Summer School Reflections
Dear Editors,
Thanks for collecting these impressions.
As for the bridging event: I very much enjoyed to see so many faces – familiar ones and new ones. The exchange in the small group added substantially to the experience. The dominant feeling was joy to see the summer school so much alive.
As for the summer school: Together with David Glyn I was as the member of the MC responsible from the GASi side for the pilot phase of the summer school (the first three summer schools – Belgrade, Prague and Athens) under the presidency of Robi Friedman. We wanted to see, if it could work out – and it did. Each summer school had its own flavour – mostly entrenched by collective traumata.
Belgrade was clearly a post-traumatic society, young people occupied with the question of whether to stay or to leave a country, that seemingly had not many perspectives to offer. Prague gave us a glimpse of the communication style of a post-totalitarian society, where the question, what is allowed to say in public was still lingering. The atmosphere in Athens still was coloured by the rage and despair that European austerity politics evoked.
Additionally, and embedded in these emotional backgrounds, each summer school had its special challenges. In Belgrade it was the breakdown of a staff member in the large group. The group had to be interrupted, the colleague was taken into emergency care – and then the group gathered again for a first debriefing, giving a first space for all the feelings and fantasies around this incident.
In Prague we had to deal with the mourning of Marie Hoskova, a very esteemed and beloved Czech colleague, member of the local organizing staff, who died ten days before the summer school started, finalizing her lecture still on her deathbed – it was read then by her colleague Ludek Vrba.
In Athens the overall atmosphere was full of tensions, also brought in from the Brexit vote (three weeks before we started), the Islamist attack in Nice with 86 deaths on 14th July (on the second day of the summer school) and the attempted coup d’état in Turkey on the 15/16th July, just before the end of the summer school. Questions of boundaries, safety and leadership were all around.
The following summer schools in Ljubljana and Rijeka had different challenges, and the next ones of course again will be different.
It was hard emotional work. But I’m glad having done my share bringing these wonderful events to life. They offered intense emotional encounters, understandings and even misunderstandings brought us closer, friendships emerged.
We started with 34 participants in Belgrade and ended up with 80 in Athens. With the end of my term in the MC in 217 the responsibility for the project was handed over to Tija Despotovic and Bessy Karagianni – two colleagues who were very much involved in the development of the summer school during the pilot phase. Now they step down and Marit Joffe-Milstein and Andrew Mallet are to follow. I wish them all the best – being very confident, that they will take good care of the meanwhile adolescent ‘baby’.
I attach to this email a commented version of the summer school statement for publication. In this document David and I tried to lay down the principles that guided us, when organising the summer schools. They are not written in stone – though it might be useful to know, what the original intentions were.
Warm regards,
Regine Scholz
regine.scholz@regine-scholz.de