Event’s Category: Seminar

Abstract:
From the very first days of their large-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian invaders have made exceptional efforts to interact with the war memorial landscape of the newly occupied territories. They have destroyed some of these memorials, renovated others, and built new monuments amid continued fighting. They also used war memorials in countless propaganda photos and videos aimed for a domestic audience and largely escaping Western attention. Mykola Homanyuk spent several months in occupied Kherson conducting wartime on-site ethnography and collected sources on the change of the monumentscape. The book shows how Russian invaders believed their own propaganda about Soviet war memorials being mistreated in Ukraine, and what they did when they discovered well-maintained monuments on the ground. More broadly, it explores the connection between monuments and territorial claims by irredentist empires, as well as the enduring role of monuments in sustaining imperial conquest or, in other cases, colonization.
We recommend you to read the introduction and first chapter beforehand (pp.1-38). Book is available online here: https://ceupress.com/book/monuments-and-territory

Mischa Gabowitsch, historian and sociologist, is Professor of Multilingual and Transnational Post-Soviet Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books and thematic journal issues in various languages on protest and social movements as well as memory and commemoration. These include, in English, The Russian Field: Views from Abroad (2011), Protest in Putin’s Russia (2016), Replicating Atonement: Foreign Models in the Commemoration of Atrocities (2017), The Sociology of Belarusian Protest (2021), Beyond Representation: The Visual Analysis of History Textbooks and Other Educational Media (2023), and Protest and Authoritarian Reaction in Belarus (2023).

Mykola Homanyuk, sociologist, geographer and theatermaker, is an associate professor at Kherson State University. Since 2022 he has been a member of the Prisma Ukraïna: War, Migration, and Memory research group at Forum Transregionale Studien and a member of the Contested Ukraine: Military Patriotism, Russian Influence, and Implications for European Security research group. Mykola is the author of numerous articles on mental mapping and toponomy, ethnic studies, as well as memory and commemoration. As a theatermaker he runs the Kherson Theatre Lab and directs documentary theater productions. In 2018 he was awarded the ADAMI Media Prize for Cultural Diversity in Eastern Europe.

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.

 The seminar will take place online, 25 March at 9:30am CET.

 Please register in order to participate: https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../9J2PEAYfRBaKCi2VeplDdQ...

Abstract

“Borders in Red shows how Lenin and his Bolshevik leadership embraced the nationality question as a way of managing diversity and institutionalized it as a means of governance. Stephan Rindlisbacher uses the making of national borders as a lens through which to examine the Bolsheviks' fundamental shift from proletarian internationalism to ethnonational federalism sui generis. Comparing how party and state managed issues of national diversity in the core regions of Soviet federalism—Ukraine, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia—Rindlisbacher provides insights into their policymaking and into the roots of current territorial conflicts.

President Putin has condemned Lenin's nationality policy to be a historical mistake, and with its war against Ukraine, Russia has tried to revise borders that date back to the early days of the Soviet state. However, Borders in Red shows that the Soviet Republics were not arbitrarily divided by leaders like Stalin or Khrushchev. They were the result of long-lasting debates involving politicians, experts, and people from the border regions. The developing Soviet order was a product of trial and error.”

Bio:
Dr Stephan Rindlisbacher works as a researcher at the Viadrina Center of Polish and Ukrainian Studies at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). Previously, he was research assistant at the Institute of History at the University of Bern. For his dissertation he studied the radical movement in the late Russian Empire. His book on Borders in Red. Managing Diversity in the Early Soviet Union will be published this April with Cornell University Press.

Abstract:
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.

