Centre for Medieval Studies

RWP 1 is based on the premise that thinking is based on conflict, within oneself and with others. The conflict within us therefore belongs to the conditio humana and cannot be definitively eliminated but at most used to our advantage. To do this, we need to have discursive representations that allow us to develop and adequately manage conflict in thought, i.e. to make us resilient to its destructive forms, as the institution of so-called critical thinking attempts to do, not always successfully. Based on a broad conceptual, historical, legal, literary and narrative analysis of the conflictual nature of experience and conflict situations, specific representations that resolve conflict and contribute to strengthening social resilience will be elaborated and implemented.

The content of RWP9 is a comparative and trans-regional analysis of international developments in strategic regions (e.g., post-Soviet space, China, India, Latin America) from the perspective of the culture wars with the aim of contributing, through their contextualization, to the resilience and cohesion of Czech society and its ability to express itself outwards. Analysis will be crucial especially in the case of alternative modernizing visions towards liberal democracy, as can be observed for example in the Russian Federation or China, and their efforts to implement alternative modernity in other regions (Latin America, Africa), but also on the European continent (especially in Central Europe and by military force in Ukraine).

WP8 will analyse the causes and manifestations of social and political polarization – amplified by disruptive events (e.g., economic shocks, migration, war in Ukraine), which ultimately reduce resilience through the failure of society’s ability to moderate social conflicts. By analysing data from a panel survey (2024–2027) and a series of qualitative and experimental studies, this WP will examine how citizens react to disruptive changes; and will investigate how public institutions may reduce the negative consequences.

The aim of RWP7 is to enhance ecological resilience (taking into account social, biological and technological as well as material dimensions) and to analyse the possibilities of transition to more sustainable forms of society (including the economy and energy) through empirical investigation of the ambivalent role of technology as both a contributor to climate change and the associated societal challenges and as a tool for addressing them. An analysis of people’s responses to a technologically transformed world, particularly in the affective sphere, moving on a scale between ecological despair and technological optimism.

The aim of RWP 6 is to analyse the transformation of education systems in response to a series of disruptive events (pandemic, war in Ukraine, energy crisis) through the analysis of the nodal conflict constellations of relevant stakeholders entering the transformation processes (state administration, parents, students, private and non-profit sectors) with the aim of designing more effective interaction models.

RWP5 will conduct an experimental analysis of the impact of populist “framing” (framing bias/labelling) on individual attitudes (micro-level) and the spread of these attitudes in society (by experimental methods, agent-based network models, or possibly. Bayesian networks) depending on the algorithmic structure of social networks (macro level) with the aim of designing policies that, depending on age, gender, education, and general psychosocial characteristics, increase resilience to populist framing both at the individual and societal level.

RWP4 will use the methods and sources of historical sciences to strengthen existing resilience models by incorporating long-term (diachronic) analysis for the (Central) European region in order to not only gain a deeper understanding of current crises, but also to identify emerging societal threats, hazards and consequences that may remain hidden to synchronic research, even though resilience theories predict these processes of long duration (on the order of hundreds of years to millennia). They do so through (1) a comprehensive analysis of a wide range of disasters and crises (2) in the context of sufficiently diverse social constellations (3) over the long term.

RWP3 focuses on research on increasing social and individual resilience in the context of linguistic, dialectal, and experiential diversity and multilingualism by examining language-based social attitudes and prejudices towards speakers of foreign languages and towards speakers of Czech with foreign accents (preserving one’s own language as a manifestation of identity × accepting the majority language as a means of inclusion). Analysis of the factors that cause communication conflicts, as well as the ways in which people eliminate or overcome conflict, will lead to the preparation of society for linguistic diversity.

RWP 2 explores the process of increasing resilience through the prism of the formation of individual/group identities in modern, post-traditional societies in art (especially literature and theatre) and in contemporary spirituality (e.g., through the analysis of quasi-religious communities and their rituals, identity conspiracy narratives, etc.). The research takes place in a historical perspective determined mainly by the development of ethnic nationalism in Europe in the 18th–21st centuries. It focuses on the involvement of art and spirituality to this development, thus demonstrating their contribution to understanding contemporary identity conflicts in particular.