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The Russian war against Ukraine resulted in a massive displacement of Ukrainian scholars and increasing attempts to make knowledge on Ukraine. At the same time a discussion emerged about the persons who could legitimately claim expertise... more
The Russian war against Ukraine resulted in a massive displacement of Ukrainian scholars and increasing attempts to make knowledge on Ukraine. At the same time a discussion emerged about the persons who could legitimately claim expertise about the country. The figure of the expert has oscillated between the “native informants,” whose legitimacy came from their local knowledge, and “Westsplainers,” whose local expertise was questionable. Acknowledging that the question of legitimacy is also a question about the situatedness of knowledge, we propose to investigate practices of knowledge making on the Ukrainian lands, its inhabitants and its recent history, with a focus on the interwar period.

World War I put Ukraine on the mental maps of Europe, both as an imagined construct and as a body of separate political entities. Ukraine appeared on maps and in international debates, and Ukrainian intellectuals were visible like never before due to the global interest in the region and their political impetus to legitimize their own knowledge on Ukraine. After the Great War, the displacement of scholars and politicians increased their entanglements with non-Ukrainian institutions and scholars all over Europe.

At the end of WWI, the imagined Ukrainian lands were integrated as new regions into various states. In the interwar decades they remained a subject of intensified interest in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union. Inquiries involved a range of actors apart from professional academics, such as officials, citizen scientists, entrepreneurs, teachers, travel authors, translators, memoirists, and photographers. Whether minorities or émigrés, Ukrainian intellectuals were subjected to power relations and often violence, which also limited their possibilities to become part of official discourses about the regions of their origins. The attitude towards them ranged from active cooperation to complete ignorance, often in reciprocity with ideologies and loyalties to state-building, nation-building or geopolitical projects.

We invite you to discuss, among others, the following questions with us:

