Center for Research on Social Memory
Our Center conducts research on how groups and societies make sense of their pasts. Focusing on East-Central Europe, we cover a broad range of topics including the memories of wars and socio-political transformations; memory politics and history policies; mnemonic structures and memory activists. We try to understand how history has been used, and for what purposes, by politicians, educators, heritage practitioners and other memory makers.
The Center is hosted by the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw and continues work of Social Memory Laboratory created in 2010.
Publications
Our publications, mainly in Polish and English, cover wide range of uses of the past in nation-building, religious, cultural, and economic processes in East-Central Europe.
Projects
The researchers of the Center pursue individual projects of their own choice and have been also involved in several international and national collaborative projects.
Education
Each year we offer several courses related to memory studies and cultural heritage for BA and MA students at the University of Warsaw (in Polish or English). We also collaborate with MA and doctoral students in our research projects.
Events
Churches and the War-Time “Spiritual Decolonization” in Ukraine
2025-01-21
– 2025-01-21
09:30
– 11:30
- ONLINE
- English
We kindly invite you to a seminar with Andriy Fert "Churches and the War-Time “Spiritual Decolonization" in Ukraine". The meeting will be chaired by Zuzanna Bogumił.
The seminar will take place online, 21 January at 9:30am CET.
Please register in order to participate: https://shorturl.at/1IlwyAbstract:
The colonial nature of the subordination of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to the Patriarch of Moscow came to the fore in the late 2010s, prompted by the state campaign to gain official recognition of ecclesiastical independence from the Russian church administration. Unsurprisingly, with the Russian full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the issue of coping with the legacy of Russian colonialism in church matters gained significant relevance for Ukrainian lawmakers and civil society activists. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) faced increasing critique for spreading Russian propaganda in the form of religious practices, particularly venerating saints such as Russian emperor Nicolas II and medieval prince Alexander Nevsky or refusing to hold communal prayers in Ukrainian language in lieu of Old Slavonic. This presentation explores rank-and-file church members' responses to decolonization discourse by focusing on (un)changing saints' veneration practices and language issues at the grassroots level.
The colonial nature of the subordination of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to the Patriarch of Moscow came to the fore in the late 2010s, prompted by the state campaign to gain official recognition of ecclesiastical independence from the Russian church administration. Unsurprisingly, with the Russian full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the issue of coping with the legacy of Russian colonialism in church matters gained significant relevance for Ukrainian lawmakers and civil society activists. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) faced increasing critique for spreading Russian propaganda in the form of religious practices, particularly venerating saints such as Russian emperor Nicolas II and medieval prince Alexander Nevsky or refusing to hold communal prayers in Ukrainian language in lieu of Old Slavonic. This presentation explores rank-and-file church members' responses to decolonization discourse by focusing on (un)changing saints' veneration practices and language issues at the grassroots level.
Andriy Fert holds PhD in history; he is the head of the Center for the Study of Religion at Kyiv School of Economics. Recently, he was a research fellow at the Center for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) in Berlin (2023 – 24) and principal investigator for Ukraine in the research project Postsecular Approach to Memory Processes in Central-Eastern Europe (2023–2024). Since 2017, he has been working for the Institute for International Cooperation of the Deutscher Volkshochschul-Verband e.V. (DVV), coordinating projects related to history education in secondary schools in Ukraine. He teaches at Kyiv School of Economics.
About the seminar series:
Series „Postcolonial perspectives–postdependance entanglements” is organized in frames of two research projects sponsored by the National Science Centre, Poland “Remembering Soviet repressions in the post-multiple colonial RussianFar East”,no. 2020/39/B/HS6/02809 and SocialMemory and the Post-ImperialRussianHeritage in Poland no. 2021/41/B/HS3/00852.
Series „Postcolonial perspectives–postdependance entanglements” is organized in frames of two research projects sponsored by the National Science Centre, Poland “Remembering Soviet repressions in the post-multiple colonial RussianFar East”,no. 2020/39/B/HS6/02809 and SocialMemory and the Post-ImperialRussianHeritage in Poland no. 2021/41/B/HS3/00852.
About Us
We are a group of interdisciplinary scholars working at the intersection of sociology, history, social anthropology, and cultural studies.
