Life-changing technological innovation is advancing at an often unpredictable pace. Liberalism is under sustained attack, as is faith in basic scientific principles. Compassion is increasingly displaced by brutal transactional values. Can humanity remain human under such strenuous circumstances? The Vienna Humanities Festival will invite the public to reflect with intellectuals, scientists, writers, and artists.

Renowned French sociologist and author Didier Eribon returns to the questions at the heart of his book The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman (Semiotext(e), 2025). Invoking the condition of elderly individuals who have lost their physical autonomy, and with it the capacity to participate in political mobilization, Eribon explores the broader issue of political voice and visibility: what conditions determine who is able to speak out politically?

After the talk, Eribon will be in conversation with Ivan Krastev, IWM Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow.

The world of academic scholarship and science is currently undergoing significant change — in terms of organization, funding structures, mobility, and forms of collaboration. Questions around academic freedom and integrity are being reshaped in many regions, and Institutes for Advanced Study, are facing new challenges as well as new responsibilities. The symposium will reflect on these developments and explore how IASs can remain resilient, relevant, and responsive in supporting curiosity-driven research beyond institutional and disciplinary boundaries.

Six fellows working on Arts & Sciences/ Artistic Research projects and coming from five different Institutes for Advanced Study all over Europe share the thoughts and insights of their three-day common reflexion at HIAS:

• Wulan Dirgantoro (HIAS, Hambourg)
• Clemens Krauss (ZiF, Bielefeld)
• Massimo Leone (HIAS, Hambourg)
• Alex South (IASH, Edimbourg)
• Rania Stephan (Iméra, Marseille)
• Jason Waite (HCAS, Helsinki)

• Rossella Alba Group on "Controversial tools: researching modelling practices in water governance"
  Hosting IAS: Mak’it, SCAS , Paris, NIAS
   
• Allassonnière-Tang Group on "Unraveling the interactions between culture and language: Does grammatical gender foster gender inequality and vice versa? "
  Hosting IAS:  Paris, IIAS, MIAS, HIAS, Zukunftskolleg, NIAS
   
• Lemoine-Schonne Group on " Metamorphoses of Law(s)?  A critical exploration of planetary boundaries and their meaning for the law relating to the environment "
  Hosting IAS: Paris, IIAS, Mak’it, TURIN , NIAS, CEU
   
• Kathryn Roberts Group on "A Transformation Framework for Artist Residencies, based on Internal Critiques, Alternative Histories, and Emerging Practices "
  Hosting IAS: MIAS (Twice) , Mak’it, HIAS

For more information on the programme, please check the dedicated page.

The European Institutes for Advanced Study (EURIAS) recently convened in the picturesque city of Konstanz for their annual meeting, a gathering designed to strengthen cooperation and foster intellectual exchange among its member institutions. This meeting served as a vital platform for scholars and researchers to share insights, explore collaborative opportunities, and address the challenges and successes of their respective projects. The event underscored the importance of interdisciplinary cooperation in driving innovation and advancing knowledge across various fields of study.

During the meeting, participants delved into discussions on a range of initiatives under the Netias umbrella, showcasing both new and ongoing projects. One of the highlights was the Constructive Advanced Thinking (CAT) programme, which aims to promote innovative and forward-thinking research. The CAT programme encourages scholars to tackle complex issues with creative and unconventional approaches, fostering a culture of intellectual risk-taking and exploration. Additionally, the meeting featured updates on the Netias Debates series, a platform for rigorous academic discourse on pressing contemporary issues. These debates provide a space for diverse perspectives to engage in dialogue, enriching the scholarly community and contributing to the development of new ideas and solutions.

Moreover, the annual meeting provided an opportunity for members to engage in various working groups focused on themes of common interest. These groups serve as incubators for collaborative research, allowing scholars to pool their expertise and resources to address shared challenges. By fostering such collaborations, the European Institutes for Advanced Study aim to amplify the impact of their research, driving progress in areas such as social sciences, humanities, and beyond. The meeting in Konstanz reaffirmed the commitment of EURIAS members to pushing the boundaries of knowledge and promoting a culture of intellectual curiosity and cooperation.

