Research context of the Summer School

In recent years, the PhD-Summer School in Leipzig has developed into an important platform for the discussion of transnationalisation, transculturality and new trends in the research of globalisation. It is organised by the Graduate Centre for the Humanities and Social Sciences of the Research Academy Leipzig where approximately 100 PhD students from the Social, Cultural, Linguistic and Historical Sciences receive structured training for doctoral studies. The annual Summer School comprises an integral part of this training process and aims to provide PhD students with an opportunity to present their research results as well as work with other members of their peer group. Therefore we would like to invite PhD candidates and postdocs working on issues covered by the Graduate Centre’s thematic focus to apply for participation.

Thematic Focus of the 2010 Summer School

As a process, transnationalisation can be observed from the late 18th century onwards. However, it may also be traced simultaneously to more ancient patterns of cultural encounters and intercultural entanglements, thereby also inviting a diachronic analysis of history.
Research approaches in the historical, political and cultural sciences that have focused on the transnational dimensions of these topics have, in recent years, increasingly dealt with movements, flows and circulations of individuals, groups, ideas and objects across and beyond the borders of national entities. The underlying methodological assumption is that modern historical processes are constituted by interaction between different entities under investigation and not primarily by developments remaining internal to a given society. This perspective is being partly supplemented, whilst also partly challenged, by the increased attention to processes of spatialisation, the drawing of borders and the production of territoriality which react to the increase of flows by trying to (re-)gain control in new ways.
Both dimensions of transnational history can best be decoded by turning to the actors who carry and represent the flows or develop and apply techniques of control. The age of transnationalisation is marked by actors constituting themselves across borders and thereby creating transnational spaces as the most relevant spaces for themselves.

This year’s Summer School of the Graduate Centre, Leipzig concentrates on the role of transnational actors in global political, economic, social and cultural processes of spatialisation. Without losing sight of the state apparatus, which has an important function/role in and for transnational processes, attention will be given to various cross border agents such as migrants, tourists, companies, political parties, trade unions, associations of entrepreneurs, political, religious and cultural movements, NGOs, academics, journalists, athletes, service(wo-)men and also transnational criminal groups. It is obvious that such a variety of organisational forms of intervention and their self-perception or self-presentation respectively demand a systematising discussion.
We envisage the Summer School to offer an appropriate framework for such a discussion, in which empirical findings and theoretical considerations can be presented with comparisons of various methodologies at its core.