    How was Ukraine made (in)visible in different political settings during the interwar period?
    How could Ukrainians influence or establish legitimate knowledge on Ukraine and Ukrainians outside of national circles? Which transnational and transregional networks provided Ukrainians with new possibilities and opportunities?
    Who were other actors producing or contesting this knowledge? Which conflict lines arose here, especially beyond the political ones?How did epistemologies of Ukrainian Studies (Ukrainoznavstvo) change since the outbreak of World War I, and how did they influence processes of knowledge-making?
    How did Ukrainians produce and institutionalize knowledge on the most recent history, particularly on the period of 1914-1923?
    How did hierarchies in different state/local/regional settings influence the circumstances of knowledge production on Ukraine?
    How was knowledge on Ukraine obliterated or unmade? Which counter-narratives to Ukrainian approaches were established, and how were they institutionalized? How was ignorance towards Ukraine produced? What forms of violence were instrumentalized to suppress the perspectives of a “national minority”?
Combining history of science and a history of universities with the new imperial history, Universities in Imperial Austria 1848–1918: A Social History of a Multilingual Space by Jan Surman analyzes the practice of scholarly migration and... more
Combining history of science and a history of universities with the new imperial history, Universities in Imperial Austria 1848–1918: A Social History of a Multilingual Space by Jan Surman analyzes the practice of scholarly migration and its lasting influence on the intellectual output in the Austrian part of the Habsburg Empire.
The Habsburg Empire and its successor states were home to developments that shaped Central Europe's scholarship well into the twentieth century. Universities became centers of both state- and nation-building, as well as of confessional resistance, placing scholars if not in conflict, then certainly at odds with the neutral international orientation of academe.
By going beyond national narratives, Surman reveals the Empire as a state with institutions divided by language but united by legislation, practices, and other influences. Such an approach allows readers a better view to how scholars turned gradually away from state-centric discourse to form distinct language communities after 1867; these influences affected scholarship, and by examining the scholarly record, Surman tracks the turn.
Drawing on archives in Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Ukraine, Surman analyzes the careers of several thousand scholars from the faculties of philosophy and medicine of a number of Habsburg universities, thus covering various moments in the history of the Empire for the widest view. Universities in Imperial Austria 1848–1918 focuses on the tension between the political and linguistic spaces scholars occupied and shows that this tension did not lead to a gradual dissolution of the monarchy’s academia, but rather to an ongoing development of new strategies to cope with the cultural and linguistic multitude.
This book is the first to trace the origins and significance of positivism on a global scale. Taking their cues from Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, positivists pioneered a universal, experience-based culture of scientific inquiry for... more
This book is the first to trace the origins and significance of positivism on a global scale. Taking their cues from Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, positivists pioneered a universal, experience-based culture of scientific inquiry for studying nature and society—a new science that would enlighten all of humankind. Positivists envisaged one world united by science, but their efforts spawned many. Uncovering these worlds of positivism, the volume ranges from India, the Ottoman Empire, and the Iberian Peninsula to Central Europe, Russia, and Brazil, examining positivism's impact as one of the most far-reaching intellectual movements of the modern world. Positivists reinvented science, claiming it to be distinct from and superior to the humanities. They predicated political governance on their refashioned science of society, and as political activists, they sought and often failed to reconcile their universalism with the values of multiculturalism. Providing a genealogy of scientific governance that is sorely needed in an age of post-truth politics, this volume breaks new ground in the fields of intellectual and global history, the history of science, and philosophy.
Heft 4/2016 der Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung
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Language is the most essential medium of scientific activity. Many historians, sociologists and science studies scholars have investigated scientific language for this reason, but only few have examined those cases where language itself... more
Language is the most essential medium of scientific activity. Many historians, sociologists and science studies scholars have investigated scientific language for this reason, but only few have examined those cases where language itself has become an object of scientific discussion. Over the centuries scientists have sought to control, refine and engineer language for various epistemological, communicative and nationalistic purposes. This book seeks to explore cases in the history of science in which questions or concerns with language have bubbled to the surface in scientific discourse. This opens a window into the particular ways in which scientists have conceived of and construed language as the central medium of their activity across different cultural contexts and places, and the clashes and tensions that have manifested their many attempts to engineer it to both preserve and enrich its function. The subject of language draws out many topics that have mostly been neglected in the history of science, such as the connection between the emergence of national languages and the development of science within national settings, and allows us to connect together historical episodes from many understudied cultural and linguistic venues such as Eastern European and medieval Hebrew science.
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This volume challenges the common belief that scientific knowledge is international. Employing case studies from Austria, Poland, the Czech lands, and Hungary, the authors show how scientists in the late Habsburg Monarchy confronted the... more
This volume challenges the common belief that scientific knowledge is international. Employing case studies from Austria, Poland, the Czech lands, and Hungary, the authors show how scientists in the late Habsburg Monarchy confronted the problem of simultaneously nationalizing and internationalizing their knowledge in a multi-national empire during the 'age of nationalism'. The case studies go beyond traditional emphasis on history, ethnology or other 'national' disciplines, ranging from chemistry and physics to natural history, geology, seismology, surgery, linguistics and eugenics, focusing inter alia on scientific terminology in various national languages, supra-national networks of observation or data gathering, language issues in science education, and research practices in cross-national comparison.
Czym jest i po co epistemologia historyczna? To pytanie stawia sobie w książce jeden z najważniejszych autorów tego podejścia do historii nauki, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. W pierwszej części autor przedstawia historyzowanie epistemologii od... more
Czym jest i po co epistemologia historyczna? To pytanie stawia sobie w książce jeden z najważniejszych autorów tego podejścia do historii nauki, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. W pierwszej części autor przedstawia historyzowanie epistemologii od Emila Du Bois-Reymonda poprzez Michela Foucaulta po Bruno Latoura. W drugiej egzemplifikuje swoje podejście do epistemologii historycznej na przykładach z historii biologii. Najważniejsze pojęcia tej pracy to system eksperymentalny i rzeczy epistemiczne, a tematy sięgają od mikrostruktur eksperymentów z tumorem kur po typologie wizualizacji w naukach przyrodniczych.
Research Interests:
The current issue of Historyka, guest edited by Klemens Kaps and Jan Surman, is devoted to postcolonial studies, a relatively new approach in cultural-historical theories. From a broad range of perspectives covering a number of... more
The current issue of Historyka, guest edited by Klemens Kaps and Jan  Surman, is devoted to postcolonial studies, a relatively new approach in cultural-historical theories. From a broad range of perspectives covering a number of disciplines, authors exemplify the approach based on  Habsburg Galicia, its culture, literature, economy and also the historical  memory
of the region stretched between Cracow and L’viv.
The volume proposes a new perspective on the interrelation between the social, political, cultural and economical inequalities in this  pluricultural and multireligious region. Although as a part of the Habsburg Empire Galicia was not a “colonial space” in the classic sense, the  postcolonial approach enables the historian’s gaze to focus on the relationships between cultures in an imperial setting, opening new perspectives for the study of continental empires in the 19th/20th centuries.

