Starts: Jun 15, 2009 10:00

Ends: Jun 15, 2009 16:00

The seminar is organised by the Finnish - Hungarian research project Nations and their others - Finns and Hungarians since 1900, which is funded by Academy of Finland, and which closely co-operates with the Collegium Budapest. The multi-disciplinary (political science, history, literature, cultural policy) project focuses on the discourses of 'us and them' and 'otherness', and explores the representations and discourse of nationalism and nationhood in Finland and Hungary.

The sessions discuss the questions of otherness and identities, as well as the setting of 'us and them' both from historical and contemporary perspectives, either as case studies or as broader theoretical and methodological studies.

Program

10 a.m. Opening by the project leader Heino Nyyssönen

10.15 a.m. - 1 p.m. Session I

Perspectives to identities, images and otherness in Finland and Hungary in the 1920s and 1930s

Chair: Heino Nyyssönen

Commentator: professor Attila Pók, the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Science

Mari Vares (Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Jyväskylä, Finland):
Geography and nation. Representations of 'the space of a nation' in Finland and Hungary, c. 1917-1945.

Gábor Egry (Research Fellow, the Institute for Political History, Budapest):
"Strangers of our own". Borders, differences, concepts of identity and otherness regarding Hungary and the Hungarian minorities in the light of everyday experiences of young Transylvanian intellectuals in Hungary in the thirties.

Coffee break

Vesa Vares (Senior Fellow, University of Turku, Finland):
"Not ripe for democracy". Finnish identity and the Eastern European "Other" in the 1920s and 1930s.

Árpád Welker (PhD CEU):
Others propagating us: Finnish decorations to Hungarian citizens between the World Wars.

Lunch 1 -2 p.m.

2 - 4 p.m. Session II

Discourses of us and them in contemporary history, politics and culture

Chair: Árpád Welker

Heino Nyyssönen (Senior Fellow, University of Tampere, Finland): Worlds according to János Kádár and Urho Kekkonen

Hajnalka Makra (PhD candidate, University of Helsinki, Finland):
Us and our advanced traditions. Literature politics in 1950's in Hungary.
(Mi és haladó hagyományaink. Irodalompolitika az 1950-es években Magyarországon.)

Emilia Palonen (Senior Lecturer, University of Jyväskylä, Finland): Consensus and polarisation: us and them in contemporary Finnish and Hungarian politics.