Africa. Especially in West Africa Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali and Senegal; in Central Africa Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.

Prof. Dr. Matthew Hannah (Bayreuth, Chair of Cultural Geography)

Prof. Hannah has taught and conducted research for 20 years, first in the US (University of Vermont), then in the UK (Aberystwyth University), and, since September 2013, at the University of Bayreuth. His interests range across historical geography, political geography, critical human-geographic theory, and include regional specializations in the USA and Germany. Research projects carried out to date have revolved around two questions: (1) how geographically organised state knowledge (censuses, trade statistics, etc.) came to form a fundamental infrastructure for modern "arts of government", and, turning the first question around, (2) which sorts of spatial power relations have made possible (and what forms of resistance have hindered or altered) the development of such modern knowledge-infrastructures.

In his position at Bayreuth, Prof. Hannah intends to maintian but widen these concerns, taking in as well broader processes of cross-border migration, transformation and translation of ideas (for example, in the case of German "Ordoliberal" economic thought in the mid-20th century), as well as a study of his home town Washington DC as a multi-scalar political "space of exception", in which the entire range of modern spatial power relations intertwine to form a complex material and symbolic place.

Nicolai Teufel (Bayreuth, Chair of Cultural Geography)

His research interests are embedded at the interfaces between social, political and historical problems emerging in border studies of Central and Eastern Europe, especially along the German-Polish border. In the context of researching and teaching, conceptions of territory, state, nation and culture become important as analytical frameworks for socio-political processes but also for practices of everyday life. Social realities showing the perpetuation and subversion of these concepts are strongly emphasized. He uses a rather holistic ethnographically-inspired approach, which lays emphasis on the interdependences between processes in political and civil society, European Integration, constructions of cultural identity, and territorial self-location (“Territoriale Verortung”). Borderwork, the shifting, construction and reconstruction of borders, is thereby shown to be inseparably linked to the historicity of these processes. Essential for his research is a trans-disciplinary understanding of scholarship aimed at dealing with complex problems relevant for society by linking research questions strongly with concrete results.

Dr. Vasyl Myronyuk (Lwiw, Lviv Institute of Management)

Vasyl Myronyuk is prorector for science and teaching at the Lviv Institute of Management. He is interested in the diverse aspects of cooperation between the European Union and Ukraine in order to analyse and solve central socio-economic challanges. Especially in the fields of law and the protection of environment, election geographies and labour markets. He has led numerous Ukrainian-German projects in the field of students exchange and visited various German universities. Since 2015 he is founder and head of the "Ukranian-German Centre" at the Lviv Institute of Management.

Additional lecturers during the project:

Dr. Evgenia Bystrov (Bayreuth, Social Geography), Dr. Iryna Vanda (Lwiw, Social and Economic Geography), Prof. Dr. Myron Yankiv (Lwiw, Director of Lviv Institute of Management)
Student assistants: Barbara Demeterova (M.Sc. Human Geography), Sabine Völkl (M.Sc. Human Geography), Benedikt Fink (B.Sc. Geography), Marco Teufel (M.Sc. Economics)

Program Einklappen