UACES conference Exchanging Ideas on Europe 2012-Dr. Mikhail Molchanov

On September 2-5,  Dr. Molchanov took part in the UACES conference Exchanging Ideas on Europe 2012; Old Borders – New Frontiers. The conference took place in the University of Passau, Germany. The University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) provides an independent forum for informed debate and discussion of European affairs. It is directly involved in promoting research and teaching in European Studies as well as bringing together academics with practitioners active in European affairs. Its annual conference is a showcase event brining in leading experts in European Union studies from the EU and abroad.

Dr. Molchanov presented a  paper entitled ” Eurasian Regionalisms and Russian Foreign Policy”. The paper presented a study of regional integration projects in the postcommunist Eurasia, defined as the former Soviet space plus China, and the impact that the Russian foreign policy has on these projects. The role that major powers, both indigenous (Russia) and external to the post-Soviet region (China, USA) play in, alternatively, encouraging or dampening the development of the competing regionalist projects remains under explored.

The paper endeavoured to close this gap by looking at new regionalism in Eurasia in the context of a parallel exploration of Russia’s foreign policy. Dr. Molchanov addressed Eurasian regionalist projects as a subset of the new regionalism (NR) developments that had emerged in response to neoliberal globalization and represent an adaptive reaction to it. The foreign policy emphasis in a study of evolving regionalisms sought to refocus attention on regionalizing agency and its role in shaping regional institutions and structures. Such a refocusing, in my view, allows building a bridge from a study of new regionalism to a study of domestic determinants of foreign policy. Both areas of research are crucially important for the better understanding of politics of development and international relations that connect emerging economies to each other.

Presentation was met with interest and contributed to a wider debate at the panel on ‘Awkward’ States in Regional Integration. The panel addressed such questions, as: What drives some states to join regional organizations while frequently appearing ill at ease with their choice? How are these states managed by their partners? What constitutes
“awkwardness” in regional integration processes? 

Summary of the event:

The Joint World Conference on Social Work and Social Development (July 8-12, 2012 in Stockholm) was a joint conference of the International Association of Schools of Social Work, International Federation of Social Workers and the International Council on Social Welfare. Over 2,000 participants attended with several plenaries and numerous concurrent sessions. I particularly valued the fact that many sessions and presentations focused on environmental social work eco-social work, and sustainability.

Abstract:
Facilitated by John Coates, Fred Besthorn, and Tiani Hetherington

This workshop is designed for social work practitioners and educators interested in incorporating environmental social work interventions into their everyday practice. Led by leading scholars on environmental social work, it will outline the core areas of environmental scholarship, education, and practice centred on key environmental issues using, as its base, a typology of micro, mezzo, and macro interventions developed by Gray, Coates, and Hetherington (forthcoming 2012). The workshop will also discuss some of the major challenges in environmental social work and the challenges that engagement with environmental issues raises for the profession. The typology includes engagement in environmental issues relating to inter alia mining and industrial damage; global warming and climate change; toxic materials production and waste disposal; air, soil, and water pollution; species extinction; sustainable development and food security; and natural disasters. The emphasis is on theoretical frameworks, practice examples, and case studies of what social workers are doing, or might do, in relation to environmental and educational initiatives. The challenges include overcoming the limitations of anthropocentric thinking and strategically changing the focus of the profession of social work with its ecosystems or person-in-environment approach to include the natural environment. Although social work has only recently engaged with the modern environmental movement, this workshop specifically seeks to extend scholarship in this area beyond claims as to what the profession ‘ought to be doing’ to address environmental concerns in practical ways so social workers can incorporate the natural environment in their direct practice with clients. Moreover, it aims to address what the social work profession can do in terms of macro, mezzo, and micro practice levels of intervention around the key environmental challenges facing our planet. We seek to engage in collaborative discussions around this key emerging area of social work practice and to discuss the potential for creating an international network of environmental social work practice and education interventions where we can share our collective practice and research wisdom.

The session I co-facilitated was a 90 minute workshop on Environmental Social Work attended by about 35 people. As outlined in the Abstract, the goal of the workshops was to discuss a Typology of Social Work Practice on Environmental Issues that will appear in a forthcoming book, Environmental Social Work (Routledge) co-edited by Mel Gray, John Coates and Tiani Hetherington. Discussion groups within our workshop were also facilitated by the organizers and included as well, Fred Besthorn (USA), Margaret Alston (Australia), Lena Dominelli (Britain) and Jej Peeters (Belgium). At the workshop we also started a network of scholars and researchers interested in environmental social work and are pleased that all in attendance signed up. I think this network will grow quickly and be useful for furthering international cooperation among social work scholars interested in environmental issues. I think the network will be of interest to Dr. Arielle Dylan and Professor Aamir Jamal who have both global and environmental interests. I expect to be a member though I am uncertain of the degree of my involvement.

The conference also provided the opportunity to meet several scholars whose work I have cited, or who have contributed chapters to my edited journals and books; it was good to strengthen these connections. I was particularly pleased to meet Aila-Leena Mathies and Kati Nari whose work I only recently came across and plan to become more familiar.

