Event’s Category: Seminar
Soviet-era monuments in Poland and Estonia: mnemonic security after Russian invasion of Ukraine
- ONLINE
- English
https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJEsd...
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 intensified the debate on the issue of mnemonic security, that has been manifested with the new “war” against the “red” monuments in Baltic countries and Poland. In words of Mälksoo (2015: 221), securitization of memory implies “making certain historical remembrances secure by delegitimizing…or criminalizing others”, which reveals a “sense of insecurity among the contesters of the “memory” in question” (Ibid.:221). Undoubtedly, any war deepens the existing social ruptures and enforces antagonistic policies of memory, of which the recent mass demolishing the Soviet monuments in Estonia and Poland are lucid examples.
The paper analyses this issue as displayed by Polish and Estonian media discourses of 2022-2023. I aim to reveal the strategies of mnemonic security in countries, which, on the one hand, have a similar traumatic experience of the Soviet occupation, and which are different in terms of ethnic coherency, on the other hand. In contrast to Poland, which demonstrates some sort of social consensus regarding the Soviet past, Estonian population includes of a sizable group of Russian speakers, who consider the Soviet symbols constitutive for their identity. The paper raises a question whether the identity-making of Estonian Russophones could be understood not in terms of antagonistic, but agonistic mnemonic security. To develop my argument, I refer to Polish nation-building narratives stemmed from the national agonistic memory on the Soviet (Głowacka-Grajper – Łukianow 2023).
Alexandra Yatsyk is a researcher at the Institut de Recherches Historiques du Septentrion (IRHiS) of the French Academy of Sciences (CNRS) at the University of Lille, and a lecturer at Sciences Po, France. She has served as a researcher, a visiting fellow and a lecturer at Free Russia Foundation (USA), Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu (Estonia), the University of Warsaw and the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies (PIAST), the Uppsala Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (Sweden), the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (Austria), the University of Tampere (Finland), George Washington University (DC, USA) as well as at the Center for Urban History of East-Central Europe at Lviv (Ukraine).
Her expertise covers post-Soviet nation-building, sports and cultural mega-events, biopolitics and art. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including - co-authored with Andrey Makarychev - the Critical biopolitics of the Post-Soviet: from Population to Nation (Lexington, 2019), Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics and the Political (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), and co-edited Mega-Events in Post-Soviet Eurasia: Shifting Borderlines of Inclusion and Exclusion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), New and Old Vocabularies of International Relations After the Ukraine Crisis (Routledge, 2016), and Boris Nemtsov and Russian Politics: Power and Resistance (Ibidem Verlag & Columbia University, 2018).
Obszar postradziecki w perspektywie postkolonialnej
- ONLINE
- Polish (polski)
https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJAtf-yhqjspE9RxVQRe4...
„Pamięć społeczna a post-imperialne dziedzictwo rosyjskie we współczesnej Polsce” nr 2021/41/B/HS3/00852.
The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial. A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire
- ONLINE
- English
Chair: Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper (Faculty of Sociology UW)
William Partlett is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School. He writes and teaches in the field of public law. Professor Partlett’s research takes a historical and comparative approach to questions of public law. He is particularly interested in how constitutional text shapes political ordering and historical memory, particularly in a post-colonial context.
Herbert Küpper is Professor for European and Comparative Public Law at the Andrássy German-Speaking University at Budapest and Managing Director of the Institute for East European Law at Regensburg. He is particularly interested in the relationships between various fields of law (especially the interaction of private and administrative law), between (constitutional) law and politics and between language and law including questions of legal translation.
Immo Rebitschek is an assistant professor for East European History at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. He has published on the history of criminal justice in Stalinist Russia, on Soviet war crime tribunals, the German occupation in Ukraine 1918 as well as on the history of famine and humanitarianism in Tsarist Russia. He is currently writing a history of famine relief in the Late Russian Empire.
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 Russian Far East”, no. 2020/39/B/HS6/02809 and Social Memory and the Post-Imperial Russian Heritage in Poland no. 2021/41/B/HS3/00852.
Zbyt głośna historyczność. Użytkowanie przeszłości w Azji Wewnętrznej
- ONLINE
- Polish (polski)
Autor monografii:
Azja u bram. Studium nad migracjami Buriatów w Rosji, Poznańskie Studia Etnologiczne nr 11, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Nauka i Innowacje, 2012.