 The seminar will take place online, 17 December at 9:30am CET.
 Please register in order to participate: https://shorturl.at/Bggae

Abstract
Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian art form that combines ritual, play, music, and fighting elements. Created by slaves in the Northeast of Brazil, arguably in the seventeenth century, capoeira has been historically associated with the power of the weak. It has been used as a martial art to fight colonial oppression. During the twentieth century, it became a codified ritual that politically worked closely with the Black Marxist movement in Salvador, fighting for the recognition of the African heritage in Brazil. During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, capoeira has expanded globally. However, its spirit for liberation from dominant ideologies continues to captivate practitioners in Brazil and abroad. In this presentation, I describe how practitioners have used capoeira in Russia and how this country's practitioners have interpreted this art's rebellious spirit in a post-Soviet context. Finally, I contrast the subversive configuration of capoeira with the efforts made by dominant state powers to use martial arts in general as a political tool to show strength, authority, and subjugation of others.

Sergio González Varela - Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Warsaw, Poland. He worked previously at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, from 2010 to 2022. He holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of London (University College London). He was awarded the Fulbright distinction as a visiting professor in 2016 and is a member of the National System of Researchers in Mexico. His research topics deal with the anthropology of ritual, religion, performance, tourism, and globalization. He is the author of the books, El arte de engañar: ensayos de antropología social (2022), Capoeira, Mobility and Tourism: Preserving an Afro-Brazilian Tradition in a Globalized World (2019), Entre dos mundos: la antropología radical de Paul Stoller (2018) and Power in Practice: The Pragmatic Anthropology of Afro-Brazilian Capoeira (2017).

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.

 The seminar will take place online, 12 November at 9:30am CET.
 Please register in order to participate: https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJEocuutqzMuE9akT5zipuZeXdN...

In the last two decades, the topic of help given Jews during the World War II has experienced an extraordinary boom in Europe and beyond. Stories of the rescuers have been adapted into books, films, public commemorations, and museums. Yet, emphasis on the uplifting narratives often obscures the history of violence and complicity with Nazi policies of persecution and mass murder. This roundtable will discuss the (mis)uses of the Righteous, deliberated in local, national, and transnational contexts. Starting point for the discussion is the edited volume The Rescue Turn and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (Wayne State University Press, 2024). Participants of the debate will be Sarah Gensburger, Ido de Haan, Naum Trajanovski and Zofia Wóycicka.

 The seminar will take place online, 15 October at 9:30am CET.
 Please register in order to participate:
https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJUkd...

Janek Gryta is a Lecturer in Holocaust History at the University of Southampton. He is a cultural and social historian with particular interests in the Holocaust commemorations in Eastern Europe, nation-building, and the history of social consensus under Communism.

Abstract
Poles tend to believe that, when it comes to the Holocaust, they were bystanders only. For decades, scholarship supported this notion. In a similar vein, there is an assumption in research that Polish bystanders did not pass on any knowledge about the Holocaust, certainly not under state Socialism. This article addresses both of those ideas, revealing that detailed knowledge about the Holocaust not only existed but was passed on from the generation of witnesses to the first postwar generation. Moreover, it demonstrates how, in the process of this transmission of knowledge, the position of a bystander was developed.
This paper spotlights the Alert of Victory, a 1965 reconnaissance organised by the Polish Scouting and Guiding Association. During the Alert, young people identified sites of fighting and suffering, and interviewed local witnesses about Nazi crimes.
Focusing on reports from this reconnaissance in south-eastern Poland, this paper comments on the shape of the vernacular, communicative memory of the Holocaust as it existed in the mid-1960s. It establishes that details of mass killings in the spring and summer of 1942 were widely known and communicated, as was some information about the camp system. It suggests that some knowledge about Polish co-participation in the killings, the denunciation of Jewish Poles and the looting of their property was suggested to the scouts. Finally, this paper establishes how the explosive potential of such knowledge was dismantled in the space of testimony. Through maintaining Jews in the position of the national Other, and strategic use of passive voice and omission, a palatable version of the war past was devised and the figure of a passive, blameless bystander was called to into being

