Karl Kaser Explorative Research Grants

Olaf Terpitz (Centre of Jewish Studies)

The project aims at exploring and digitizing Desider Stern’s estate. His archive documents his (travelling) exhibition of 1967 “Works of Jewish Authors in the German Language” and the ensuing handbook. Almost 20 years after the Shoah the exhibition took place in a social climate that still regarded Austria as the ‘first victim’ of the Nazis. Stern brought together authors and their texts that were (once again) available in the publishing industry. In doing so, he bridged the spheres of literary production and societal perception, “reclaiming home” via cultural intervention and marking literature as political actor. Stern whose handbook (almost) fell out of scholarly attention addresses crucial questions of Jewish life, of Jewish – non-Jewish interactions in Europe’s post-war period.

Heike Karge (Department of History)

The research project “Negotiating Trauma in Europe after 1945” examines the concept of trauma as a defining feature of the 20th century, focusing on its evolution and implications rather than recounting historical events. It explores trauma as an analytical category, highlighting its transformation from a medical term to a socially, politically, and culturally negotiated concept by the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Europe, as a key site of the two world wars, the Cold War, and decolonization, experienced profound political and social ruptures that influenced the adaptation and negotiation of trauma concepts. The project argues that these uniquely European caesuras contributed to the development of trauma discourse in ways distinct from the U.S. experience. By tracing how these European historical events were translated into medical and psychiatric frameworks, the study aims to illuminate their subsequent societal impact. Ultimately, the research seeks to uncover the specific European trajectory of trauma conceptualization and its role in the emergence of PTSD as a globalized phenomenon.

Siegfried Gruber (Department of History)

Almost 30 years ago Karl Kaser published a map about the distribution of the Balkan family household in 1850 and today and a map of household formation patterns in historical Southeastern Europe. Research during this time period have brought new insights into this topic and therefore the need for new maps arise. The Mosaic database containing the largest database of historical census microdata for Southeastern Europe enables us to refine Karl Kaser’s maps considerably. One major obstacle still remains: for many countries in Southeastern Europe either no census manuscripts have survived or only some parts of the respective country are covered. Therefore, the need arises to accompany the existing microdata with aggregate data to fill the gaps. Aggregate data cannot provide us with all information about co-residence or marriage patterns, but they can provide us with rough measures of household structures (household size, number of married couples per household) and marriage patterns (singulate mean age at marriage). The anticipated outcome of the project will be a series of updated maps about household structures and marriage patterns in Southeastern Europe.

Rivka Saltiel (University of Graz), Sarah Klosterkamp (GoetheUniversity Frankfurt/Main), Luisa Gehriger (University of Zurich)

Neoliberal urban housing restructuring—characterized by financialization, speculation, rising rents, and land scarcity—has led to widespread displacement and forced evictions. In Austria, five households are evicted daily. The need for affordable housing and for socio-material support for the growing number of people in precarity is pressing. 

Against this backdrop, we are engaging with a peculiarity of Graz, the so-called ‘transitional housing’ estate (also known as “Delogiertenwohnungen”). This municipal housing program provides evicted households with affordable apartments, social worker support, childcare, and other services. It serves as a rare example of combining both material housing infrastructure and social support for people experiencing housing precarity. Thus, we approach these housing estates as infrastructures of care. Drawing on qualitative research with residents, we explore the residents’ everyday experiences and seek to understand how these infrastructures meet their needs and provide socio-material stability. Our findings aim to derive lessons for temporary housing programs in other urban contexts.

Carolyn Defrin, PhD (Centre for Southeast European Studies)

This exploratory research aims to conceptualize a mobile museum of migration futures, shifting from traditional museum practices focusing on past and present crises to envisioning migration through dignity, compassion, and connection. Current migration-related exhibitions tend to frame migration as a static crisis, emphasizing trauma and displacement through artefacts like lost shoes or graffitied border wall fragments. This project, however, aligns with decolonial museum practices that involve marginalized communities in programming but takes it a step further by focusing on the future. 

Informed by current research on the role of speculative design in facilitating inter-relational dialogue and understanding between key actors in Southern European border contexts, this grant  offers a key research phase for a new and larger follow-on project exploring how museum spaces can co-create dignified migratory futures in collaboration with refugee and migrant artists, curators, and community members in wider global border contexts. 

To develop this concept, this period of research is focused on engagement with arts and community initiatives along the US/Mexico border, a critical border site and the origin of border art practices; but, which has remained disconnected from its European counterpart in research and art practices. Visiting this region will enable connections and new insights to develop the envisioned museum. 

