You are invited to the documentary screening of 'Citizens' (1986) followed by a discussion with Director/Producer Richard W. Adams.
This film portrays human dimensions of Poland’s Solidarity movement in 1980-81 that were obscured by Cold-War rhetoric: the efforts of workers, artists and intellectuals who joined together to create a thriving civil society within a totalitarian state. Solidarity activists describe how they learned that to protect their own interests they had to fight for the interests of Polish society as a whole. Their self-governing trade union won the trust and support of virtually all segments of society by providing the only available channel for the local grass-roots initiatives, open debate, and democratic action that ultimately led to non-violent systemic change in Poland and beyond.
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This event opens the April 25th Conference: No End of History: Crooked Circle of Democracy and Authoritarianism. More details about the conference and to RSVP please click here.
Presented by the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies and the Zolberg Institute for Migration and Mobility at The New School
Richard Ware Adams began early with 8mm murder movies. He later co-edited the Oscar-winning three-screen To Be Alive!, a hit of the 1964 NY World’s Fair. While on a Fulbright in film in 1965 Poland he captured an encounter at the language barrier between American and Polish students in Exchange of Words (1967). He shot and edited the feature-length Asylum (1972) about life in R.D.Laing’s therapeutic commune in London, now a cult classic. As cameraman/editor he helped the late William Miles make his first two films, Men of Bronze (1977) and the four-hour PBS mini-series I Remember Harlem (1981), both classics of black history. Richard produced, shot, and edited Citizens (1986) on the birth of Poland’s Solidarity movement, which premiered at the New School and MoMA.
Irena Grudzińska Gross emigrated from her native Poland after student unrest of 1968. She studied in Poland, Italy and in the United States; she received her PhD from Columbia University in 1982. She taught East-Central European history and literature at Emory, New York, Boston and Princeton universities.
The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies: TCDS’s transregional and cross-departmental research and study programs, conducted both at home and abroad, bring together civic-minded students, junior and senior scholars, and civil society actors from various regional contexts. Our activities — region-based institutes, workshops, conferences, talks, and fellowships — are designed to further strengthen social and human capital, i.e., individuals and organizations concerned with the promise and sustainability of democracy. Our flagship projects have been the annual Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institutes (held in Poland since 1991 and also in South Africa from 1999 to 2015), aimed at a rigorous quest for a more textured understanding of the precariousness of democracy as it arises almost everywhere.
About the Zolberg Institute for Migration and Mobility:
In the world’s leading city of immigration, in a time of a troubling resurgence of anti-migrant action and rhetoric, in a University with a faculty and student body committed to social justice, the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility supports critical and applied scholarship and provides opportunities for social action and policy engagement for faculty, students and the broader New School community.
The Institute fosters concentric circles of scholarship and action—in our University, our city, and the world. We contribute to the University community by offering courses, sponsoring lectures and events, and supporting extended visits of leading scholars. We engage deeply with New York City, supporting student work with the wide range of groups and communities in the City. We undertake initiatives to inform and influence public debate and public policy at the national and global level.
The term “mobility” in the Institute’s name is the key to our mission. It commits us to a dynamic understanding of concepts central to the field of migration studies—borders, citizenship and other forms of membership, the nation-state, forced migration, migration due to climate change and disasters. It also opens up for examination the prevailing political, cultural and economic narratives that both influence and are influenced by scholarship, policy and social action. It is a time for serious scrutiny of the premises, categories and policies that have produced the current historical moment, and for imagining new approaches to understanding human mobility (and immobility).
Committed to amplifying diverse voices, The New School offers more than a thousand public programs and events each year, providing fresh perspectives and unique learning opportunities. These lectures, exhibitions, concerts, and performances feature prominent and emerging artists, activists, and thought leaders. Be sure to visit our Events Calendar to see the full roster.
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Andrzej W. Tymowski teaches Academic Writing in English at the University of Warsaw. In February 2023 he led a two-week writing workshop at Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv.
Tymowski is president of the EEPS Foundation, which sponsors the quarterly East European Politics, Societies, and Cultures. In 2023-24 he is moderating the weekly forum of the New University-in-HiExile Consortium for scholars fleeing authoritarian regimes.
Tymowski recently retired from the American Council of Learned Societies, where he directed international programs of support for Humanities research in Eastern Europe and Africa, along with programs in Buddhist Studies and China Studies.
Irena Grudzińska Gross emigrated from her native Poland after student unrest of 1968. She studied in Poland, Italy and in the United States; she received her PhD from Columbia University in 1982. She taught East-Central European history and literature at Emory, New York, Boston and Princeton universities. Her books include Golden Harvest with Jan T. Gross, Oxford University Press, 2012, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets, Yale University Press, 2009, and The Scar of Revolution: Tocqueville, Custine and the Romantic Imagination, University of California Press, 1995. She edited books on literature and the transformation process in Central and Eastern Europe and published numerous book chapters and articles on these subjects in the international press and periodicals. Between 1998-2003, she was responsible for the East-Central European Program at the Ford Foundation.
As a Guggenheim Fellow she is working on a biography of Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski (1901-1964), an Austrian-Jewish physicist, political prisoner, writer, businessman, communist, then anti-communist and gambler. His life will be an entry point into the most important phenomena in twentieth-century East-Central European Jewish history: social mobility limited by violence and discrimination, assimilation through education and politics, internationalism versus national affiliation, family discontinuities, and geographic displacement. Weissberg’s life, the story of his milieu and that story’s aftereffects on her own post-World War II generation will constitute three aspects of that book.