To this day, the following explanatory scheme has become widespread in public discussions of the collapse of the Soviet Union: the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 was the disintegration of an empire, but Russia remained an empire in many ways and therefore retained its aggressive essence. This scheme seems to me too reductionist. It is based on a simplistically conceptualized postcolonial theory, which assumes that the collapse of a colonial empire occurs because of an enslaved nation's struggle for freedom. The collapse of the Soviet Union was not like this. The new states on the ruins of the USSR emerged not as a result of the struggle of enslaved peoples, but as a result of the crisis of central power. We could now discuss in what ways the new political elites of the former “union republics” -- and especially Russia -- reproduced the Soviet notion of sovereignty, and what new elements were included in this notion. In my paper, I hope to discuss the cultural and political mythologies of sovereignty that have proliferated in the public rhetoric and Russian language literature of the “perestroika” period and in Russia in the 1990s.

Ilya Kukulin is a literary critic, cultural historian, and cultural sociologist. Currently, he is a research fellow at the Amherst Center for Russian Culture. He authored a book Machines of the Noisy Time: How the Soviet Montage Became an Aesthetic Method of the Unofficial Culture (Moscow, 2015) and co-authored a monograph A Guerilla Logos: The Project of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov (Moscow, 2022, with Mark Lipovetsky); in 2019, he also published a volume of selected articles and essays The Breakthrough to an Impossible Connection.

Series „Postcolonial perspectives–postdependance entanglements” is organized inframes of two researchprojects sponsored by the National Science Centre, Poland no. 2020/39/B/HS6/02809 and no. 2021/41/B/HS3/00852.

 The seminar will take place online, 23 April at 9:30am CET.
 Please register in order to participate: https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJYpdeispzkrHtIWRp8GfF5Mcza...

Author's bio:
Alima Bissenova is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Nazarbayev University. She specializes in urban anthropology, anthropology of Islam, postcolonial studies, and intellectual history. She has published her work in English and Russian in the journals Religion, State, and Society, Europe-Asia Studies, AB Imperio, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Sotsiologiya Vlasti.

About the book:
This collection is an attempt to form a new post-colonial agenda, in which we, seven Kazakhstani authors, are trying to rethink and theorize our current state from the position of our own locality and develop a “local” point of view on the most pressing issues of “our post-coloniality” - a point of view that would be pronouncedly local but, at the same time, global – connected with the universal post-colonial experience. We believe that the concept of “place” is very important for describing the states of coloniality and postcoloniality, as well as for describing the knowledge that we produce in this collection, knowledge that is socially and locally “situated”, to use Donna Haraway’s term . The connection with the place, on the one hand, shapes our position, and on the other hand, leaves its own unique imprint on the situation of post-coloniality that we describe. On the one hand, living in Kazakhstan, we, as citizens of a new state that was born after the collapse of the Soviet Union, are already in some way “post-colonial” - it would seem that we can articulate our own agenda for ourselves, we are given the freedom to represent ourselves at the international arena. However, on the other hand, we are very dependent on global markets, on regional military blocs and, no less important, we continue to be under pressure from the ideological structures and hierarchies of colonialism, both from the former metropole and from new metropolitan centers in Europe and North America. If we add to this economic (but not yet ideological) pressure from China, then we can say that because we are in such an inter-imperial post-colonial zone our subjectivity is limited. Perhaps it is precisely because of this limitation that the desire to “declare oneself” and formulate one’s own separate position is felt very strongly - we are just learning to “live for ourselves” and “understand ourselves” from the point of view of our own place and our own interests. We have long been the object of external modernization and industrialization projects, "learning" from advanced countries, gaining experience, including post-colonial experience. As the heroine of Aliya Kadyrova asks, sitting at one of the conferences on post-coloniality in Central Asia in Moscow: “How long can you talk about post-coloniality when you can live it here right now?” (Chapter V). Without exception, all of the authors of the collection really "live through" their own post-coloniality, while simultaneously reflecting on it. All seven authors of this collection have good research on this aspect of our culture, and it is time to present them to the interested reader - to contribute to the discussion about “our post-coloniality” and, perhaps, to find a way out of its labyrinths.

