Visegrad Scholarships, Open Society Archives in Budapest, Hungary (2015-2016)

The International Visegrad Fund in cooperation with the Open Society Archivum Budapest offers research fellowships at the Open Society Archives (OSA) at the Central European University in Budapest. As part of the joint project, 12 fellowships will be awarded annually to selected scholars, researchers or journalists from the Visegrad Group (V4) countries and 3 fellowships annually to non-V4 applicants. The fellowships will be given on a competitive basis to scholars/artists/journalists who wish to conduct research at OSA, and whose current research projects are relevant to the holdings and the given research priorities of the Fund and the Archivum.

Suggested research topics for 2015:
- The informational environment of the period of the Cold War, East and West;
- History of information science during the Cold War;
- History of information gathering during the Cold War (scientific, diplomatic, clandestine, public opinion research, intelligence, party reports, etc);
- Public opinion research East and West during the Cold War (audience research in the West and reports on the “public mood” behind the Iron Curtain);
- The consequences of limited available information on “the other” in the Cold War;
- The perception and construction of the “other” as reflected through cataloguing and data classification practices before 1989;
- The impact of cybernetics on informational and archival practices;
- The techniques and role of gathering and using information in the planning process and for social engineering purposes both East and West;
- The nature of the propaganda (including film) archive and its impact on (planning and manipulating) political and social processes;
- The role of propaganda during the Cold War;
- “Manufacturing objectivity” (how archival “facts” were used in order to create the objectivity effect of information);
- How political events and professional scholarly practices in the “real world” of the Cold War had an impact on the documentary practices, the categorical changes, the perception and interpretation of information and the documents.

The list does not exclude those applicants, who would like to pursue their own research that is different from the current research focus.

Further details:
http://www.mladiinfo.eu