Making Refuge: Place and Space in Refugee History (Programme)
Prague, 11-12 April 2024
Venue: Vila Lanna, V Sadech 1/1, 160 00 Prague 6, Czech Republic
ERC Consolidator project Unlikely Refuge? Refugees and Citizens in East-Central Europe in the 20th Century, Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Refugees in Europe 1914–1923 Research Group, Faculty of History, Jagiellonian University in Cracow, supported by Research University – Excellence Initiative
Registration (in-person only): unref-public@mua.cas.cz
Thursday, 11 April 2024
09:30–10:00 Introductory remarks (Michal Frankl, Kamil Ruszała)
10:00–11:00 Panel 1: Microhistory of child refugeedom (Chair: Michal Frankl)
Nikola Tohma, “We were like princes…”? Socialist Czechoslovak children’s homes as refugee spaces
Lorraine McEvoy, ‘There was a Dutch camp named “BROOMLEE”, whose leaders were all very comely’: Temporary reception centres as places of meaning in post-WWII humanitarian hospitality schemes for children
11:00–11:30 Coffee break
11:30–13:00 Panel 2: Resettlement and imagined community spaces (Chair: Martin Klečacký)
Pauli Aro, “Out of the barracks … and back to agriculture”! Ethnic German expellees as farmers and settlers in post-1945 Austria
Cristian Cercel, From refugees to settlers: Danube Swabians in southern Brazil
Fabio Santos, The coloniality of migration in the Caribbean: Offshoring Haitian refugee detention to Puerto Rico, 1981-1982
13:00–14:30 Lunch (Vila Lanna)
14:30–15:30 Panel 3: Refugee trajectories and mapping of refuge (Chair: Elisabeth Czerniak)
Na'ama Seri-Levi, Mapping wandering routes: Exile and nomadism among Polish-Jewish refugees during World War II
Konstantin Schischka, Researching displacement, refuge and resettlement between time, space and administration
15:30–16:00 Coffee break
16:00–17:30 Panel 4: Liminal and in-between spaces of refuge (Chair: Lidia Zessin-Jurek)
Irial Glynn, Using the sea as a space and place of analysis for refugee history
Ines Koeltzsch and Michala Lônčíková, Coping with space scarcity: Space management and refugees’ experiences on the Danube steamer Pentcho (1940)
Michal Frankl, Beyond the nation-state: No man’s land and Jewish refugees at the end of the 1930s
19:00 Dinner (Vila Lanna)
Friday, 12 April 2024
9:30–10:30 Panel 5: Child Displacement and Resettlement (Chair: Kateřina Králová)
Julia Reinke, A Refugee Town in the “Polish Wild West” – Zgorzelec as Place of Refuge for Greek Civil War Refugees in early Postwar Poland
Raphaela Monika Bolwein, “Those difficult to resettle […].” – Making space for the “residual cases” within displaced children in specialised installations in the post-WWII period
10:30–11:00 Coffee break
11:00 – 12:30 Panel 6: Camps as refugee spaces (Chair: Anca Cretu)
Kamil Ruszała, The First World War Refugee Camps Experience in Austria-Hungary – Disparate Perspectives from Below
Benjamin Thomas White, European refugees in Egypt (1944–48) and the stuff of the refugee camp
Catrina Langenegger, More than a Map: Swiss military refugee camps during the Second World War
12:30–14:00 Lunch (Vila Lanna)
14:00–15:30 Panel 7: Refugees in the urban space (Chair: Petra Svoljšak)
Saeed Ahmad, A tale of two temples: Producing refugee spaces in postcolonial Delhi
Giota Tourgeli, Negotiating the urban space: The Asia Minor refugee associations and their resettlement strategies (1922-1932)
Dimitra Glenti, Shifting spaces: Exploring refugee housing arrangements and urbantransformation in interwar Lesvos
15:30–16:00 Coffee break
16:00–17:00 Panel 8: Making refuge in the context of borders and nation-states (Chair: Keely Stauter-Halsted)
Ana Guardiăo, Refuge within contested (post)imperial spaces: Refugee movements of the Kenyan, Algerian and Angolan independence wars (1951-1961)
Arnab Dutta, The spatial scale of displacement and refugee political thought: Jewish exiles between Central Europe and British Bengal, 1930s-40s
17:00 Closing remarks: Peter Gatrell; Comments: Michal Frankl, Kamil Ruszała