Balkan Express 2023: Between Orientalism and Occidentalism

The conference Balkan Express 2023: Between Orientalism and Occidentalism is organized by the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University and the Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences (Zora Hesová, M.A., Ph.D.), the Czech National Committee of Balkan Scholars – Czech Association for Slavonic, Balkan and Byzantine Studies (ČSSBBS). It will be held from 10 to 11 November 2023 at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University. The conference has been supported by Strategy AV21 - Top Research in the Public Interest, a research program of the Czech Academy of Sciences and also the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA).

Programme     Conference Report EN     Conference Report CZ

In 2023, the 7th International Balkan Studies Conference “Balkan Express” aims to rethink the Balkans through concepts of Orientalism and Occidentalism from the 19th century until the present day. In a broader sense, at the center of attention are the mechanisms of integration and disintegration, the social construction of local, national, and European identities in Southeast Europe, and the discourses that further shaped these processes. The 7th “Balkan Express” conference would like to revisit the notions, practices, and discourses of orientalism and occidentalism from the interdisciplinary perspective (historical, anthropological, political, and economic perspectives). The goal of the interdisciplinary approach is to improve the communication between the individual disciplines and, thus, enable different fields of knowledge production. Last but not least, the conference aims to provide an innovative perspective on the region, which at present (as well as in the past) becomes an unstable and potentially explosive space where Europe (West), Russia, and the Islamic world compete for political, economic and cultural influences. 

Foto: Domingo Mohedano, Markéta Slavková, Boris Skenderija