Joint Budapest Fellowship on the topic of Falsifying the Future

Following the successful launch of its inaugural fellowship program Revisionism and Falsification, Evidence and Proof for the academic year 2023/24, the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS CEU) together with the Democracy Institute (DI) and the Blinken OSA Archivum (OSA) at the Budapest site of CEU are pleased to continue their joint fellowship program. The new call for applications for the academic year 2024/25 focuses on the topic of Falsifying the Future.

The three Budapest-based units of CEU invite applications for their joint fellowship call. In various capacities, the Democracy Institute, the Institute for Advanced Study and the Open Society Archive are engaged in a multi-year research, teaching, and public program series on issues related to historical revisionism. The present call focuses on one important aspect of revisionism, the projection of either a fearful or reassuring future with an eye on immediate political profiteering.

We invite scholars and artists from all disciplines and artistic fields who are interested in exploring the extrapolation of the consequences of ideologically or politically selected events of the past and the present, or misrepresentations and revisions of history, in the service of constructing an invented, ideologically sanitized and politically marketable future.

Going beyond textual narratives, many of these revisionist projects have visual and spatial dimensions as well. A spectacular manifestation of this manipulation concerns the urban landscape of illiberalism. Highly ideologized projections of the past and the future are employed for the purpose of destroying the public sphere by reframing the symbolic and spatial setup of key urban sites. Recent examples range from Kossuth Square and the Castle district in Budapest to Skopje 2014, or the New Parliament House in New Delhi. We are interested in receiving applications which aim at discovering and analyzing the tools, techniques and methods of both the creation, visual and spatial representation, and the ways of transmission of a politically bespoke future.

The call for academic year 2024-2025 is closed.