Transnational Ecologies Project

The Flying University of Transnational Humanities (FUTH) is an annual summer school for graduate students and young scholars interested in the transnational paradigm of humanistic inquiry. FUTH takes its name and immediate inspiration from Poland's Flying University, an underground institution that offered an alternative education outside the confines of state control and government censorship. The program is particularly concerned with developing critical understandings that resist the ideological and conceptual hegemony of the nation-state and the epistemological and hermeneutic conventions that support it. This does not mean that FUTH seeks to dispense with the "national" and construct a reified "transnational" with which to replace it, or to foster "transnationalism" as an ideological alternative to "nationalism." Rather, FUTH aims to free our imaginations from essentialist approaches to the nation or the state and to offer new ways of thinking about the political, social and cultural order of the world, both past and present.

The Flying University of Transnational Humanities is accordingly:

*-** Trans-cultural:** *FUTH not only critically examines the production and circulation of (trans-)national knowledge and culture, but it also problematizes imagined geographies of the "East" and the "West." We explore periods, places, and subjects as fluid and hybrid, rather than as confined and constrained by geopolitical or cultural boundaries.

*-** Trans-disciplinary:* FUTH seeks to comprehend the complex nature of various trans-cultural issues through trans-disciplinary approaches. To that end, FUTH is open to scholars, educators, researchers and students from all academic specializations.

*-** Trans-institutional:* FUTH is an intellectual network, founded and run by a global consortium of scholars, departments, and institutions. With the support of this network, we hope to facilitate trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary collaborations.

*Program*

Started in 2010, the Flying University of Transnational Humanities is organized annually-usually in the summer-by the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture (RICH), Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea.
FUTH consists of a series of advanced lectures, student presentations and feedback sessions where renowned scholars from RICH's partner and other institutions are invited to share their knowledge, insights and perspectives. Student participants are required to study the recommended readings in advance. They are also expected to present their own scholarly work related to the theme of each year. The official language of FUTH is English, although the possibility of trans-lingual practices is being considered. Graduate students and recent PhDs interested in the transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences are welcome to apply with a presentation proposal.

The overarching theme for the first three years (2010-2012) is "borders."
There have been numerous studies on how borders are constructed, negotiated, and policed and how they are simultaneously transgressed, challenged, and renegotiated. Borders are no longer seen simply as physical divisions but as discursive practices and cultural institutions. However, the multiplicity and hybridity of borders (e.g., national, cultural, geographical, gender, political, economic, *etc*.), as well as their transnational scalability (e.g., local, national, supranational, global, * etc*.), have yet to be intensively investigated. To address this gap, the first FUTH "Regions and Regionalization" in 2010 examined regions as sites of bordering practices and processes. In 2011, the second FUTH "Border-crossing Self" extended the scope of discussion to explore the ways in which the construction and performance of subjectivities and identities are connected to the demarcation and transgression of borders.

The third FUTH will take place at Hanyang University, July 15-18, 2012, under the title of "Borders of Knowledge." As numerous empirical studies in intellectual history, sociology of knowledge, and history/sociology/anthropology of the social, human, and natural sciences have convincingly demonstrated for several decades, the production, dissemination and use of knowledge, though seemingly universal, are always embedded in specific social, cultural, and historical contexts. Often, the subject, the object and the modus operandi of knowledge are defined, construed, and constrained by (national) borders. Knowledge and its associated practices thus shaped may in turn reinforce, reproduce or redefine those very borders. How then, does knowledge travel across borders? Rather than following the naïve modernist assumption that knowledge is spread because it is true and/or is channeled through universally transferable methodical practices, one should approach the travels of knowledge as themselves explananda rather than merely explanans for other phenomena. For instance, one may ask, what are the ways in which locally-produced knowledge is translated, adapted, appropriated, or contested in different local contexts? By the same token, one may also ask, how does knowledge, despite its local origins, come to acquire a proclaimed universality or globality? With such questions as a basis, the third FUTH in 2012 aims to provide graduate students and young scholars with a unique opportunity to critically examine the making and unmaking of the borders of knowledge-including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences, and other forms of knowledge.

*Lecturers *(surname-alphabetical order)**

*.** Alice L. Conklin* (Department of History, Ohio State University,
U.S.A.)

*.** Christian Fleck* (Department of Sociology, University of Graz,
Austria)

*. **Sari Hanafi* (Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, American University of Beirut, Lebanon)

*.** Johan Heilbron* (Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique de la Sorbonne, France / Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands)

*.** Michael Kim* (Graduate School of International Studies, Yonsei University, Korea)

- And other lecturers will be announced soon.

*Eligibility / How to Apply*

FUTH 2012 welcomes applications from graduate students as well as recent PhDs of all fields who are interested in the transnational paradigm of humanistic inquiry and also currently conducting research on topics related to the theme of the making and unmaking of borders of knowledge. All student participants are expected to give a full paper presentation on their own scholarly work.

