The blog post was written by Angelika Zanki, research facilitator and manager in Spectral Recycling grant.

What do fingerprints, migration and Jacques Derrida have in common?

Starting with the invention of fingerprint identification by Juan Vucetich’s, Sherlock Holmes from Hvar, Angelika moves into a haunting reflection on Croatian emigration to South America, inspired by Derrida’s concept of hauntology.

The homeland appears here as a specter – geographically absent, yet powerfully present through language, rituals, music, religion, and religion in the collective memory of a diaspora. How do diaspora communities sustain an imagined Croatia that shapes everyday life and can even mobilize political action, especially in moments of crisis like the war of the 1990s?

This is a story about how the past returns, not as something fully present, but as a force that still acts, insists, and shapes the present.

Link to the blog post you can find here.

Building on our interest in memory, materiality, and transformation, we decided to revisit two canonical texts of memory studies by reading and discussing Paul Connerton’s “Seven Types of Forgetting” alongside the opening chapter of Kenneth Foote’s “Shadowed Ground.” Both texts propose analytical typologies that proved productive for thinking through the dynamics of forgetting, reuse, and normalization that are central to our research.

A significant part of the discussion focused on the usefulness and limitations of typology as an analytical tool. Connerton’s attempt to systematize forms of forgetting is a classic contribution that invites critique as much as application. Foote’s work, grounded in empirical observation of sites of violence in the United States, offered us a more spatial and practice-oriented framework, prompting debate about the transferability of his categories beyond the American context. We wondered if typologies created to embrace sites of memory are useful for intimate objects that are at the center of our interest.

We also explored how both texts intersect with our ongoing interest in recycling, reuse, and transformation. Foote’s notions of obliteration and rectification prompted discussion about different ways of dealing with sites of violence, and about whether some of these modes we can understand as forms of recycling. This, in turn, led us to reflect on the kinds of effort, recognition, and indifference that such practices involve.

Finally, we connected the readings to our own fieldwork, testing Connerton’s and Foote’s categories against concrete examples from European contexts. These discussions reinforced our shared sense that typologies function less as closed systems than as points of departure. They are useful for thinking with, but always in need of revision when confronted with specific historical and spatial conditions.

In the early 19th century, some thinkers dreamed of uniting all Slavs… or at least federating them. Panslavism, as this intellectual and political current was called, was a bold attempt. However, along the way, it encountered many obstacles, both internal and external. In episode 104 of Czechostacja, a podcast hosted by Jakub Medek, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska talks about the history of panslavism and Czech entanglements with it, Russia’s role in these ideas, Polish and Slovak perspectives, and why many believers quickly lost their illusions. She also examines what remains of Slavic unity today—in a world shaped by war and modern nation-states.

Link to the podcast you can find here.

In early 2026, Karina visited the Sudetendeutsches Museum in Munich. She took the train ride across borders only to learn more about Bohemian history as the institution serves as an enclave of Czech heritage within Bavaria. During her visit, the museum featured an exhibition devoted to another notable native of Vratislavice/Maffersdorf, the renowned automotive engineer Ferdinand Porsche, who grew up just some hundred years and a few hundred meters from Karina’s. She was particularly interested in comparing the Munich exhibition with the one at Porsche’s birthplace in Vratislavice, which is run by the Škoda car producing company (nowadays part of the VW concern). Whereas the Vratislavice exhibition focuses exclusively on Porsche’s technical achievements, the Sudetendeutsches Museum also addresses the political implications of his work for the Third Reich. Both exhibitions illustrate how technology and technical innovation can serve as a unifying and non-threatening narrative for interpreting the past.