Współredaktor numeru tematycznego pt. Kinship and Urbanisation in Inner Asia, „Prace Etnograficzne”, 2021, t. 49, nr 1-2.
„Pamięć społeczna a post-imperialne dziedzictwo rosyjskie we współczesnej Polsce” nr 2021/41/B/HS3/00852.
Global Easts-Entangled Mnemoscape in Postcolonial Perspectives
- ONLINE
- English
https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJEudeqpqDkvGtMIdO_u3ABW...
‘The Revolution Will not be Televised’: Resistance and Governance in Pakistan away from the metropole
- ONLINE
- English
https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJMrf...
He is editor of Naked Punch Review (www.nakedpunch.com). NP is a interdisciplinary magazine of art, philosophy, politics, and poetry that has featured leading thinkers such as Noam Chomsly, Spivak, Vijay Prasad, Wim Wenders, Mike Leigh, Balibar among many others.
He is also the companion to many cats - 20 at the last count.
Remembering the 2001 armed conflict in Macedonia: Modes of commemorating and memorialization
- ONLINE
- English
https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJIqdOypqT0rGdzrHYQW39nc...
Various memory activities related to the 2001 conflict in Macedonia appeared in the immediate aftermath of the conflict and they were predominantly performed within the assumed domains of the two largest ethnic groups in the state: the ethnic Macedonians and the ethnic Albanians. However, the post-2001 developments demonstrate that the memory discourses, narratives, and practices are not as uniform as those of the early 2000s. There are critical changes of the memory actors and activities over the last two decades which hint at the shifting power dynamics related to the memory of the conflict and the agreement.
Naum Trajanovski, a PhD graduate from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, is an assistant at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw. In the past years, he was cooperating with the Faculty of Philosophy in Skopje and the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His major academic interests include memory politics, nationalism studies and sociological knowledge-transfers in East Central and South East Europe. He is the author of a book in Macedonian on the Museum of the Macedonian struggle and the Macedonian memory politics (Templum, 2020).
Jelena Ɖureinović is a postdoctoral researcher and scientific coordinator of the Research Platform “Transformations and Eastern Europe” at the University of Vienna. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Giessen. Her current research project combines the approaches of global history and memory studies and explores the role of memory in the context of networks of solidarity in the global Cold War and decolonisation, focusing on the internationalism of Yugoslav war veterans. She is also interested in the memory work of the far-right and specificities of memory politics in contemporary authoritarian democracies. Her book The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution (Routledge, 2020) centres on the question of how memory politics works, investigating the radical revision of the Second World War in post-Yugoslav Serbia. She developed the Memory Activism Programme at the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, where she is still involved in providing strategic direction.
Emina Zoletić
I am a doctoral student (finishing my second year) at the Doctoral School of Social Science, University of Warsaw, program in English language, with a doctoral project: "Intergenerational transmission of the memory of the war: The Cases of Families in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Bosnian diaspora in Europe." The doctoral research project deals with the intergenerational transmission of memory, with a focus on the first generation of Bosnians who experienced the 1992–1995 war and their children, born after the war in Sarajevo and currently living in the EU countries and US. I work under the joint supervision of Joanna Wawrzyniak (the University of Warsaw, Institute of Sociology) and Chris Hewer (Kingston University, UK, psychology).
In my research, I leverage my background in psychology (a bachelor’s degree from the University of Sarajevo), two master’s degrees in health sciences at Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, and the University Paris Descartes, and specialization in clinical psychology in Zagreb, as well as ten years of clinical experience at the university hospital as a clinical psychologist.
Last year, I was awarded a Polish national research centre NCN Preludium grant for the PhD project, a 3-year grant. My doctoral research has been funded by the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius, Hamburg, within the Ph.D. scholarship program "Beyond Borders" for one year (2022–2023) to conduct part of my research on the Bosnian diaspora in Germany. I was awarded a CEFRES mobility grant in Prague, 2022–2023, and I will be doing a PhD fellowship at the CEFRES centre starting in the fall of 2022.
Memory, Monument, Anti-Monument: The Challenge of Virtual and Augmented Technologies
- ONLINE
- English
https://www.europeanpluralities.uw.edu.pl/.../project.../...