DATE: Thursday, 22 June 11:00 – 13:00
LOCATION: Budapest, Nador 15 Room 101 (Quantum room)

Societies in European cities are faced with environmental problems related to air and water quality, biodiversity loss, and advancing climate change. At the same time cities need to tackle socio-economic issues such as social cohesion and justice or the transition to sustainable mobility systems. All these challenges place complex demands on the design, use and functionality of urban space and infrastructures. Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are expected to play a major role in solving these issues through a redefinition and amplification of their multi-functionality in urban areas. i.e. the potential of vegetation to cool urban areas. Our Constructive Advanced Thinking network “reshape cities” combines knowledge from civil engineering, geography, architecture, landscape architecture and social sciences that needs to be combined for such complex challenges. Based on case studies, we will cross current knowledge frontiers regarding key issues of upscaling and mainstreaming of NbS and develop innovative ideas for improved multi-functionality, integral cost-benefit sharing and diverse stakeholder engagement. Our individual research’s foci are applied in an integrated manner to different case study cities at different spatial scales. By connecting our different schools of thought, we develop diverse kinds of knowledge required for socio-ecological transformations: technical knowledge (evidence base for NbS functionality / efficiency); policy knowledge (governance tools and strategies for upscaling green infrastructure); and transformative knowledge (leverage points, transformative actions and methods). The integration of these knowledge dimensions across case studies (e.g. with different climatological, political, social contexts) and spatial scales (building - neighborhood - city-wide-level) will be conceptually addressed and result in policy recommendations regarding the upscaling and mainstreaming of NbS in European cities.

Speakers:

• Principal Investigator Prof. Maria Manso, Lusófona University, Lisbon, Portugal
• Prof. Rieke Hansen, Geisenheim University, Germany
• Andrea Nóblega Carriquiry, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
• Manuel Beißler, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany

Further information on the project
Further information on the CAT programme

Within recent discussions of sovereignty, the multiplication of borders and borderlands has become a major research topic in anthropology. Europe is one of the main targets of this scholarly investigation but all anthropological literature on European borders reinforcement has been dedicated to continental Europe and the rim of the Mediterranean Sea. In this presentation Catherine Benoit will argue that the borderlands of “Fortress Europe” are instead located far from the shores of the Mediterranean, the Channel or the land border with Turkey, and are made of the French overseas departments of the Caribbean and the Indian ocean. They are the invisible buffer zones of France and the European Union on the edge of the former French colonial empire, not only in a geographical sense but also in a historical one.

Irina Nicorici’s contribution will focus on the history of human movements on the easternmost periphery of Europe, along its borders with the erstwhile USSR. For this event, we will set aside the conventional assumption that these borders were impenetrable during the Cold War and will instead examine how some migrants crossed them. Drawing on new archival evidence, this presentation advances the following argument: Migration towards the Soviet Union heavily depended on interpersonal connections rather than formal state authority. Public officials elevated intimate, informally driven sponsorship relations above all other factors as critical for residency and citizenship status acquisition, thus radically reshaping mobility and the welfare state. 

On the basis of an ethnographic, longitudinal study with Senegalese migrants (mainly men) in Catalonia, Spain, María Hernández-Carretero will discuss bordering experiences of migrants in situations of chronic and cyclical administrative irregularity. She examines how borderscapes – spaces of hierarchization, exclusion, racism, and persecution – are built and maintained well beyond Europe’s actual borders, and how migrants manage and resist the chronification (in the sense of becoming entrenched) and societal normalisation of irregularity. Hernández-Carretero analyses these intranational dynamics applying Mbembe’s concept of ‘necropolitics’ – the politics that dictate who may live and die (and how) –, a concept that has typically been used to examine dynamics of migrant exclusion at nation states’ physical territorial borders.

Speakers:

• María Hernández Carretero, MIAS fellow, Madrid 
  Anthropologist and migration researcher, with a background in sociology and international development and peace studies
• Irina Nicorici, New Europe College fellow, Bucharest 
  Sociologist working on Migrations between Romania and the Soviet Union, 1960-1990
• Catherine Benoit, IMéRA fellow, Marseille 
  Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, Connecticut College