HIPS Internship at Blinken OSA in January–February 2023

During the first two months of 2023, Blinken OSA is hosting a 5-week internship within the framework of the inter-university History in the Public Sphere (HIPS) program. The program organized by the Archives, titled The City and the Archive. Historical Interventions in the Public Record, includes lectures, guided walks in Budapest, and archival workshops.

Students participating in the two-year master program spend semesters at the Central European University (Vienna and Budapest), the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, the Università degli Studi di Firenze, and the NOVA University Lisbon. The 5-week internship at Blinken OSA, Budapest, concludes the first semester spent in Vienna at our parent institution, CEU, and consists of lectures, guided walks in Budapest, and archival workshops. The students will get acquainted with a critical toolkit that will allow them to deal with historical falsifications in the public sphere, from the urban landscape to archival corpora. The city of Budapest provides an opportunity for a concrete exploration of political strategies of deception, belonging to the dictatorial regimes of the 20th century up to the populist autocracies of current times. The Archive serves as a “source,” documenting sensitive topical issues; in a broader, heuristic sense, it is the laboratory where analogous issues related to the relationship between documents/traces, representations, and historical phenomena are analyzed.

The program is carried out by the research and archivist staff of Blinken OSA, also involving renowned guest lecturers, such as Pieter Lagrou, Pablo de Greiff, Stefano Bottoni, Jane Rogoyska, Zsuzsa Toronyi, József Mélyi, András Török. Students are required to produce short video pieces/podcasts in groups, which will be shared online later. The desired learning outcomes are the following: the students can learn the methodology of producing video pieces based on archival documents, they learn the problems associated with archival (re-)use, and acquire notions about memory politics and Central European historical issues.