13 September 2024

The research project “Scaling the Transnational: Entangled Political Imaginaries and Practices in East and West Europe (STEPPE)” invites doctoral students and young postdocs to apply for up to eight fellowships with a mobility grant totaling up to 2.500€.

The EU is facing immense political challenges. In many countries, democratic principles are being questioned and an “illiberal policy” is being explicitly positioned as a defence of national values against the “liberal values of the West”. “Liberal democracies” and “illiberal regimes” are thus juxtaposed, and old dichotomies are revived: while Eastern Europe is accused of a democratic and rule of law deficit, Western Europe appears to be merely interested in maintaining its discursive and political dominance. This East/West opposition lends a geopolitical and territorial dimension to the crisis of confidence between the European states.

Against this background the project “Scaling the Transnational: Entangled Political Imaginaries and Practices in East and West Europe” (STEPPE) seeks to nuance this picture by analysing the transnational dimensions of political movements and ideological conflicts in Europe. It questions the dichotomy between Western and Eastern Europe as a category of analysis for understanding historical and current social developments and political conflicts. In so doing, the project offers an innovative take on studying the transnational engagement of political movements and ideological paradigms across the symbolic dividing line of Western and Eastern Europe.

STEPPE focuses on multi-directional transfers and interactions, transnational imaginaries of the self and the other, and the underlying experiences that came to shape the European public sphere in the 21st century. Thus, it seeks to accentuate the politics of East-West entanglement as key, but often overlooked, component of European political culture and social imaginary.
Four thematic directions structure the project: three forms of ideological transfer (liberal, illiberal, leftist) as well as transnational academic networks that both observe and shape the exchange.

These four main focuses are assigned to the respective partner institutions as follows:

➢ Illiberal movements (CEU-Democracy Institute, Budapest/ Hungary)
➢ The new Left (New Europe College NEC, Bucharest/ Romania)
➢ Rule-of-law activism (Institute of Political Science at Leipzig University, Leipzig/Germany)
➢ Transnational academic transfer and social change (Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin/Germany)

For more details on the project, visit our research blog on: steppe.hypotheses.org

Fellowships:
The programme addresses doctoral students and young postdocs from the humanities and social sciences whose research topics match with the questions addressed by STEPPE.

The fellows will be associated with one of the institutions that constitutes the project network (Democracy Institute at the Central European University (Budapest / Hungary), New Europe College (Bucharest / Romania), Universität Leipzig (Leipzig/ Germany), and Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin / Germany)). They will be actively involved in all activities of the STEPPE research network. The fellowship programme provides funding for travel to the partner institutes for research and training purposes.

The participation in the first network meeting on 21-22 November 2024 in Berlin is mandatory for an application for the fellowships.
The fellowships will start on 1 December 2024 and will end on 31 March 2026. An extension of the association and funding opportunities is intended as a follow-up application for an EU research funding is envisaged.
The working language is English.

What we offer:

➢ Association with the network for the entire duration of the project.
➢ Integration into an interdisciplinary and international research team in a growing network of partners in Eastern Europe.
➢ Independence and flexibility: fellows pursue their own research projects, gain interdisciplinary impetus and make a wide range of new contacts.
➢ Participation in the network meetings and other activities of the project.
➢ Mobility grant of up to 2.500€ to finance your research and training stays.

Your application:
Please send the following elements in a single PDF document to: mertz@cmb.hu-berlin.de

➢ Cover letter
➢ Curriculum vitae
➢ Project description (no longer than 2 pages), stating how the proposed project addresses the main research questions and outlining the thematic approach to which your research can be assigned to. This will define the destination of the research stays.

Application deadline: 21 October 2024

For more detailed information on the research project, the partner institutions and the four thematic approaches please follow the link to our research blog see above.

For any question, please contact the project manager Dorothee Mertz: mertz@cmb.hu-berlin.de

Coordinating institution and project partners:

The Centre Marc Bloch, as the coordinating institution is an interdisciplinary research centre in the humanities and social sciences that examines the present and past of European societies from a Franco-German perspective and places them in their global context. The centre focuses on analysing European societies and the complex structure of German-French and European relations. At the same time, the CMB picks up on the diverse stimuli of global European research and offers a theoretically and empirically grounded reflection on the relationship between Europe and other regions of the world with particular attention to mutual influences and dependencies. The CMB offers a binational space for reflection that brings different academic cultures and disciplines into dialogue to development new approaches, topics, theories and methods.

New Europe College is an independent Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences and Humanities in Bucharest (Romania). It now has over 25 years of experience in supporting fellows and offers Romanian and international researchers in the postdoctoral phase scholarships for a stay of 5-10 months as part of an interdisciplinary group of researchers within the framework of various structured programme funding. In addition, it offers the possibility of longer-term collaboration in thematic focus groups.

The CEU – Democracy Institute in Budapest (Hungary) is dedicated to researching and strengthening the conditions of democratic and open societies in Europe. It offers a platform for cooperation and teaching of international researchers from various disciplines and enters a dialogue with social and political actors. It offers various event formats and short-term fellowships and provides high-quality support for international fellows. Together with several other institutions, it has been trialling a virtual teaching format for refugee students from Ukraine as part of the Invisible University for Ukraine.

The Institute of Political Science at Leipzig University (Germany) contributes to the project through its department “Political System of Germany and Politics in Europe”, which provides experience in researching structures and perceptions of the rule of law in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine and Moldova. The Institute also hosts the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence “Problems of Representation: Perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe”. Leipzig University offers an excellent academic environment for the fellows involved in the project, among other things through its Graduate School Global and Area Studies.