Archives and Evidentiary Practices Specialization
Instructors: István Rév, Iván Székely, Csaba Szilágyi, András Mink
The Archives and Evidentiary Practices Specialization is initiated by OSA and organized jointly with the Department of Legal Studies and the Department of History at the Central European University for the first time in AY 2016/17. The aim of the specialization is to provide students with theoretical grounding and practical skills in working and pursuing research in a contemporary and innovative archive. The knowledge and skills acquired during this program will open up for them additional avenues of pursuing a career not only in their chosen field but also in archives, libraries, and museums or in the multidisciplinary arena of the digital humanities.
The detailed description of the specialization is available here.
More information: Csaba Szilágyi at szilagyc@ceu.edu
- Archives, Evidence and Human Rights
Instructors: Iván Székely, Csaba Szilagyi, András Mink
This course aims at looking at the roles and uses of human rights documentation in the context of preserving recorded memory and the history of human rights. Establishing facts by forensic methods, producing impeccable evidence to convict perpetrators, or understanding the roots of conflicts and working toward dialog and reconciliation are just a few areas where the availability of reliable records and archival activism can make a huge difference. Course description and Syllabus
- Archival Practice
Instructors: Csaba Szilágyi, Iván Székely, and OSA staff
The second part of the Archives and Evidentiary Practices Specialization includes a supervised practice in the archives’ professional activities. Students will spend 30 hours at Blinken OSA to familiarize themselves with the various stages of the archival workflow and the ‘invisible’ processes of creating the archives. It is conceived as a guided individual discovery of the archives under the supervision of assigned staff members, from the processing area to the AV studio, and from the electronic catalogs to the digital repository. The full program of the Archival Practice is available here.
- Human Rights and Documentary Cinema
Instructors: Oksana Sarkisova, Rénata Uitz
By introducing ten recent well-crafted and engaging documentary films, this course addresses questions concerning the possibilities of cinematic investigation and advocacy with regard to politically and economically contextualized human rights abuses.
- "Though this be madness, yet there is method in it": Cold War fantasies
Instructors: István Rév, Ioana Macrea-Toma
This course approaches post-World War II history through the lens of Cold War social science on both sides of the ideological divide, their interdependencies and mutual influences on each other. Using unique, up-till-now barely used archival sources, the course will explore how the social sciences contributed to the emergence of the fantasy of past, present and future that guided both the programs of the sciences and perceptions of the world. The course is accompanied by a series of forthnightly public film screenings, Cold War Fantasies: Film Laboratory at OSA, taking place September - December 2013.
Previous courses (2012-2013):
- The Archives of Living and the Dead Things
Instructors: István Rév , Ioana Macrea-Toma, Simina Bădică
This experimental seminar seeks to explore ways for dealing with the past through a theoretical and empirical interaction with the archives (plus libraries and museums), understood as complex transformative devices, due to their inscriptive materialities and practices. Objects, infrastructures, collecting and collections, relations and classifications, are not just privileged topoi of material history, but methodological and also epistemic entry points in the reconstruction of complex and meaningful worlds.
Central European University Summer University Courses
- 2013: Documentary Cinema in the Digital Century
Course directors: Peter Almond, Oksana Sarkisova
- 2012: Polices and Practices to Digital Archives. Towards a New Research and Policy Agenda
Course directors: Gabriella Ivacs, Milena Dobreva