Contents:
Klemens Kaps, Jan Surman
Postcolonial or Post-colonial? Post(-)colonial Perspectives on Habsburg Galicia.....................................7
Franz Leander Fillafer
The “Imperial Idea” and Civilising Missions...........................................................................................37
Christoph Augustynowicz
Blutsaugen als othering oder Reiseerfahrungen aus dem Galizien des 18. Jahrhunderts.
Einige Beobachtungen zu Postkolonialismus und Vampir(ismus)-Diskurs............................................61
Ewa Thompson
Stefan Żeromski’s Ashes as a Postcolonial Narrative..............................................................................77
Klemens Kaps
Kulturelle Differenzen des Ökonomischen: Galizische Entwicklungsdiskurse im Spannungsfeld
räumlicher Funktionalisierung und sozialer Bruchlinien (1772-1848) .................................................97
Danuta Sosnowska
Limitations and Opportunities of Postcolonial Criticism.....................................................................117
Andriy Zayarniuk
Empire, Peasants, National Movements – Galician Postcolonial Triangle? .........................................133
Jan Surman:
Symbolism, Communication and Cultural Hierarchy. Galician Discourses of Language
Hegemony at the Beginning of the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.................................................................................................................................................151
Burkhard Wöller
Zivilisierungsmission oder Fremdherrschaft? Die Annexion Rotreußens unter Kasimir III.
im kolonialistischen Diskurs polnischer und ruthenischer Historiker im österreichischen Galizien................................................................................................................................................175
Stefan Simonek
Franko, Mickiewicz, Bahr – Spielarten galizischer Subalternität um 1900..........................................195
Angelique Leszczawski-Schwerk
Juden und Jüdinnen als Postkoloniale Subjekte im Spannungsfeld frauenemanzipatorischer
Bestrebungen (1890 -1914) im österreichischen Galizien ..............................................................213
Dietlind Hüchtker
Rückständigkeit, Fortschritt und Geschichte. Die Rhetorik der
Frauenpolitik am Beispiel Galiziens.....................................................................................................231
Wiktoria Kudela-Świątek, Adam Świątek
The trap of colonialism...The Ukrainians of Eastern Galicia - colonised or colonisers?.......................257
Notes on Authors............................................................................................................................289
Nowy numer "Historyki" jest poświęcony badaniom postkolonialnym habsburskiej Galicji. Do przygotowania tomu zaprosiliśmy Klemensa Kapsa i Jana Surmana, którzy zakończyli pracę nad nim w 2011 roku. Autorzy obecnego tomu XLII ―... more
Nowy numer "Historyki" jest poświęcony badaniom postkolonialnym
habsburskiej Galicji. Do przygotowania tomu zaprosiliśmy Klemensa Kapsa
i Jana Surmana, którzy zakończyli pracę nad nim w 2011 roku.
Autorzy obecnego tomu XLII ― literaturoznawcy, kulturoznawcy, historycy ―
podjęli się trudnego zadania przyjrzenia się historii Galicji z perspektywy badań
postkolonialnych.Proponują nowe ujęcie występujących w tym regionie
społecznych, politycznych, kulturalnych i ekonomicznych form zależności. Chociaż
jako część państwa habsburskiego Galicja nie była "przestrzenią kolonialną"
w klasycznym rozumieniu tego pojęcia, podejście postkolonialne pozwala
historykowi uchwycić relacje pomiędzy zamieszkującymi ją społecznościami
i imperialnym centrum oraz otwiera nowe perspektywy dla badań nad imperiami
europejskimi w XIX i XX stuleciu.
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