Winter School lectures and workshops
29 January 10:15–11.00 In the Name of the People. Can Populist Policies of Memory Be Interpreted with a Postcolonial Approach?
Dr. Łucja Piekarska-Duraj
Populism is a promise given to people looking for effective reference frameworks to help them position themselves and navigate the threatening world of complexities. Answering this need and in an attempt to provide the people with a sense of ontological security, populism makes use of the symbolic resources connected with the past. Heritage, as a dynamic social construct, aims, however, not only to construct the past but also to organise the diversity of the present. The ways in which the past is turned into myths and narrated are therefore reflected in identity policies concerning the past and, most of all, the present. The lecture presents some elements of populist identity politics and tests if they can be approached as colonial or postcolonial narratives. Can postcolonial theory help us understand the politics of memory and identity in post-Soviet Europe? What are the main strategies of heritage-related identity politics in populism? How are they challenged by memory activism?
I want to propose several classical ways of approaching symbolic resources in the creation of collective identity construction in order to see how they can be used in understanding the politics of memory in the populism of the 21st century. I will illustrate the theory with some cases from the region, especially those where religion allies with history and the past gets sacralised. To counterbalance these, I will present some examples of “memory activism” where the democratisation of collective memory is present.
Bio:
Łucja Piekarska has a PhD in social sciences (Jagiellonian University). She is a social anthropologist working in European Studies and heritage on identity-related topics. Recently involved in research on populism (H2020 POPREBEL), she also works as an academic teacher and heritage interpreter with cultural routes and museums. Her monograph, The Invisible Hand of Europe, approaches museums as agents of Europeanisation.
29 January 14:30–15:15 Postcolonial Heritage Returns, Relational Memory and ‘Rematriation’
Dr Magdalena Zolkos
The discourse of cultural heritage restitution provides the dominant framework for the “object movement” from Western museums and collections to the descendant communities of these items’ original custodians. That framework, however, is currently being expanded and challenged by Indigenous and anti-colonial memory art and activism in the concerted efforts to reshape the field of interactions between collective remembrance, restitution for wrongs, and social justice. In this talk, I identify key problems raised in regard to the discourse of cultural heritage restitution: first, that the political logic of returns subjectivates claim-makers as supplicants of the state; second, that these items tend to be reduced to the status of “de-vitalised” and “servile” things, which fails to account for their place in Indigenous ontologies as other-than-human beings; three, that there is a disconnect between acts of return and what Achille Mbembe calls “developing a capacity for historical truth” and for postcolonial ethics of “remembering together”. I illustrate these trajectories with a case of restitutive struggles centred on a Māori ceremonial meeting house, Hinemihi, currently placed in England. Focusing on the memory art activism of the artist Victoria Hunt, dedicated to Hinemihi, I elaborate the conceptions of “relational memory” and “rematriation” as a rejection of the definition of ancestral beings as “property”, and their return as “re-appropriation”. Rather, this case of art activism helps us understand restitution as a physical return of objects and a re-establishment of relationships severed by colonial violence, grounding remembrance in relations of care and custodianship.
Bio:
Magdalena Zolkos is an associate professor in the Department for Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland). She works in critical memory studies, visual aesthetics and politics, and reparative and testimonial practices in art and activism. Her recent publications include Restitution and the Politics of Repair: Tropes, Imaginaries, Theory (Edinburgh UP, 2020).
30 January 10:00–10:45 How Can We Decolonise Language Revitalisation? Some Ideas and Challenges
Prof. Julia Sallabank
This lecture tackles some issues I've been grappling with recently and raises some questions I invite participants to discuss and consider further.
Colonial and postcolonial language policies have resulted in many people feeling a loss of self-worth and pride. Reclaiming one’s language is an important means towards combating colonial and postcolonial legacies, and in principle, language revitalisation aims to empower minoritised communities. Languages become minoritised because communities are marginalised, so revitalising language is part of a larger process of decolonisation, cultural reappropriation, and reclaiming the right of communities to determine their own fate.
