The CoMoDe team cordially invites you to the workshop “Roads to Happiness” held by the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient in corporation with the Humboldt University Berlin, happening 16th to the 18th of March.
Next to many other exciting and diverse panel discussions, Lyubomir Pozharliev will contribute a talk on the topic of Eastern Trolleybuses vs. Western E-Buses whilst putting an emphasis on decolonial insights from Sofia. The talk will be part of the decolonial panel which is being held on Friday, the 17th of March, from 4 to 5 pm.
The workshop program is convened by Malte Fuhrmann and Hannes Grandits.
Download the full program here: Roads to Happiness Program
Traffic infrastructure has played a central role in Southeast Europe’s political discourse for almost two hundred years. Roads, canals, and later railways were intimately linked with the enlightened absolutist promise of enabling “the pursuit of happiness” (in English liber- alism), “Glückseligkeit” (in Austrian cameralism), or “refah” (in Ottoman reformism). provide for both, began to inform Habsburg policy as of the eighteenth century and became pop- ular in the Ottoman Empire, its breakaway provinces and successor states, by the 1830s. And also, for almost two hundred years, the promise of infrastructure development and its failures have provoked resistance and Eigen-Sinn (self-interested adaptations), both on the epistemic level and in direct action. The conference will address the relationship of traffic infrastructure to power and its impact, among others, on discourse, culture, and everyday life in Southeast Europe from 1800 until the recent past.
The event is free and open to the public.
Workshop: 16 – 18 March 2023
Humboldt University Berlin
Unter den Linden 6
Room 2249
We are excited to see you there!