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The Narrating Conflicts in Post-Truth Era, Facing Revisionist Russia: Ukraine and Georgia in comparative perspective webinar will address the instrumentalization of the historical past and populist claims to historical truth that reached ‘new heights’ in a world characterized as the ‘post-truth era.’ The speakers will discuss the Russian President Vladimir Putin’s populist justifications of the historical reasons for the ‘Russian-Georgian War’ in August of 2008, the Russian-Ukrainian conflicts in Donbas and Luhansk regions, and the annexation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea by Russia.
Panelists Malkhaz Toria and Mykola Balaban, Global Dialogues 2016 Fellows at the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS), will base the webinar talk on their upcoming publication on the same topic, which will appear in the edited volume History as an Instrument of the Contemporary International Conflicts edited by Jan Rydel within the series issued by the European Network of Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS).* The panel will be moderated by prof. Jeffrey C. Goldfarb.
*The publication is the outcome of the research project supported by the Open Society Foundation (OSF) ‘Global Dialogs’ Collaborative Research Grant (2019-2020).
This event is FREE and open to the PUBLIC. You will receive a link to the online event after you register.
Presented by The Memory Studies Group at the New School, the Democracy Seminar and the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at The New School for Social Research.
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Jeffrey Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. He is also the Co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar and Special Advisor to the Provost for The New School Publishing Initiative. His work primarily focuses on the sociology of media, culture and politics.
The Memory Studies Group at the New School is based at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) under the auspices of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS). It was launched more than a decade ago by a cohort of graduate students. The conferences they organized over time that brought together leading scholars in social, cultural, and public memory across the disciplines, the fellowship programs, and finally an array of outstanding dissertations, made the New School a recognized site of Memory Studies, and one that contributed to shaping and establishing it as a field of study in the United States.
The Democracy Seminar is a project convened by publisher and founding editor Jeffrey Goldfarb and senior editors Elzbieta Matynia and Jeffrey C. Isaac. This world-wide discussion among pro-democracy intellectuals and activists addresses the political, social and cultural obstacles to democratic governance; investigates the rise and appeal of illiberal philosophies and practices; and explores ways for rolling back autocratic politics. Read here about the first international meeting of the DS project.
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.
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Elzbieta Matynia is Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies, and founding director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS). Her research in political and cultural sociology focuses on democratic transformations, gender and democracy, and more recently on the challenges faced by democracies emerging with a legacy of violence. Her book Grappling with Democracy: 1989-1995 (1995) documents the debates of the first Democracy Seminar project; Performative Democracy (2009, Paradigm) examines a potential in political life that easily escapes theorists: the indigenously inspired enacting of democracy by citizens, and identifies the conditions for performativity in public life; An Uncanny Era (2013, Yale University Press) is a discussion on the precariousness of democracy, and early signs of its recent retreat in Central Europe). One of her recent essays, “How to Kill Democracy?” was published in 2019 in Social Research.
Jacek Kucharczyk is President of the Institute of Public Affairs, one of Poland’s leading think tanks. He received a PhD in sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. He studied at the Graduate School for Social Research in Warsaw, Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York, the University of Kent at Canterbury (MA in philosophy) and Warsaw University (MA in English studies). In the 1980s he was active in the independent student movement and clandestine publishing. Dr Kucharczyk has been a co-founder and board member of a number of international NGOs, including Prague Center for Civil Society and the European Partnership for Democracy (EPD) in Brussels. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Scholarship Program at Open Society Foundations. In 2008-2015 he was Advisory Board member of OSF Think Tank Fund. In 2009-2015 he was a board member of the National School of Public Administration in Warsaw. Kucharczyk has authored and edited articles, reports, policy briefs and books on European integration, democratic governance, democracy assistance, migrations and populism. His recent book-length publication is Phantom Menace: The Politics and Policies of Migration in Central Europe. Dr Kucharczyk regularly comments on current domestic and European affairs and political developments for Polish and international media.
Jeffrey Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. He is also the Co-Executive Editor of Public Seminar and Special Advisor to the Provost for The New School Publishing Initiative. His work primarily focuses on the sociology of media, culture and politics.