About the seminar series:
Series „Postcolonial perspectives–postdependance entanglements” is organized inframes of two researchprojects sponsored by the National Science Centre, Poland “Remembering Soviet repressions inthe post-multiple colonial RussianFar East”,no. 2020/39/B/HS6/02809 and SocialMemory and the Post-ImperialRussianHeritage inPolandno. 2021/41/B/HS3/00852.

 Please register in order to participate:
https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJwrdu6pqjIoE9KmtEF9h8cCHnC...

The main aim of my study is to investigate the unique, European character of queer memorials understood as “(…) heritage sites that honor gender and sexual minorities, [which] represent communities that have often been excised in dominant public narratives” (Orangias et al. 2018: 705–706) that are located in 20 European cities. European queer memorials started to be incorporated into the public spaces of Western European cities in the 1980s and play an important role in memorizing LGBTQIA+ citizens. The project is based on the findings from an ethnographic research project “European queer memorials: from Homomonument to the HBTQ+ monument in Göteborg” funded by Adlerbertska Foundation (2023). Methodologically, it is a multiple case study (Yin 2018) where several qualitative research methods such as a) mapping of existing queer memorials in Europe, b) ethnographic observations on-site combined with informal interviews; c) production and analysis of visual materials (photos of selected monuments). To shed light on the nature of contemporary queer memorials in Europe intersectional approach (Crenshaw 1998, Hill Collins & Bilge 2016) will be utilized. This perspective allows sensitizing the research to the sexuality, gender, citizenship, and social class perspectives. In this case, it will be applied in the analysis of the investigated phenomena to capture the development of ideas regarding who and how is supposed to be memorized and represented in European queer memorials.

Katarzyna Wojnicka is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Work Science at the University of Gothenburg. Her main fields of research are critical men and masculinities scholarship, migration, and social movements studies. She is one of the editors-in-chief of NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies. Previously she had worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Gothenburg, the University of Leeds, and the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her work has been published, among others, in Men and Masculinities, the International Journal of Qualitative Methodology, Social Movement Studies, Qualitative Research, and the Gender, Work and Organization. Currently, she is involved in research projects on fathers’ activism in Europe, single migrant men, transnational abortion activism and European queer memorials.

 The seminar will take place online, 12 March at 9:30am CET.

 Please register here in order to participate:
https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJckfuuvqD8vHdeFM-PXLy...

Ara Ketibian graduated from the Mekhitarist Congregation College in Venice, specializing
in Armenian studies. Worked as a member of the editorial team of Ararat daily newspaper, one of the major Armenian-language newspapers in Beirut, Lebanon. Teacher of Armenian Language and History at Melkonian Educational Institute (Nicosia, Cyprus). Retired from accountancy practice in 2011 and combined knowledge of journalism and investigative work to research American newspaper archives.

Dr. Edita Gzoyan (PhD in History, LLM) is the Director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation. She is also a leading researcher at the Department of Department of the Study of the Oppression of the Armenians of Artsakh, Nakhichevan and Azerbaijan at the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation. Her main fields of research are legal and historical aspects of the Armenian Genocide and the Artsakh issue, the history of the First Armenian Republic and Scientometrics. Dr. Gzoyan has published dozens of articles in national and international journals and authored and co-authored three books. Among her latest articles are “From War Crimes to Crimes against Humanity and Genocide: Turkish Responsibility after World War I” Genocide Studies International 15, no. 2 (2023): 79-98 and Edita G. Gzoyan, "Forcibly Transferred and Assimilated: Experiences of Armenian Children during the Armenian Genocide"; in Childhood during War and Genocide: Agency, Survival, and Representation, ed. by Joanna Beata Michlic, Yuliya von Saal, and Anna Ullrich, European Holocaust Studies 5 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2024), 31-51. She is an assistant editor of Ts’eghaspanagitakan Handes and International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies.