tranzit.ro/ bucurești/ cluj/ iași/ sibiu/

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

24–30.08.2023
Câmpu Cetăţii, Mureş County

Application Deadline: 23.07.2023

Our times of polycrisis give a new, enhanced, and urgent readability to the old revolutionary slogan of 1917 – „Bread, Land, and Peace”. Even without a full-blown world war (but merely looming on the horizon, normalized in daily discourse), contemporary capitalism has endangered and is increasingly menacing all the basic prerequisites not only of a supposedly just society, but even of its own meagre bourgeois modernity: manifestly incapable – or unwilling – to ensure the bare necessities (the “bread”) of world society, by subsuming the social needs – and first of all the production and distribution of food – to the imperative of private accumulation; implacably reckless in its relation to land, through rampant desertification and overcrowding, land grabbing, enclosures and extractivism; and more and more unwilling – or at least incapable – of ensuring the basic social and political conditions (the “peace”) of its citoyens and républiques.

This year’s summer school will address this critical context from a double perspective. Firstly, through a series of investigations on the contemporary state of polycrisis affecting the global production and distribution of basic social necessities, the climate meltdown, and the militarization and fascization of political life. Secondly, in a historical perspective, by revisiting the way in which the initial revolutionary movements and ensuing communist states that sprung in Eastern Europe from that 1917 context dealt with these questions and handled their own polycrisis in their final decades – in order to see how these issues, of climate crisis, breakdown of the supply chains in basic necessities, and renewed militarization have been dealt with in their first instantiation, in a not so distant time and place.

As usual, the summer school will consist in a series of two daily lectures, panels or workshops featuring scholars from various disciplinary fields (anthropology, IT, philosophy, cinema, journalism, history of ideas and literary studies). Besides these, this year's edition will also include panels in which students can present and discuss their own research projects and ideas.

The school is especially (but not exclusively) dedicated to students from the social and humanities faculties. There is no registration fee. The school offers free accommodation in 4-6 bedded rooms, up to a maximum of 24 places, plus free camping space.