Funded Fellowship Programs for Scholars and Artists in Budapest 2021

The International Visegrad Fund offers the Visegrad Scholarship at the Open Society Archives for international scholars and artists.

Visegrad Fund invites applicants from the fields of history, the arts, philosophy, and sociology to reflect on the conditions of knowledge production during and after the Cold War. Scholars and artists are invited to analyze the documentary practices of different agencies and persons on both sides of the Iron Curtain and assess the truth value of related documents/ artifacts.

Research Themes:

Applicant should consider the following reflexive questions when engaging with OSA collections:

• To what extent one can attempt to provide a truthful account of a historical event or problem based on the OSA collections? What do the sources highlight or obscure?
• What kind of truth regimes archives stood for in the past and what kind of investigation they can inform in the present?
• In what sense the “perspective” of the source (or the metadata connected to it) contribute to the understanding of the information it presents?
• What is the relevance of the gathered data (and metadata) for current debates and research?

Visegrad Fund also, recommends several thematic areas:

• Conceptualizing and reporting about opposition or social movements (selection and support for what counts as a "movement", "dissidence" or "non-conformism")
• Sociological data: relevance of polls, surveys, and statistics during socialism and after.
• Circuits of communication and (anti-)propaganda techniques: information gathering and classification, textual and visual dissemination (book programs, samizdat, TV monitoring, instructional and documentary movies)
• Problems of documentation and verification of human rights abuses.
• Representation and assessment of socio-economic issues: labor, standards of living, urbanization, education, religion
• Science and ideology: considerations regarding expert claims, efficiency, impact.
• Intellectual debates in a polarized world and their aftermath.
• Consequences of Cold War conceptual schemes and treatment of information on current economic and socio-political issues.
• Reflection on the (Cold War) receptions, instrumentalizations, and revisions of the history and the notion of the Revolution.
• The issue of historical credibility in Cold War archives.

The €2,000 fellowship is designed to pro­vide access to the archives, cover travel to/from Budapest, mod­est sub­sis­tence, and accom­mo­da­tion for a research period of two months. Scholarships for shorter peri­ods are pro-rated.

The invitation is not only addressed to scholars working specifically on Cold War topics, but to all those interested in theories of knowledge, who would use OSA documents as props for larger reflections and activist concerns.

Applicants, preferably but not exclusively, from a V4 country(four countries of Central Europe: Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia), may be researchers, students after their second degree carrying out research, or artists, journalists, academics, or both.

Fellowship Requirements:

While working on their own subject, fellows will have the opportunity to collaborate with OSA researchers and to transform their archival investigation into a full research experience. The fellows are invited to give a final presentation about their research findings at OSA and the ways in which the documents were relevant to their research. The presentations are organized within the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA lecture series and as such former Visegrad alumni and external guests can also attend. 

Assessment:

The Selection Committee will evaluate proposals on the strength of the professional quality and novelty of the research proposal, its relevance to the chosen topic, and the involvement of the OSA holdings in the research. In the case of equal scores, those from V4 countries have an advantage.

About Visegrad Fund:

The International Visegrad Fund is an international organization established and funded by the governments of the Czech Rep., Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. The fund promotes closer cooperation in the region through several grants and mobility programs.

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