The Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network
How does technology mediate what it means to be human? How have scientific, intellectual, and artistic experiments reshaped human experience in diverse historical and cultural contexts, and how might they shape our shared futures?
Rethinking the humanities in the light of changing technologies, our increasingly connected planet, the ongoing ecological crisis, and the need to create more inclusive institutions.
Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN) is an OSUN-funded initiative headquartered at the Experimental Humanities Center at Bard, NY.
EHCN supports the development of innovative pedagogy, interdisciplinary research, and public engagement via digital, analog, and conceptual methods to build more just technological realities. At each partner institution, this collaboration fosters critical reflection, social justice, and practice-rich learning; digital and face-to-face public projects; and truly integrated interdisciplinary research that draws on history, theory, and experimental practice.
Global / Local Projects
EHCN insists on the power of grassroots leadership, and invites an array of collaborators to the table. Its courageous—and often playful—experimentation with both “old” and “new” technologies flattens hierarchies not just between academic disciplines but between the academy and local communities. Not only working with each partner institution to emphasize its unique local technological, environmental, and cultural ecology, EHCN also creates opportunities for partners to share the lessons of their distinctive experiences with a larger global community.
EHCN at CEU
In CEU, the EHCN is mandated to support faculty, students, researchers and staff for their innovative ideas and project proposals that chart new ways of using technologies and experimentation in engaging with Humanities in a meaningful way. The idea of 'experimentation' is central to the project and the concept and idea can be realized through the development of a course, a skill-based workshop or through a community-facing event. EHCN also would like to create a common ground in the CEU community between faculty, students, and staff through a creative synergy of individual talents, interests, academic backgrounds, and mentorship by a faculty. We hope to pave the way for a Laboratory in the long run where new media, technologies, and human values will create a discourse bridging the domains of social sciences and sciences through a vigorous and topical engagement with arts and humanities.
“AGENCY: Vote With Her” Exhibition Opening
Location: CEU Cafeteria (Library Cafe)
We invite you to the opening of the “AGENCY: Vote With Her” exhibition that celebrates the power of migrant and refugee women’s agency in shaping the future of Europe.
“AGENCY” is an inspiring initiative by the European Network of Migrant Women (ENoMW), in collaboration with the European Parliament, femLENS and several partner organizations across EU states, aimed at amplifying the voices of women with migrant backgrounds in the lead-up to the 2024 European Parliament elections. As part of the AGENCY project, over 50 women from 14 EU states participated in a series of online and in-person trainings on EU institutions, legislative processes, and advocacy, followed by the implementation of the photovoice technique to develop their own projects. To learn more about the initiative, click here: https://www.votewithher.eu.
The exhibition will feature the works of four Change Makers based in Hungary, Pauline Mwabishi Ang’ang’o, Meri Shirzai, Aigerim Marat, and Sarah Anurika. Through their documentary photographs, we can learn about their relationship with European democracy, their perceptions of it and how they seek to engage their communities in political discourse.
Curated and organized by Lucia Anna Demény, the Country Facilitator of the Hungarian branch of the AGENCY project, and Human Rights MA student at CEU, this dual exhibition will unfold at both the Budapest and Vienna CEU campuses.
The gates open at 5:15 pm, with the event officially starting at 5:30 pm. The evening will commence with an opening speech, providing insights into the project's overarching goals and will be followed by the Change Makers’ guided tour, offering personal narratives behind their photographic works.
The opening will be complemented by a standing reception, providing opportunity for guests to engage in meaningful conversations and deeper engagement with the themes explored in the exhibition.
This event is made possible by the generous support of the OSUN Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network funding, in partnership with CEU Student Engagement.
Join us to celebrate the powerful voices of migrant women and to reflect on our collective responsibility in shaping a democratic and inclusive Europe!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Experience an engaging and intellectually compelling event with Atifete Jahjaga, the esteemed former President of the Republic of Kosovo, as she delves into the intricacies of constructing a narrative of peace. This event will offer a comprehensive understanding of Jahjaga's remarkable journey, ascending to the presidential post at the age of 36. Jahjaga will expound upon her strategic approach towards post-war inter-ethnic reconciliation, elucidating the methodologies she employed in narrative construction to navigate this complex terrain.
The event will be moderated by Michael Ignatieff, Rector Emeritus, Professor of History.
Registration is mandatory, please register here.
The event is sponsored by the OSUN EHCN project and OSUN Civic Engagement.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Workshop & Performance: Drag is so [*insert here*] it’s a Crime!
This workshop aims at critically engaging with and countering the continuous politicized violence on human rights. On the one hand, it wants to further understand the ideologies perpetuating such violence and locate them in a broader structural level of hegemonic power through sexualization, racialization, class hierarchization, criminalization and pathologization of “othered” bodies. On the other hand, it explores the evocative force of drag art practices for forms of resistance against these ideologies.
What does drag do to our activism, our daily embodiment, our relationality with others, and our perceptions? This practical exploration is threefold:
1. Three drag artists share their drag practices with those who are interested in drag.
2. Together, the workshop group transforms drag into a tool of expressing current political concerns, collective struggles, and visions of a better world.
3. The workshop group will collectively work on performances that will be shown on March 1. As this is an outreach project which provides a safer space for Vienna’s queer and trans community, the performance night is only accessible to invited people.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2-year MA Sociology student, Beatriz de Figueiredo is helping to organize a digital theatre workshop, supported by a Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN) grant.
Online Event - Zoom link
Join the launch of "(in) between worlds/ entre mundos," an audio-visual project that reflects on Latin American women’s experiences of crossing borders. The project is supported by the OSUN Civic Engagement Microgrant at Central European University and the EHCN Student-led Initiatives Grant.
"(in) between worlds/entre mundos" is an audio-visual project that aims to co-create a safe space for migrant, Latina, self-identifying women in Vienna. It is led by Loren Sandoval Arteaga, a Mexican MA student in Women's and Gender Studies at Central European University and the University of York, living in Europe since 2017 and Madár, a Brazilian interdisciplinary researcher and multimedia artist, living in Europe since 2018. Through a series of podcasts and photographs, this project hopes to reflect upon the collective experience of crossing borders (both physical and psychological) and foster the exchange of experiences and emotions connected to transition journeys and migration narratives.
The speakers will discuss the birth of the project and the theoretical and methodological approaches framing it. They will also reflect on some of its challenges and present some of the resulting audio-visual material. At the end of the event, there will also be an opportunity to ask questions and engage with the speakers.
● How do we teach responsibly and critically with generative AI?
● Why has generative AI become ubiquitous, and what future developments can we expect?
The Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network is offering an online workshop on Generative AI and Experimental Pedagogy, open to all teachers and administrators across the OSUN network. The goal of the workshop is to address the recent boom in generative AI tools and models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, and its implication for university pedagogy and research.
QS-B505 or online
Video Games & Autoethnography EHCN Participatory Experimental Research Workshop
This is a 3-day workshop about using autoethnography to study video games. If you’re a videogame enthusiast, you can incorporate them into your academic work from a huge variety of perspectives, across disciplines and using many different methods. Autoethnography is a qualitative research methodology that involves examining personal experiences and cultural contexts in order to gain insights into cultural phenomena – which is very useful for game studies. This workshop aims to familiarize the participants with some of the key issues in game studies and autoethnographic research, then engage in hands-on learning, practising the skills in question.
Open to all, hybrid format available. No prior knowledge required.
Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScktsIgD8jGO2U3z4XQ7tB-aQ-D5c2vw_oQ3SqJXUnSl-YEpQ/viewform
Jerzy Jarniewicz is a Polish poet, literary critic, translator and essayist. His latest poetry collection, Mondo Cane, won the 2022 Nike Award, the most prestigious distinction in Polish literature.
This event will focus on the role of Love Poetry in our age of discontent. Do love poems still have relevance? How has love poetry changed throughout the ages? Can it surpass and survive crippling binaries, patriarchy, colonialism, or AI?
In conversation with Borbála Faragó, the poet will offer his views on these issues and will also read from his poems.
Reception to follow!
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Workshop series: Collaborative Manifesto for Experimental Humanities at CEU
The Department of Gender Studies and the CEU-OSUN Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN) are pleased to invite you to three workshops devoted to creating a Collaborative Manifesto for Experimental Humanities at CEU (read more here).
The first workshop will be concerned with discussing the broad scope of the humanities in society, academia and contemporary activism(s).
The second will be devoted to creating a Vision Statement for the humanities at CEU.
The while the final workshop focuses on the pragmatic goal sketching out the courses, events and interventions that can be developed under the aegis of CEU-EHCN.
These workshops will be held in hybrid format at the CEU’s Quellenstraße campus on the following days:
Dates and Times
May 8 1330-1510 (A420)
May 15 1330-1510 (A211)
May 24 1330-1510 (A211)
For those joining us online, here is the Zoom link:
https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/3339270353?pwd=alBJalQvSEdrNzlHYW5nbjY5YjJhQT09
Meeting ID: 333 927 0353
Passcode: 704893
A Reading Group at CEU
Next meeting: March 21, 2023 at 5.30PM in B215
Feel free to drop in, no RSVP required!
Would you like to spend some quality time with poems? Would you like to read poetry that unsettles, provokes, questions, opens up the senses, makes you feel more alive and more in touch with being human?
In this group we take the slow approach to poetry, spending as much time as we need to discover an individual poem’s social, political or personal message. Centered around a theme there will be a collection of contemporary and modern poems to read in advance of every meeting.
The close readings are guided by Borbála Faragó from the Center for Academic Writing, whose academic research is in poetry criticism.
Call for Participation | Pelion Summer Lab 2023 “Eco/o/ontologies”
This summer the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN) will co-host the 5th Pelion Summer Lab for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities (PSL), an initiative of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly, on June 28 -August 7.
The aim of this 10-day program is to convene an interdisciplinary group of graduate students, researchers, artists, activists, and cultural producers from fields such as anthropology, history, sociology, interdisciplinary arts, gender studies, cultural and new media studies to collaborate on an intensive exchange and exploration of current pressing global problems.
Read more and apply here.
------------------------------------------
Types of Funding:
3) Skills-based Workshops (up to 1500 USD): Eligibility: CEU faculty/staff/students
4) Student Research and Professional Opportunities (up to 1000 USD): Eligibility: CEU students
Criteria for Applications:
The Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network promotes projects that encourage the following:
1. Critical reflection on the intersection of science, technology, media, art, and the humanities in response to the question: how does technology mediate what it means to be human?
-----------------------
Check out the promotional video from May 2021 explaining the EHCN-local grants opportunity: https://youtu.be/7V7DxrPVc20
- CEU Virtual Ecovillage - Olea Morris
- Listening as Doorways to Futures - Julian Willming
- Public History - Jefferson R. Mendez
- Restaging Memories of Dissents: #ENDSARS in Retrospect - Oluwafunmilayo Miriam Akinpelu
- Third Country National Discrimination - Luka Gotsiridze
- Visual Civic Literacy - Iurii Rudnev and Elizaveta Berezina
Additional partners include: Hampton University, USA; Recovering Voices, Smithsonian Institution, USA; and University of Thessaly, Greece.
