Soviet Nostalgia as a Protest of the Unheard? | Virtual Seminar with Prof. Ainė Ramonaitė

Invitation to a Virtual Seminar with Prof. Ainė Ramonaitė: “Soviet Nostalgia as a Protest of the Unheard? Experiences of Post-Communist Transformation, Social Resentment, and Societal Polarization.”

March 26th, 3:00 PM (15:00)

Registration: https://forms.gle/Bitw5stEg8UsBDg99

The event will be held in English

The post-communist transformation was a period of complex upheavals, bringing not only liberation from the Soviet empire with the Act of March 11th but also drastically changing the social, political, and economic life of society. There is still disagreement in the public sphere as to why part of society feels nostalgia for the Soviet era. In recent years, researchers have also observed another phenomenon: polarization in Lithuania has increased to the level of the 1990s.

• Is Soviet nostalgia an expression of the protest of the unheard?
• How is the growing societal polarization in Lithuania related to the complex experiences of the post-communist transformation?
• How can we talk about the past and memory without deepening political and cultural alienation?

On March 26th at 3:00 PM (15:00), we will seek answers to these and other questions in a virtual seminar with Professor Ainė Ramonaitė from the Vilnius University Institute of International Relations and Political Science, who researches the period of post-communist transformation.

Ainė Ramonaitė is a Professor at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University. She is the head of the Department of Political Behaviour and Institutions and the leader of the (Post)Soviet Memory Studies Center.

This seminar is open to everyone – we welcome history and civics teachers and anyone interested in the history of the post-communist transformation!

The seminar consists of several parts: a presentation, a discussion, and a project presentation.

It is part of the Changing Democracies project. More about the project: www.changingdemocracies.eu

Seminar organizers: Open Lithuania Foundation (ALF)

The “Changing Democracies” project aims to reflect people’s stories and memories of communism, dictatorships, resistance, and the transition period from a European perspective, to create a common space of memory. The project explores how living, oral European history could help understand the crisis facing democracy, and in addressing the challenges of the modern world, it attempts to reveal that our experiences and expectations for democracy can be very different. The project invites us to rethink what democracy means to us personally and what experiences we could share ourselves. It was implemented by a team of civic and education organizations from Belgium, Croatia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Poland, Greece, Romania, Spain, and Portugal. In Lithuania, we, the Open Lithuania Foundation team, represented this consortium.