Applicants should fill out the form on our website (
http://www.rich.ac/eng/fly/apply.php) and send it as attachment to hk.transnational@gmail.com along with their CV, research statement and an abstract of proposed presentation. *The deadline for applications is March 16, 2012*.

*Costs / Accommodation *

There is a registration fee of USD 80. While accommodation including breakfast and lunch will be provided, participants are expected to arrange their own funding for travel and daily living expenses. Partial travel grants may be awarded to a limited number of applicants.

*For further details, please contact: *

Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture

College of Humanities, Hanyang University

Seoul 133-791, Korea

E-mail: hk.transnational@gmail.com

Fax: +82-2-2298-0542

Website: http://rich.ac/eng/fly/introduction.php?pageNum=5&subNum=1

Call for Papers for International Conference: Environmental Protection in the Global Twentieth Century: International Organizations, Networks and Diffusion of Ideas and Policies
Research College (Kollegforschergruppe, KFG) “The Transformative Power of Europe”,
Free University of Berlin

Issues of pollution, excessive use of natural resources, nature protection and climate change transcend national boundaries. They tend to be of a regional or even global scope. In historical perspective, the European Union was relatively slow to take up environmental protection (beyond health and safety related issues) in the 1970s, followed by the formal introduction of this policy field into the EC treaty with the Single European Act only in 1986-7. In fact, other International Organizations (IOs) had addressed environmental issues much earlier starting with the League of Nations in inter-war Europe. After World War II the United Nations and its Economic Commission for Europe, the Council of Europe and the Organization for European Economic Co-operation and Development, the present-day OECD, addressed environmental issues such as water and air pollution by pooling scientific expertise, collecting comparative data, propagating and funding international scientific programmes and inducing greater media attention to the cross-border dimension of environmental protection. These IOs became norm entrepreneurs in environmental protection and crucial sites for the diffusion of ideas and policies to other IOs, to states and governments and probably, across world regions and regional integration organizations.

In a long-term perspective covering what might be called the global twentieth century, the UN Conference Man and the Environment in 1972 appears to be a turning point. From then onwards, environmental protection increasingly became the focus of policy-making at the transnational and international level, in the context of IOs, and was no longer confined to bilateral treaties, for example concerning river pollution. This is also when the European Communities developed their first Environmental Action Programmes and began to become involved in issues such as bird and habitat protection. The conference will take the event of 1972 as a point of departure for analyzing the origins of the role of IOs in environmental protection prior to this event and for exploring how it evolved until the early 1990s, with a perspective to the present-day.

Academically, the conference has two main objectives. The first objective is to explore the structural environment for IO activities and agenda-setting in environmental protection, especially their linkages with scientific institutions and experts and any network-type relationships with societal NGO actors as well as member states and governments, which were pioneering new environmental policies nationally. The second aim is to study how the IOs helped to diffuse, or transfer, ideas and policy concepts – by uploading them from societal or state actors at national or regional level or by downloading and re-contextualizing ideas and policy concepts developed within and among IOs to national and regional policy-makers or even, businesses. We assume, and hope to explore in greater detail, that despite the absence in most cases of formal decision-making powers, IOs have been able to play a key role in the diffusion of ideas and policy concepts drawing upon crucial competences such as information gathering and diffusion and translating ideas and concepts across institutional and cultural divides, for example.

Strategically, the proposed conference has three main objectives. The first objective is to de-center the EU as a transformative power by embedding the analysis of its role in environmental protection within a broader study of the transnationalization of this policy field which includes other IOs (including those operating globally and in other world regions) and the EU’s relations with them. The second aim is to connect historical research, which so far has mainly focused on the history of the environment rather than of environmental protection, with social science research on regional and global environmental policy and politics. The third objective is to broaden the study of IOs and environmental protection in Europe to a comparative regional and global analysis which begins to address the question to what extent “Europe” and its regional integration institutions have been the recipients of ideas and policy concepts downloaded from global organizations like the UN or other non-European national or regional actors like the US, and to what extent more recently, “Europe” and the EU have also increasingly acted as norm entrepreneurs and exporters in this policy field.

Historical research on Europe and other world regions in the twentieth-century is currently beginning to develop an interest in the multiple roles of IOs including those with limited policy-making powers, but manifold other functions. At a global level this type of research appears to be even less developed. The initial purpose of the conference is, therefore, to identify and mobilize researchers, research projects and avenues of further enquiry regarding IOs and environmental protection, and bringing these researchers in dialogue with social scientists who work in the field.

We invite paper proposals on any topic or period, which address the role of IOs, experts and networks in the diffusion of ideas and policies of environmental protection. All papers must be based in original research drawing upon archival sources, interviews, media reporting etc. Paper proposals must include the name of the paper-giver, a short CV and a paper abstract of no more than 250 words. The deadline for the submission of paper proposals is 15 January 2012. Paper proposals have to be sent simultaneously to Wolfram.Kaiser@port.ac.uk and jhmeyer@gmx.de.

Successful applicants will be informed on or shortly after 31 January 2012. The KFG “The Transformative Power of Europe” will cover their overnight accommodation in Berlin and reasonable travel costs.