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

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

This book analyzes how Second World War heritage is being reframed in the memorial museums of the post-socialist, post-conflict states of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. It argues that in all three countries, a reluctance to confront undesirable parts of their national histories is the root cause explaining why the state-funded Second World War memorial museums remain stuck in the postsocialist transition. In most cases, Second World War museums, exhibitions, and displays conceived in the Yugoslav period have been left unchanged. However, there are also examples where new sections were added to the old ones and there are a small number of completely reconceptualized permanent exhibitions. The transitional position of the Second World War museums has made it possible to view these institutions as historical formations in their own right. The book will appeal to students and academics working in the fields of heritage and museums studies, memory studies, and cultural history of Southeast-Europe.

Bio:
Nataša Jagdhuhn is a Museologist whose research focuses on memory constructs in the successor states of Yugoslavia, museum transformation in the post-socialist countries of Europe, the history of museology from a Global South perspective, and current debates on decolonizing heritage worldwide.

 The seminar will take place online, 5 December at 9:30am CET.

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

Abstract:
In her talk Orli Fridman will feature her book Memory Activism and Digital Practices after Conflict: Unwanted Memories published with Amsterdam University Press (2022). The book investigates the study of memory activism and memory of activism, emerging after conflict, as a political civic action. It examines the appearance and growth of memory activism in Serbia amid the legacies of unwanted memories of the wars of the 1990s, approaching the post-Yugoslav region as a region of memory and tracing the alternative calendars and alternative commemorative practices of memory activists as they have evolved over a period of more than two decades. By presenting in-depth accounts of memory activism practices, on-site and online, the book analyses this evolution in the context of generational belonging and introduces frameworks for the study of #hashtag #memoryactivism, alternative commemorations and commemorative solidarity.

Bio:
Orli Fridman is an associate professor at the Belgrade based Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK). She also is the academic director of the School for International Training (SIT) learning center in Belgrade, Serbia.

Her interdisciplinary research focuses on critical peace and conflict studies, memory politics and memory activism. In the past 2 decades she has been studying processes of conflict transformation in the post-Yugoslav space, and memory activism that has emerged from the study of anti-war activism during the wars of the 1990s in Serbia. She also has published extensively about Kosovo-Serbia relations, from the perspective of everyday peace and peace formation from below.

Her new co-edited book (with Sarah Gensburger) will be with Palgrave by the end of this year and is titled The Covid-19 Pandemic and Memory. Remembrance, commemoration, and archiving in crisis.

Among her current new research projects is a comparative study of alternative commemorative events, which includes new empirical evidence from The Israeli-Palestinian joint Memorial Day Ceremony.

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

Abstract:
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).

Bio:
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).

Serdecznie zapraszamy na kolejne spotkanie z cyklu "Postkolonialne perspektywy – postzależnościowe uwikłania".

Spotkanie na temat „Obszar postradziecki w perspektywie postkolonialnej” z Iwoną Kaliszewską (Instytut Etnologii i Antropologii Kulturowej UW) i Grzegorzem Skrukwą (Wydział Historii, UAM) poprowadzą Zuzanna Bogumił i Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper.

23 maja (wtorek), 9.30

Rejestracja na spotkanie:
https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJAtf-yhqjspE9RxVQRe4...

Seria dyskusji „Postkolonialne perspektywy – postzależnościowe uwikłania” odbywa się w ramach grantów badawczych finansowanych przez Narodowe Centrum Nauki: „Pamięć o represjach sowieckich na post-wielokulturowym rosyjskim Dalekim Wschodzie” nr 2020/39/B/HS6/02809 oraz
„Pamięć społeczna a post-imperialne dziedzictwo rosyjskie we współczesnej Polsce” nr 2021/41/B/HS3/00852.

We will discuss the book “The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial. A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire” (Edward Elgar 2022) with the authors William Partlett (University of Melbourne,) and Herbert Küpper (Research Centre for Eastern and South Eastern Europe, Regensburg) and the first comment: Immo Rebitschek (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)

Chair: Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper (Faculty of Sociology UW)

In order to participate in the meeting, please register using this link:

The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial. A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire describes the collapse of the Soviet Union as a moment of decolonization and the post-1991 constitution-building experience as a postcolonial one. Partlett and Küpper’s application of the post-colonial paradigm to the former Soviet world adds new facets to post-colonial constitutional theory by presenting a third type of (ideology-based) colonialism and a third type of decolonization.
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.

Prowadzenie: Zuzanna Bogumił, Ośrodek Etnologii i Antropologii Współczesności IAE PAN

Spotkanie odbędzie się online, prosimy o rejestrowanie się pod tym linkiem: https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJUocuGrpzIjEtyEHa...

Zbyt głośna historyczność opisuje poszukiwania użytecznej przeszłości prowadzone przez mieszkańców postsocjalistycznej Azji Wewnętrznej. Autor, traktując historię jako politykę skierowaną ku przeszłości, analizuje jej użycia na poziomie państwa, społeczności lokalnej i na poziomie rodzinnym. Wiele uwagi zostało poświęcone praktycznym formom funkcjonowania przeszłości wykraczającym poza tradycyjną historiografię i politykę historyczną, a także poza instytucje ją reprodukujące: szkoły, muzea, uniwersytety. Bogaty materiał etnograficzny odsłonił oddolne i pozatekstualne praktyki związane z wizualnym, cielesnym, materialnym i rytualnym wymiarem użytkowania przeszłości. Czytelnik może zatem dowiedzieć się, dlaczego syberyjscy buddyści widzą w Putinie kobietę, po co ałtajscy szamani walczą z archeologami, a duchy ofiar komunizmu w Mongolii domagają się upamiętnienia. Antropologiczna perspektywa wykorzystana w książce do wyjaśnienia procesów społecznych zachodzących na Syberii, w Mongolii czy na chińskich peryferiach, może także zostać wykorzystana do zrozumienia rzeczywistości otaczającej czytelników.

