An overview of the 3 days of the meeting
The International Congress “Thinking the 20th Century. Perspectives on the 21st Century” brought together researchers and guest speakers such as Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Lília Moritz Schwarcz, Odd Arne Westad and Vanessa Schwartz to discuss and reflect on the 20th century and its implications for the 21st century.
The guest speakers introduced the topics of culture, history, politics and economics. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, for example, addressed the impact of the capitalist system on contemporary subjectivities, saying that only collective desertion and refusal can be the path to change against today’s “abyss”. Lília Moritz Schwarcz, in turn, spoke of the great “marks” that marked the beginning the start of a new century, such as the great wars, the so-called “Spanish Flu”, which at the beginning of the last century was accompanied by a boom in the sale of chloroquine, and how we were then living in an anachronistic time of fabricated news and photographs manipulated by authoritarian regimes, drawing a very clear parallel with the current century.
Odd Arne Westad looked at the case of the Chinese economic reforms in the last years of the 20th century and how they have completely reshaped the global economic market at the beginning of the new century, while Vanessa Schwartz talked about the concept of time in the 20th century, and in particular how cinema changed the perception of time, calling the 1950s “The Jet Age”, with a strong influence on contemporary society.
The congress was also an opportunity for researchers to present their work and to exchange ideas and opinions with other researchers and students. All participants discussed relevant aspects of 20th century history in their various fields of research: history and memory, art history, cultural, artistic and literary studies, philosophy, communication sciences, pedagogy, digital humanities, economics and social sciences, climate and environmental studies, natural sciences and technology, urban and mobility studies.
CEIS20 and the Scientific Committee of the Congress would like to thank FEUC for hosting this event and for the participation of all those involved, especially the four guest speakers and Cláudia Cavadas (Vice-Rector for Research and the 3rd Cycle, UC), Delfim Leão (Vice-Rector for Culture and Open Science, UC) and Álvaro Garrido (Director of the Faculty of Economics, UC).
We would like to remind you that the call for papers for the journal Estudos do Século XX, on the same theme as the Congress, is open until 31 March. Papers will be accepted in English, Portuguese, French or Spanish.
