Zukunftsperspektiven für die deutschsprachige Slavistik

The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine marks a turning point in Europe’s more recent history—a turning point that not only affects politics, economics, and society, but also science. For Slavic studies, in particular, this results in a break with the discipline’s own self-conception. The Scoping Workshop takes the war in Ukraine as a starting point to discuss the discipline’s current challenges while also generally reflect its profile and perspectives in a changed and continuously changing world and academic landscape. The program consists of these two major subject areas.

Regarding the first subject area, the workshop aims to facilitate the framework for an in-depth discussion of basic questions that have become more important and must be discussed more thoroughly as a result of the war in Ukraine. Thus, the workshop also reacts to a significantly increased consciousness within Slavic studies: the discipline understands that it must, in part, question and newly define its own established perspective on Eastern, Middle, and South-Eastern Europe as well as its own self-conception.

Regarding the second subject area, the workshop aims to explore the possibilities and problems of current developments in digitization, internationalization, as well as within new research paradigms for Slavic studies research and teaching.

With both its subject areas, the workshop pursues two major goals: on the one hand, it aims to determine the discipline’s position, a necessary step given the upheavals and changes in the world as well as within science throughout the last months and years. On the other hand, the workshop will attempt to work out specific perspectives for development which would enable the German-language Slavic studies to further provide an up-to-date, high-quality, and internationally feasible research and teaching of high academic as well as social-political relevance.

The workshop’s results will be recorded in a position paper.