However, language activists and linguists are often influenced by the same language ideologies that informed colonialist policies and practices, so language revitalisation activities may copy hegemonic models and language ideologies that disempower community members. These might include:
- Essentialist ideas, both ‘strategic and more ingrained, including
- notions of ‘authenticity’ and hypertraditionalism
- exocitisation or folklorisation of endangered languages and the communities they belong to
- Inclusivity, exclusivity, and intersectionality
- Reliance on formal education
- Devalorisation or denial of language variation and change
I look at assumptions, ideologies, and discourses about all of these. The lecture examines examples of language revitalisation, as well as the legacy of colonialism in the field of Linguistics, the role of an external researcher in a decolonising agenda, and the relationships between external researchers and community members.
Bio:
Julia Sallabank is a Professor of Language Policy and Revitalisation at SOAS, University of London. She studies small, minority, and endangered languages: e.g., language revitalisation, language policy, and planning, mainly from a sociolinguistic perspective. She has played a key role in the international recognition of language revitalisation as a field of study. She also undertakes broader research in the fields of multilingualism, sociolinguistics, linguistic ethnography, and linguistic anthropology. Prof. Sallabank has also been interested in interdisciplinary studies, e.g., links between languages and development, language use and wellbeing, language and gender, and their implications for language policy.
30 January 14:00–14:45 The Uralic Languages of Russia: Why Do We Care About Them?
Prof. Petar Kehayov
In UNESCO’s Classification of Endangered Languages, the Uralic languages of Russia range from “definitely endangered” to “extinct” (with “severely” and “critically” endangered as intermediate stages, also amply instantiated in the family). These degrees of endangerment are external attributions and do not necessarily reflect how speakers feel about their native tongue. In the first part of my talk, I will discuss the current sociolinguistic situation of the Uralic languages of Russia and present some conflicting impressions from the field (inevitably, through the blinding lenses of an outsider). In the second part of the talk, I will reflect on the way linguistic relatives have been essentialised in the Estonian and Finnish public discourse, often to serve one’s self-image. I will also point out a certain moral trap that contemporary academic activism tends to fall into when defending the linguistic rights of the Uralic people of Russia.
Bio:
Petar Kehayov was born and raised in Sofia but obtained his bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD degrees at the University of Tartu. In 2016, he habilitated at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he worked from 2020–2021 as an associate professor of Finno-Ugric studies and, since February 2023, he has been a professor of Finnic languages at the University of Tartu. He has published two monographs on Finnic languages, co-edited a volume on complementiser semantics in European languages, and co-authored a textbook on language and society for high schools. Among other topics, he has studied evidentiality, modality, and complex sentences in Finno-Ugric languages and beyond.
1 February 9:00–9:45 Occupying Public Space, Generating Public Spheres: Street Tree Art and Activism in East and West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s
Prof. Sonja Dümpelmann
Street trees have stood at the core of events that have shaped and characterised the evolution of the modern city. In European cities, comprehensive and systematic street tree planting organised by municipal governments began in the second half of the nineteenth century for hygienic and aesthetic reasons. Yet, despite their benefits, street trees have always been contested. This lecture focuses on bottom-up and top-down movements for tree planting and protection during German division in the 1970s and 1980s. Various types of citizen protests in East and West Berlin, including the new genre of street tree art, both built upon and led to scientific research into trees’ vulnerability and resilience against soil and air pollution. In both cities, the state and fate of street trees created a discursive space contributing to the creation of an alternative (second) public sphere and counter-public, which in turn not only transformed public urban space through tree planting and care but, in the case of East Berlin also fostered and bolstered the opposition against the German Democratic Republic’s dictatorship, ultimately contributing to its fall in November 1989.
Bio:
Sonja Dümpelmann is Professor and Chair of environmental humanities at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, where she also co-directs the Rachel Carson Center. She was previously a Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Dümpelmann is a historian of urban landscapes and environments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her most recent award-winning books are Landscapes for Sport: Histories of Physical Exercise, Sport, and Health (ed., Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2022) and Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin (Yale University Press, 2019).
2 February 9:00–9:45 Circulation Gigwork and the Cultures of Control
Dr. Annie McClanahan
This talk takes up a figure I term the “circulation gigworker”: app-based drivers/bike riders who deliver groceries, meals, packages, and people and whose work is often informalized, precarious, and super-exploited. The circulation gigwork is a vexed figure, signifying independence, opportunity, and freedom but also precarity, overwork, and coercion. Circulation workers have thus become a particularly complex site for anxieties about managerial control, the problem of regulation, and the freedom or unfreedom of contemporary labour more broadly. I argue that circulation gigwork is uniquely available to these contradictory fantasies and anxieties around freedom and control in part because it is associated with spatial mobility. I take up three recent novels about circulation gigwork—Raven Leilani’s 2020 Luster, Priya Guns’ 2023 Your Driver is Waiting, and Peter Mendelsund’s 2021 The Delivery—to explore how the image of spatial freedom (promised and foreclosed, meaningful and false, a sign of both autonomy and precarity) mediates the contradiction between circulation labour as a symbol for human freedom and a type of work uniquely degraded and exploited.
