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In this blog post, Michal Korhel explores the March of Gratitude dedicated to the Slovak National Uprising (SNP) as a present-day form of commemoration that blends physical participation with mediated remembrance. Drawing on participant observation and informal conversations with attendees, he reflects on how walking through historically significant landscapes can foster a form of experiential memory. At the same time, this dimension of memory often remains subtle and unarticulated.

Michal points to a tension between immediate, lived experience and the symbolic frameworks that seek to give the event a clear commemorative meaning. He suggests that the significance of the march tends to emerge retrospectively, if it emerges at all, rather than being fully realized in the moment of participation.

Link to the blog post you can find here.

In February, our team had the pleasure of hosting a seminar with Brett Ashley Kaplan, Professor and Conrad Humanities Scholar in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. During the seminar, our guest presented not only a portion of her research but also offered insight into the creative process behind her recent book on the now-vanished village of Seneca Village, located in the nineteenth century on the grounds of what is today Central Park in New York City.

Together, we reflected on what “haunting” truly means—whether it should be understood solely as a feature associated with figures (“human” ghosts), or whether it may also belong to objects. This question resonated particularly strongly in the context of our project, which explores the agency of things and the material traces of the past. The conversation then expanded to the issue of memory tied to specific spaces—how bringing new information about the past to light affects contemporary communities and what kinds of reactions it can provoke. We also considered the differences between the work of writers and scholars—how both groups gather and interpret data, construct narratives, and combine facts with imagination.

For our team, the seminar only broadened our research perspective but also opened up new questions about the relationship between place, memory, and that which—though seemingly absent—continues to shape the present. We particularly appreciated that our guest introduced us to the context of New York City, with its entangled memories of Indigenous and Black communities, erased from the white history.

Is there a mathematical formula for the most cohesive territorial shape a state can have? In the Czech literary magazine “Tvar”, our PI, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska, explores this very question in her essay on postwar Polish efforts to conceptualize such a model.

The whole issue of the magazine, titled The Polish Ends of the World, is devoted to recent Polish literary attempts to answer the question about geographical and cultural scope of Poland as Central European state. Karolina engages with this theme as well, and mentions the work we are doing within the Spectral Recycling project!

A link to the full text you can find here.

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.

Call for Submissions – EASA 2026 Conference, panel P053: Entangled Ruins: Polarised Temporalities and the Afterlives of Decay

We warmly invite scholars and researchers to submit proposals for Panel P053, convened by our PI, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska and Václav Sixta from the Charles University, at the EASA 2026 Conference.

The panel explores ruins as powerful materialisations of tension between decay and renewal, loss and endurance. Ruins reveal collisions between past and future and expose polarised temporalities shaping contemporary worlds, while also opening spaces for care, reflection, and re-imagined relations.

Focusing on the social, political, and material afterlives of decay, the panel will examine ruination as a dynamic and relational process: one that highlights contested values and unequal power, yet also gestures toward new possibilities beyond binary thinking.

Aligned with the conference theme “Anthropology: Possibilities in a Polarised World,” organizers welcome anthropological, ethnographic, geographical, theoretical, and creative contributions engaging with ruins, memory, heritage, materiality, and temporal entanglements.

Suggested keywords:
Ruins and Ruination · Temporalities · Memory and Heritage · Materiality and Decay · Anthropocene · Entanglement · Afterlives of Ruins

More information and submission details you can find here.

The popular conviction, popularized by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, is that vampires live primarily in Transylvania. However, as Josef Váchal, a Czech writer, visual artist, and book printer, sought to demonstrate, the main headquarters of these creatures lies elsewhere: in Slovakia.

Karolina discovered this book during one of her archival searches at the Museum of Czech Literature in Prague. She proposed discussing it among our team, particularly because the narrative is set not only in Slovakia in general but also in Hauerland, a region studied by both Michal and Karina.

Over the course of the seminar, the reading gradually shifted from a search for ghosts and supernatural beings to a critical conversation about Czech colonialism in Slovakia during the interwar period. How does a Czech visitor behave in Slovakia—as a tourist and as a keen observer of social life? And how did such encounters unfold during the First Czechoslovak Republic? Can we read Váchal’s text as an ethnographic source? These were the guiding questions of our discussion.

Although the text was not an easy read, we welcomed its depictions of the region and the opportunity to approach our case studies from yet another angle. This time, the discussion opened up perspectives drawn from tourism studies and postcolonial theory.

In his commentary, Michal analyzes the return of the Beneš Decrees to contemporary Slovak politics and law through the lens of hauntology. He argues that today the decrees function less as valid legal norms and more as a “specter” of the past that reappears in property disputes and political crises of identity. Although they are largely exhausted in legal terms, the Beneš Decrees remain symbolically powerful and are politically instrumentalized, particularly by the government, which presents them as an untouchable foundation of statehood. Michal also points to the difference between the Czech and Slovak contexts: while in the Czech Republic the decrees functioned mainly as a one-off political symbol, in Slovakia they return systematically and have tangible practical consequences. In conclusion, Michal emphasizes that instead of becoming a taboo, the “specter must be listened to” – that is, the historical and moral problematic nature of the decrees must be openly acknowledged and their legacy translated into the language of a twenty-first-century constitutional state, so that the past ceases to automatically determine the present.

Link to the text you can find here.