Summer School “Eastern Europe” started – University of Innsbruck
On Monday, July 11, 2022, the first summer school started at the University of Innsbruck Eastern Europe. Under the slogan Find a common language 25 students from Ukraine and 25 from Austria will spend two intensive weeks together.
In the academic year 2021, we succeeded in bringing employees from the University of Innsbruck to our university and establishing it as a summer school. Funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF), the so-called summer colleges aim to support students in learning foreign languages and to create a space for intercultural encounters. Due to the war waged by Russia against Ukraine, the directors of the Innsbruck College, Dr. Eva Binder and Prof. Dr. Jürgen Fuchsbauer from the Institute for Slavic Studies decided at short notice to hold the college in Innsbruck and to invite students who had fled from the Ukraine to attend. Supported by the committed team of the Eastern Europe Center, it was possible to put together an appealing program and to focus in particular on what we have in common and what connects us across national and linguistic borders.
Under the slogan Find a common language 25 students from Ukraine and 25 students from Austria will spend two intensive weeks together from July 10th to 23rd, 2022 to learn languages (German or Ukrainian or Russian) and to attend workshops and lectures on social, cultural and historical topics. On the one hand, experts from outside could be won as workshop leaders and speakers, such as the curator Iryna Kurhanska (currently Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen), the literary scholar Miriam Finkelstein, who teaches at the University of Graz, the historian and Holocaust researcher Nikolaus Hagen or the Head of the OeAD office in Lviv Andreas Wenninger. On the other hand, we owe the diversity and breadth of the workshop program to the great support we received from our colleagues in the Faculty of Philology and Cultural Studies and the Faculty of Philosophy and History. In this way, the students gain insights into various research areas, such as spatial imagination and cultures of remembrance in Eastern Europe (Gernot Howanitz, Ellinor Forster), global history and African educational migration (Eric Burton), onomastics (Emanuel Klotz) or regional history and tourism (Kurt Scharr). The workshops and lectures are held in the various languages of the college, multilingual or in English.
The scientific and cultural program is supplemented by city tours and museum visits, which focus on Innsbruck and Tyrol as a linguistic and cultural intersection between North and South – as a historical contact but also conflict zone. A highlight of the program WILL be a joint excursion to the university center in Obergurgl in the Tyrolean high mountains — trusting that the mountains are a special place of encounter, where borders are literally overcome and what is common and connecting WILL BE trusted.
(Eva Binder)