Bio:
Annie McClanahan is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where she is affiliated with the Culture & Theory program and the Critical Theory Emphasis. She is also a founding faculty of the UC Marxist Institute for Research and co-editor of the journal Post45. Her first book, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture, was published in 2017, and she is currently completing a new book titled Beneath the Wage: Tips, Gigs, and the Age of Service Work. Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, boundary 2, Representations, theory & event, and elsewhere.
WORKSHOPS 31 January
Reet Aus & Ave Matsin
Sustainable design practices
This workshop will address the ecological footprint of fashion and efforts to develop sustainable fashion practices, such as upcycling, as proposed by the Estonian designer Reet Aus. Participants get hands-on experience in reducing textile waste by learning different forms of mending clothing, led by textile practitioners from Viljandi Culture Academy.
Bios:
Ave Matsin is a Lecturer in Estonian Native Textiles and the director of the native crafts program at the University of Tartu Viljandi Culture Academy. Her main areas of research are archaeological textiles, ancient techniques and tools, and topics related to the copying and reconstruction of historical items, including methodology, technology, and their historical context. In recent years, she has been engaged in researching and valorising local natural craft materials (especially wool) and developed the regenerative craft speciality in the native craft program. She applies practice-based research methods at the Viljandi Culture Academy in her work.
Reet Aus is a Senior Researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts, a fashion designer, and an environmental activist who founded REET AUS COLLECTION® and THE UPSHIRT®. She is a pioneer in industrial upcycling for fashion and has developed the UPMADE® certification to pass on her knowledge to brands and factories.
Dr. Sara Bedard-Goulet & Flo Kasearu
Research-Creation in Theory and Practice: Arts of Survival in Academia
This workshop starts by developing theoretical understandings of research-creation as an approach to academic research, based on seminal works and experimentations mainly from Canada, France and Australia. It includes an overview of completed research-creation projects by artists-researchers in Europe and elsewhere and focuses on one case study, a collaboration between a researcher and an artist (the two lecturers). The last part of the workshop gives the participants the opportunity to develop and reflect on their research-creation ideas, with feedback from the lecturers and the other participants. The whole workshop requires preparatory reading and thinking about how to develop a research-creation approach with the participants’ respective work.
Bios:
Sara Bédard-Goulet is an Assistant Professor of French and General Literature at Utrecht University and a Guest Researcher in Semiotics at the University of Tartu. Her research interests span contemporary French-language literature and art, building on environmental humanities, psychoanalysis and reader-response theory. With Otso Aavanranta (Uniarts Helsinki), she has established the Nordic-Baltic Transdisciplinary Research-Creation Network. She is also a contemporary art curator and is currently organising three exhibitions within the Tartu 2024 European Capital of Culture program.
Flo Kasearu, an internationally known Estonian artist, works and lives in Tallinn in the Flo Kasearu House Museum. The nature of her works is seasonal and explorative. Each of her projects begins as an open-ended game. She values irony as much as aesthetics. She works with private and public spaces, solo and in collaboration. Her work engages with vertical and horizontal relationships, the monumental and the unstable, through a variety of topics: economic depression, patriotism and nationalism, endangered species, domestic violence, fears, control, etc. In 2023, she received the annual Cultural Endowment of Estonia award.