Oana Hergenröther (meeting point languages - Center for Language, Plurilingualism and Didactics)

This project explores intersections of masculine identity with chronological and cultural aging. Three in-depth narrative interviews with older male Serbian filmmakers-Goran Marković, Emir Kusturica, and Želimir Žilnik- and archival research at the Yugoslav Film Archive will ask how the aging process and narratives about the life course have found their way into art; how they interact with political engagement, aesthetic transformations parallel to the artists' own chronological aging; and how they function as subtle metaphors for wider social issues like generational conflict and solidarity. Serbia's current political and cultural climate, (still) widely dominated by (aging) male figures, is a prolific field for inquiries into real and artistic practices of patriarchy and gender roles. Marković, Kusturica, and Žilnik are chosen based on their regional and international success and visibility, but also considering their diverging aesthetics, personal histories, political views. The combined close reading of the recorded interviews, and the archival research exploring the quantitative and qualitative presence of the topics of age and aging in secondary sources about Yugoslav/Serbian film, will showcase artistic negotiations of tropes such as the aging body, sexuality and virility; fathering, grandfathering, mentoring; male stock characters; interrelations between violence, war, and masculinity.

Derya Özkaya(Center for Southeast European Studies)

The socio-political transformations in Southeast Europe, intertwined with demographic changes like depopulation and migration, hold significance for Europe. Yet, the role of ageing population amidst these transformations remains underexplored. Directing attention to the often-overlooked experiences of older adults' political engagement, this exploratory research focuses on the intersections of age, gender, and protest for democratization in Southeast Europe. Aiming to deconstruct widespread portrayals of older adults in a "decline" of the political agency, it examines grassroots movements in Turkey, Austria, Bosnia Herzegovina, and Serbia, particularly focusing on older women's roles in social and ecological justice movements. The study seeks to uncover their motivations for collective action in their later lives, strategies for democratization from below, and challenges in forming and sustaining alliances within and across different movements. In addition to contributing to the critical ageing and gender studies and protest movement scholarship from Southeast European societies, this exploratory research aims to lay the groundwork for a coherent framework to prepare a successful application for a broader research project. In line with this expected outcome, the exploratory research will involve conducting a comprehensive literature review, archival research, and exploratory field visits with preliminary interviews to inform the selection of empirical cases.

Chiara Pagano (Center for Southeast European Studies)

Focusing on the reconfiguration of Italy's borderscaping across the Central Mediterranean from 2015 to 2024, this project investigates southern European (re)bordering practices, including the de facto retraction of the EU's external borders within southern European spatialities and their concomitant extensions beyond EU geographies. Expanding on previous research conducted from 2018 to 2019 in Italy and Tunisia, this study examines the evolving dynamics of Italy's border management in light of significant recent developments. The European Agenda on Migration and the Hotspot Approach, launched in 2015 and implemented in Italy in 2016, aimed to streamline the processing of new arrivals, namely through mainstreaming the sorting out potential asylum seekers as opposed to so-called "economic migrants" already from the moment of their arrival. However, this new system was soon confronted with new challenges connected to the COVID-19 pandemic and, later on, due to political shifts, including the 2022 election of the right-wing government led by Giorgia Meloni. Additionally, EU negotiations on the New Pact on Migration and Asylum and attempts to establish off-shore processing of asylum requests have further complicated the landscape, with Italy increasingly aspiring to a leading role in informing European negotiations for bilateral agreements with neighboring "Third countries", such as Albania, Tunisia, and Egypt. This research will involve site visits to major ports and hotspot structures in central and southern Italy, including Sicily and Lampedusa, and interviews with key stakeholders. The goal is to reassess and update previous findings, offering a comprehensive understanding of Italy's border management strategies and their broader implications for the Euro-African Mediterranean.

Tatjana Petzer (Institute for Slavic Studies)

With the spatial turn in the humanities, the binary relationship between land and sea has become broadly applied in the topographical and geo-aesthetic analysis of text and image. The dichotomy does not only divide Utopian insularity from landlocked locality, but, according to the political theorist Carl Schmitt, rather indicates the fundamental opposition between the telluric and thalassic spheres of the world order. Drawn by this controversial constitutional lawyer during World War II, the telluric-maritime paradigm had its revival in the conservative thought of New Right intellectualism. The project examines the reception of Schmitt's geopolitical values in South-Eastern Europe from the forties to the nineties, and in the current politically tense situation, when they become popular again via the doctrine of Neo-Eurasianism. By approaching the cultural semantics of Schmitt's "Raumordnung"(nomos) in discourse and arts in general, and of the Adriatic and its hinterland in particular, the project will analyze the continuities and ruptures of continental and maritime order structures in South Slavic spatial discourse and how they took part in the conceptualization of Europe.