Conspiracy mentality as an adaptation to historical trauma | Seminar with Michał Bilewicz
- ONLINE
- English
It is our pleasure to invite you to another seminar in the Center for Research on Social Memory Seminar series. This time we will meet with Michał Bilewicz, author of "Traumaland. Polacy w cieniu przeszłości" and Zofia Wóycicka as a moderator, to discuss "Conspiracy mentality as an adaptation to historical trauma".
The seminar will take place online, 10 December at 9:00am CET. Facebook event.
Please register in order to participate: https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEsfuCprDosG9aDjqN5LWbLZ1F2w5wLIdPJ#/registration
Abstract
Conspiracy beliefs are often viewed as a form of psychopathology, closely linked to anxiety, paranoia, and maladaptive traits. However, recent research has brought attention to adaptive and functional aspects of conspiracy theories. I would like to present a framework for understanding conspiracy mentality (a generalized tendency to believe conspiracy theories) as a paradoxical adaptation to historical trauma. There is vast evidence that three essential aspects of historical trauma (loss of personal and collective control, status devaluation, and victimhood) constitute the key antecedents of conspiracy beliefs. Although conspiracy theories might be adaptive in times of shared trauma (e.g., war, colonization), they become maladaptive in times of peace and prosperity. Examples from research performed in Poland, Greece and other traumatized societies will be presented as evidence for such destructive consequences of historical trauma.
Michał Bilewicz is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Warsaw, where he established the Center for Research on Prejudice. Previously, he was a Fulbright scholar at the New School for Social Research (USA) and DAAD postdoctoral fellow at the University of Jena (Germany). In 2005-2019 he served as the Vice-President of Forum for Dialogue and since 2020 he has been chairing the Scholarly Advisory Board of this NGO focusing on raising awareness of the histories of Jews in Poland and inspiring new connections between contemporary Poland and the Jewish people. His research interests include psychological foundations of prejudice, post-genocide reconciliation, dehumanization, antisemitism, and collective moral emotions. For his research in political psychology he received the Nevitt Sanford Award of the International Society of Political Psychology. His works appeared in "Political Psychology", "Memory Studies", "Psychological Inquiry" and "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology", among other journals. Recently he published the book "Traumaland" that aims to analyze the traumatic sources of social, political and psychological specificity of Polish society.
Peripheral Shame: Affective City and the Nation on the Margins of Post-Colonial Georgia
- ONLINE
- English
Please register in order to participate: https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJAofuCspz4pHdNazRZtsXGoVAD...
Based on the forthcoming book Peripheral Shame: Affective City and the Nation on the Margins of Post-Colonial Georgia, Tamta Khalvashi explores post-Soviet Georgia as a unique postcolonial space that gives rise to an affective condition of peripheral shame. By mixing family archives and autoethnographic reflections with traditional fieldwork material, she follows glimpses of this shame in various urban settings, from the monuments on the move to indebted houses or from unburied bodies of Soviet mass killings to awkward coexistence of different religious and ethnic groups in urban courtyards of Batumi on the western edge of Georgia. Khalvashi offers a new way of conceiving shame, not just as a feeling of stratified geopolitical, social, or personal relations but as an impulse to straddle with or repair ongoing peripheral frictions. She thus approaches shame as a productive feeling that gives rise to inconvenient coexistence, which is the only way to live and survive on the margins of the postcolonial world.
Tamta Khalvashi is a professor of Anthropology and the Head of the PhD Program of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ilia State University in Georgia. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology from Copenhagen University (2015). She has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships from the Fulbright Program at New York University, Department of Anthropology (2016-2017) and Cornell University, the Society for the Humanities (2022-23). Her research interests overlap experimental anthropology, the interdisciplinary field of affect theory, and cultural anthropology, focusing on postsocialist transformations, peripheral histories, marginal social identities, space, and materiality. Her article Horizons of Medea: Economies and Cosmologies of Dispossession in Georgia (Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 2018) has been awarded Honorary Mention from Soyuz (Postsocialist Cultural Studies Research Network of the American Anthropological Association) in the Article Price Annual Competition (2018). Currently, Khalvashi is finalising her book Peripheral Shame. She is the author of A Sea of Transience: Politics, Poetics and Aesthetics Along the Black Sea Coast (with Martin Demant Frederiksen) (Berghahn 2023).
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.