Dr. Marton Rovid
From tackling antigypsyism to remedying racial injustice
The growing literature on racial justice in the field of normative political theory usually tracks the legacy of colonialism and imperialism, white settlement and African slavery that systematically privileges “whites” globally and that needs to be “repaired”. The moral grounding and forms of reparations are highly debated not only in academia but in countless political fora. However, both academic and political debates have largely taken place in post-colonial contexts and ignored the enduring forms of injustice Romani people face. In the seminar, we will assess the relevance of normative debates around racial justice for the case of Roma in two steps. First, arguments on the forms, desirability, and feasibility of reparations are reviewed. Some scholars distinguish remembrance, reconciliation, restorative justice, and reparations. The United Nations distinguishes five forms of reparations: restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition. We discuss the relationship between racial justice and democratic solidarity. Second, contemporary academic and political debates on anti-gypsyism are assessed in light of the literature on racial justice. To what extent and under what conditions can social and education policies remedy enduring racial injustice? What is the relation between social inclusion and tackling anti-gypsyism? Who and on what grounds can demand racial justice on behalf of Roma? Who has benefited from the exploitation of Roma, and who bears responsibility for past and present forms of oppression? What are the responsibilities of so-called post-socialist states, churches, companies, and settlements? To what extent is tackling white privilege in Eastern Europe desirable and feasible?
Bio:
Marton Rovid is a visiting professor at the Romani Studies Program at Central European University. His research interests include racialization in post-communist contexts, theories of cosmopolitan democracy, global civil society, transnational social movements, and the Romani movement. He published several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and policy papers. His most recent publication is “From tackling antigypsyism to remedying racial injustice”, Ethnic and Racial Studies (2021). He has been teaching in various programs targeting students with fewer opportunities for participating in higher education, such as the Roma Graduate Preparatory Program, the Jesuit Roma College, the Open Learning Initiative for persons with refugee or asylum seeker status, and the Socrates Project for persons who lacked educational opportunities in the past. In addition to research and teaching, he has been involved in policy research. As a research and advocacy officer of the Decade of Roma Inclusion Secretariat Foundation, he coordinated the monitoring of Roma policies in 16 countries. Currently, he is a project officer at the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights. In addition, he is the managing editor of the journal Critical Romani Studies.
Dr. Maria Murumaa-Mengel
Academia on Social Media: Tool, Community, Identity
Twitter (presently X), Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Mastodon, Spotify, YouTube, Bluesky, Discord, Telegram, Reddit, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, ETIS, ... - today, researchers operate on very diverse digital platforms. To share their achievements, to find their community, to express critical perspectives, to belong, to find research participants, to enhance general knowledge, to change the world, fight disinformation, [insert hundreds of reasons for professional use of social media]. We will discuss interesting practices and strategies for using social media in academia, explore what to adopt or avoid from the influencers’ toolkit, and which approaches have been particularly successful and which ones have failed miserably.
Planned outline of the day:
Part 1: Social media content and platforms - what do influencers do? What do academics do? Are these discourses compatible, or should we avoid the “influencer creep” (Bishop, 2023)?
Part 2: Case studies of successful and unsuccessful academic social media use. What works and why? Ethics of social media communication.
Part 3: Activist-researcher? Do we fight mis/disinformation in digital spaces? Why? How? From microinterventions to social movements. Do you want to change the world?
Part 4: Planning your own professional social media use. Which platforms? For what reasons? For whom? Which communicative choices?
Bio:
Maria Murumaa-Mengel (PhD in Media and Communication) is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at the Institute of Social Studies, University of Tartu. She is involved in research focusing mainly on young people’s use (and non-use, going “off the grid”) of social media, different literacies (e.g., digital, MIL, social media, porn), and various online risks (e.g., gendered online hate, online shaming, online child sexual abuse and grooming). Maria Murumaa-Mengel’s main strengths lie in teaching and supervising; she is the recipient of the 2020 Estonian National Award for the Teacher of the Year and has supervised several award-winning theses. In her seminar-lectures, she will bring together a cluster of studies on influencers and audience attention, digital activism, social change, and numerous examples of social media use in academia.
Dr. Alexandra Milyakina & Prof. Peeter Torop
Living culture: developing interactive projects based on artistic texts
The world is becoming increasingly digital and multimodal. Artistic texts are constantly being retold, reused and transformed. Video games are adapted into novels; comic strips turn into operas. Repetition and translation of texts lie at the heart of the development of culture. In the workshop, we will track the existence of our favourite texts in the digital age and imagine how to make them even more popular. The workshop will be based on the materials of the "Education on Screen" project.
Bios:
Alexandra Milyakina is a researcher in Semiotics at the University of Tartu, a member of the Transmedia Research Group and the creator of "Education of Screen".
Peeter Torop is a professor of the Semiotics of Culture at the University of Tartu, supervisor of the Transmedia Research Group and creator of "Education of Screen".
