Throwback to the first TUD Summer School on the history of violence

Violence is a multi-faceted phenomenon that appears in a wide variety of, what would seem at first glance, unrelated contexts. Whether it be at the state level in colonial practices and political discourse, or at the more personal level of drink-related violence, there is a conceptual thread that runs through each expression consistently, allowing researchers to work with violence as a broad theme across time and space.

With a thirst to explore this further, a Summer School on the history of violence was held at TU Dresden between 2-8 July 2023 in cooperation with The University of Warwick and within the EUTOPIA initiative, in order to gain an interdisciplinary insight into the histories of violence while encouraging collaboration and knowledge sharing across the partner institutions. The workshop was primarily targeted at senior undergraduate students, and with the enthusiastic attendance of 26 students from seven European universities the summer school demonstrated there is a considerable demand for such a platform of learning and exchange.

Given the fact that it was the EUTOPIA initiative’s first summer school in Dresden, the organisers had the freedom to be creative with the structure and direction of the program. This also meant though that there was the added responsibility of creating systems and logistics relating to the project’s management. The organisers therefore had to experiment with various systems and tools on a trial-and-error basis. This made the process very valuable in terms of creating a template and body of lessons learned for future EUTOPIA Summer schools to draw upon.

•  Learn more on TUD website
• Listen to the podcast (in German) released on this occasion. The English transcription is available here.