Constructive Advanced Thinking (CAT)

The ageing of the world's population is accompanied by an increase in comorbidities and disabilities. This leads to the need for long-term care in nursing homes, which report alarming levels of depressive symptomatology. Professionals in these institutions also report existential difficulties experienced by their residents.
No studies are currently available on the subject. This interdisciplinary project therefore fills this gap by clarifying the relationship between geriatric depressive symptoms and existential concerns, with the aim to develop the psycho-educational training of nursing home care professionals.

Over the last decade, the transitional past has been increasingly instrumentalized, by national-populist actors and in the counter-memories of their opponents. In the context of heated contestations of memory, with high political stakes, spaces for dialogue are rapidly shrinking and public spheres are becoming increasingly ‘disconnected.’

Project activities (last update: October 2022):

• Events organized at the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk (in collaboration with the Centre)
• Film screening and discussion: Crystal Swan (2018, dir. Daria Zhuk), 30 September 2022
• Discussion about the experiences and memories of postsocialist transition, and their mediation, in Belarus and Poland with Kacper Dziekan, Sviatlana Rasliakova and Magda Szczesniak, moderated by Agnieszka Mrozik and Andrei Zavadski
• Workshop with people living in Gdańsk "What does the turn of the 1980-90s mean to you?", 1 October 2022

Project presentations 

• June 2021: project presentation at the Zukunftskolleg, Konstanz, June 2021 
• December 2021: meeting and discussion with the Gemeinsinn group, University of Konstanz, (organized and chaired by Gruia Badescu)
• February 2022: project presentaiton at IAS CEU 

Publications

Robbe, Ksenia and Andrei Zavadski. “‘C’mon, Turn Swan Lake on’: Memories of the 1990s at the Belarusian Protests of 2020.” Digital Icons (special issue on the Belarusian protests). Accepted, forthcoming 2022. 

Organized panels/ calls for papers

Call for papers: Dialogic Memories of the 1970-90s Transitions Across the World: Current Practices and Possible Solidarities (the Memory Studies Association 2022 online conference)

 The project addresses this societal issue by engaging with memory practices of the ‘transitional period’ beyond the polarized versions. Drawing on approaches of cultural analysis of discourse and affect, critical memory studies, public history, (digital) ethnography, and intersectional study of gender and generations, we aim to develop strategies for facilitating more cohesive and at the same time more critical practices of remembering that have the potential to lead to dialogue and form reflective communities. The comparative approach will allow for developing strategies and policies on a transnational (European) level based on trans-local resonances rather than top-down scripts.

 The participation of the NGO Dekabristen e.V., Berlin, and close collaboration with the European Solidarity Center in Gdańsk and the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center in Yekaterinburg will facilitate the execution of empirical research and its translation into concrete policy recommendations.

Light exposure is a key driver for synchronising rhythms in our bodies and brains with the external 24-hour light-dark cycle. In turn, light exposure at the wrong biological time of day can disrupt our inner clock and lead to sleep loss, which has knock-on effects on our physical and mental health and well-being. Additionally, light is important for normal development of the eye, with low levels of light exposure being associated with myopia. With increasing knowledge from basic laboratory findings on the wide-reaching effects of light exposure on human health and well-being, it is time to apply this knowledge to the real world, guiding policymakers and other stakeholders. In this interdisciplinary NETIAS CAT project, five internationally recognised early-career scientists come together to address these topics, with a view to (1) develop a unified scientific framework for understanding effects of light exposure on human health and well-being, (2) develop strategies for making the existing and future scientific evidence base as robust as possible and (3) will develop strategies to communicate the complex scientific knowledge to different audiences.

ENLIGHT will ensure a comprehensive and standardized reporting of light characteristics across research using light as intervention. ENLIGHT will be developed in accordance with the EQUATOR toolkit for developing a reporting guideline (https://www.equator-network.org/) through a modified Delphi consensus process consisting of 1) a pre-round where the project team went through a literature review, identifies a set of potential reporting-related items and a group of participants with established track record in light-based interventions; 2) four feedback rounds (three questionnaire-based and one face to face discussion).

Due to its inherent ambiguity and elusiveness, humor can make it particularly difficult to tell where someone’s ‘right to offend’ starts, and someone else’s ‘right not to be offended’ begins. The challenge is even more evident in the case of cartoons, whose high degree of implicitness and condensation can further contribute to blurring the line between lawful and unlawful humor. Significantly, cartoons have been at the center of several legal debates and court litigations in recent years, from the Muhammad cartoon controversy of 2005-2006 to the ongoing lawsuits against Charlie Hebdo.

These legal controversies are particularly topical in the digital age, where potentially offensive material can easily obtain global exposure, often beyond its original context and intention. The juridical problems raised by controversial cartoons are still largely unsolved, with judges finding themselves without solid legal ground when dealing with conflicting interpretations of the same ambiguous cartoon. Such issues clearly pose a crucial test for the democratic negotiation of freedom of expression. Yet, despite their urgency, the following questions remain unanswered by scholars, policy makers and practitioners: How can judges deal with the ambiguity of offensive cartoons? How can a distinction be made between ‘reasonable’ interpretations and contrived misreadings?

Cartoons in Court brings together scholars and stakeholders with the aim to tackle these questions by implementing an unprecedented synergy between humor studies and legal scholarship.

Populist forces have recently transformed the political landscape in Europe, challenging the legitimacy of institutions and representational systems. Frequently aligned with reactionary – sometimes explicitly post-fascist – platforms, these actors emphasize ethnonationalist and exclusionary societal views. The mainstream media, politicians, and migrants are demonized, and mistrust in the system is a widely circulated currency. Affect plays a central role in the success of this worldview – such as anger at perceived victimization and loss of social status, resentment against elites, and attachment to leaders who “bravely” defy political correctness. Populist affect is now also inseparable from our digital media environment; while citizen access to political discourse has grown, their interactions are increasingly shaped by their respective ideological and affective communities.

Narrative work is a crucial element of populist mobilization, yet the role of audiovisual fiction in these processes remains significantly understudied: grasping this relationship is necessary to disentangle populisms’ capacity to transform affect into democratic erosion. From the citizen’s perspective, political affect and audiovisual fiction spread through an uninterrupted flow – but due to disciplinary fragmentation, scholarship often tackles isolated parts of the experience and misses the whole picture. The project aims to trace and re-connect the different dimensions of the process, by analyzing narrative and stylistic aspects of films and TV series in a number of Western European countries, tracing their reception, interactions, and appropriations in social media content and online political conversations. The project will focus on the impact and circulation of key case studies in a number of Western European countries between the onset of the 2008 financial crisis and Brexit. The collaboration of scholars in film, TV, digital media, and political sciences, as well as two organizations working in political participation and in media literacy (SALTO Participation & Information; Media & Learning Association), will enable a better understanding of the role of fiction in creating and spreading populist affect in this political conjuncture.