On 26 September 2024 at 1 p.m. CET, Michal Frankl will give a presentation entitled East-Central Europe as a Place of Refuge at the HUN-REN Social Sciences Research Center, Institute of Sociology, in Budapest, Hungary. Róza Vajda (HUN-REN TK KDK) and Veronika Kaszás (Unlikely Refuge?) will assume the role of discussants.
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.
For the invitation, please visit the official website.