Zbigniew Szmyt - pracownik Instytutu Antropologii i Etnologii UAM. Specjalizuje się w antropologii migracji, badaniach granicznych i urbanizacji w Azji Wewnętrznej. Prowadził badania terenowe w Mongolii, na Syberii i w Chinach.
Autor monografii:

Zbyt głośna historyczność. Użytkowanie przeszłości w Azji Wewnętrznej, Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2020.
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.

Seria dyskusji „Postkolonialne perspektywy – postzależnościowe uwikłania” odbywa się w ramach grantów badawczych finansowanych przez Narodowe Centrum Nauki: „Pamięć o represjach sowieckich na post-wielokulturowym rosyjskim Dalekim Wschodzie” nr 2020/39/B/HS6/02809 oraz
„Pamięć społeczna a post-imperialne dziedzictwo rosyjskie we współczesnej Polsce” nr 2021/41/B/HS3/00852.

Please make sure to register before the meeting using this link:
https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJEudeqpqDkvGtMIdO_u3ABW...

The end of the global Cold War has dramatically reconfigured the mnemoscape in the third millennium. In Eastern Europe, released memories of Stalinist terror and Holocaust collaboration unboxed the pandora box of conflictual memories. In East Asia and the other peripheral region, the West could no longer marginalize the memories of colonial genocide and atrocities because the imperative to defend Western civilization against Soviet communism had lost its historical force. Freed from the ideological constraints, the triple victimhood of the Holocaust, colonial genocides, and Stalinist crime together became entangled globally. Their postwar memories are intertwined, even though their stories remained unconnected throughout World War II. With a focus on global Easts-Eastern Europe and East Asia, I will probe for the non-hierarchal comparability and multidirectional interactions among the memories of the Holocaust, colonialist crimes, and the Stalinist terror. Dislocating this triple victimhood from the memorial provincialism and relocating it in the postcolonial perspectives would be the first step towards mnemonic solidarity. Suggesting “critical relativization” and “radical juxtaposition” as conceptual tools, I will try to rescue global memories from remembering provincialism.

Jie-Hyun Lim is Professor of Transnational History and director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University, Seoul. He is now Principal Investigator of the research project Mnemonic Solidarity: Colonialism, War and Genocide in the Global Memory Space (2017-2024) and Series Editor of “Entangled Memories in the Global South” at Palgrave/Macmillan Publisher. His recent memory studies books include Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Practicing (Columbia Univ. Press, 2022). Victimhood Nationalism-A Global History (Humanist, 2021, Japanese translation-2022), Mnemonic Solidarity-Global Interventions (Palgrave, 2021) co-edited with Eve Rosenhaft. As a memory activist, he has been co-curating exhibitions of “Unwelcome Neighbors,” “Naming Forced Laborers” and others.

Please register in order to particpate:
https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJMrf...

In this talk I argue that governance in Pakistan is uneven and fractured. Caste, class, geographical location, gender and ethnicity all play a role in defining how the state and non-state powers treat subjects. Therefore, it is my contention that there is no such thing as a 'Pakistani' citizen treated by a totality of a field of either bio-politics or governmentality. Rather, governance and, therefore, resistance, takes place differently in different locations. To understand structures of power and resistance, then, we need not look at Pakistan as a field of study but we need to move to local histories and understand how power is experienced by different groups and how it is resisted by them. I will note the different regimes of governance that operate in Pakistan and by noting resistance to these structures point to ways for the transformation of politics in the region.

Qalandar Bux Memon is an activist and teacher based in Lahore, Pakistan. He has worked in solidarity with various movements for the past 15 years - from these he gets his epistemology perspective. He has been involved in the anti-dictatorship movement known as "Lawyers Movement", supported and ran campaigns for the release of political prisoners in Pakistan and was the founder of 'Pakistanis for Palestine', among other solidarity work.
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.

Please register in order to particpate and receive the paper:
https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/.../tJIqdOypqT0rGdzrHYQW39nc...

13 August 2022 marked the 21st anniversary of the ceasefire agreement that ended the armed hostilities in Republic of Macedonia, now Republic of North Macedonia. The armed conflict started on 22 January 2001 with guerrilla attacks on the police station in Tearce, near Tetovo, and a passenger train. The self-ascribed National Liberation Army, a group with a same Albanian acronym as the Kosovar Liberation Army, immediately claimed responsibility for the two assaults. The months of clashes between the state forces and the ethnic Albanian rebels resulted in more than 200 casualties and more than 170,000 internally displaced persons.
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.

The seminar is based on the longer paper that discusses the modes of commemorating and memorializing the 2001 Macedonian conflict in North Macedonia since its formal end in August 2001, authored by Naum Trajanovski in 2022 and prepared for the Humanitarian Law Center’s Memory Activism Programme. The paper argues that both the major trajectories of commemorating and memorializing 2001, as well as the critical changes occurring during the last two decades, were predominantly elite-driven and, in several cases, reposing on vernacular understandings of 2001.

Author’s bio:
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).

Introduction:
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.

Commentator:
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.