This grant enabled Dr. Vose to travel to Chile and Spain in the Spring-Summer of 2012, as one of the phases in his five-year research project.

Summary of project:

Inquisition tribunals were dedicated not only to rooting out religious beliefs and practices deemed “heretical’; they also generated massive quantities of written records and preserved invaluable testimony for all aspects of life in their host societies. Inquisitors were far more scrupulous than most contemporary observers in the intimate attention they paid to topics ranging from economic and social relationships to cultural practices and gender roles. Texts composed for internal purposes, too, shed light not just on the lives of interrogated subjects but also on the ideological and practical underpinnings of local power structures. A great many such records, preserved in a wide variety of formats, remain housed in archives and libraries around the world, yet few resources are available to help researchers grasp the scope of this documentation. As a result scholarship to date has tended to focus on a relatively narrow set of records, often relating to Spain or Italy alone, while neglecting other aspects of the inquisitorial legacy in diverse regions of the globe.

My project contributes both to the development of more global inquisition studies and to a range of other historical speciality areas by systematically surveying, categorizing and analyzing the contents of key inquisition archives worldwide. In phases 1 and 2 preliminary surveys were carried out in major US and Spanish collections such as the University of Notre Dame’s McDevitt Collection, the Lea Collection (University of Pennsylvania) and the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid; a visit to Mexico’s Archivo General de la Nación is pending for the spring of 2012. GISI funding will permit me to embark on phase 3 of the project, expanding my research to cover the Peruvian Inquisition archives (now held at Santiago de Chile). This will require a two-week stay in situ at the Archivo Nacional Histórico, as well as a brief followup visit to Madrid to check my findings against the colonial files held there.

Since I have yet to see the holdings of the little-used Peruvian archives-in-exile, I cannot say what the results of my visit will bring. However I am confident that I will locate sources that correspond to some of the document types previously identified in the preliminary stages of my project as described on the project website <inquisition.library.nd.edu>. Trial records will undoubtedly be found, each with its own intriguing story to tell; I will examine not only their contents but also the layout and formatting of such transcripts in comparison to those produced by other tribunals. I am also eager to see what non-trial volumes and folios sueltos may reside in this collection, whether similar to those I have already identified in other settings (manuals, auto de fe accounts, etc.) or perhaps items which are entirely unique to the Peruvian Holy Office. Either way, I fully intend to have material to share with the Research Associates of the GISI upon my return, and I will also present my findings at the annual meeting of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies in 2013 or 2014.

In collaboration with other experts, and building on my own previous research, I will further disseminate the full results of my investigations (phases 1-8) over a five-year period through a series of articles on discrete documentary categories such as procedural literature, sermons read out at sentencing ceremonies, and internal historiographies. Collected together and expanded with further research, these focused studies will ultimately form the core of a new interactive website along with a published scholarly monograph designed to orient novice and seasoned scholars alike to the complexities, idiosyncrasies, and potential uses of inquisitorial sources.

Robin Vose

The grant enabled Dr. Horgan to conduct a research trip, in 2012, to London for the purposes of consulting original documents and records  held by the UK National Archives.

Summary of the project:

Prorogation is a device routinely used in Westminster-style parliamentary systems when the governing party/coalition has largely completed its legislative agenda, and wishes to set out a new legislative programme. However, governing parties sometimes attempt to use prorogation as a political tool, by taking advantage of one of its essential features: the suspension of all parliamentary activity. Such attempts raise a question as to whether the Crown’s representative should, or indeed can, act to prevent such use of the Crown prerogative. The current project has three goals: first, to identify Australian precedents analogous to a recent Canadian case; second, to identify the factors that conduce to the use of prorogation as a partisan political tool; third, to examine the Crown representatives’ actions in these cases, the rationales for those actions, and the reaction of the UK Colonial/Dominions Office to the representatives’ actions, in order to better establish the extent of representatives’ discretion regarding the reserve power to deny advice to prorogue a parliament.

Gerard Horgan

This grant enabled Dr. Lofkrantz to travel to France, Mauritania, and Nigeria in April 2012. Dr. Lofkrantz visited local libraries and archives in these countries to access works and writings of 19th Century leaders.

Summary of project:

“Scholars, Captives, and Slaves: The Intellectual Debate on Ransoming Prisoners in Muslim West Africa” is a transnational intellectual and social history of the debate amongst West African Muslims, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, on the legality and use of the practice of ransoming. Ransoming, or the return of a captive otherwise slated for enslavement in exchange for payment, was a defining characteristic of captivity and slavery in West Africa. While many aspects of slavery have been studied, this project bridges social and intellectual history to highlight the connections and ramifications of the debate between religious and legal authorities and policy-makers on the institution of slavery and remedies for illegal enslavement, specifically ransoming. In particular this project will contribute to the understanding of slavery in Islamic and African systems, especially in relationship to the ties between intellectual discourse, the formation of policy and actual practices of enslavement and treatment of captives and slaves.

Jennifer Lofkrantz