On 1 November 2016 UCL SSEES hosted a panel discussion on recent memory politics in Ukraine, organised in collaboration with the Ukrainian Institute in London. The speakers on the panel were Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, Andrii Portnov, a historian based at the Forum Transregionale Studien and Humboldt University in Berlin and a well-known commentator on Ukrainian memory politics, and Alina Shpak, Deputy Director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance (UINR).

Uilleam Blacker of SSEES, who chaired and co-organized the event, reports on it here for SSEES blog. Video excerpts can be seen here:

The focus of the discussion was a set of laws redefining state memory politics that were introduced in 2015. The four laws, known in the shorthand as the ‘decommunization’ laws, entail the following:

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On the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, Uilleam Blacker of SSEES considers the cultural impact of the nuclear catastrophe in Ukraine through the work of one of the country’s most famous poets, Lina Kostenko, and one of its leading literary critics, Tamara Hundorova. The post first appeared on the British Library’s European Studies blog. 

See Words Without Borders for Uilleam’s translations of two of Kostenko’s poems.

The Chernobyl disaster wasn’t just an unprecedented environmental disaster: it was an event that caused profound political and cultural shifts on a global scale. The disaster foreshadowed and accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cold War order, and the political reverberations of this were felt the world over. Yet it also forced a rethink of human beings’ relationship with the natural world, and compelling societies to face up to the fact that a nuclear apocalypse was no longer the stuff of science fiction, but a reality that was perilously close.

Lina Kostenko near the Chornobyl  Nuclear Plant (From Encyclopedia of Ukraine)

For all of these reasons, the name Chernobyl – or to use more accurately its Ukrainian form Chornobyl – is a worldwide symbol of the disastrous climax of Western modernity. The Chornobyl Zone continues to function as a phantom, warning humanity of the dangers inherent in blind technological advancement, with endless images or drone films of the ghost town of Prypiat affording internet users the vicarious thrill of wandering a post-apocalyptic landscape. Western horror movies and video games take the Zone as their setting. Yet the real Chornobyl, the real Zone, with its real abandoned villages and its real locals – those displaced and those who stubbornly return – is less often the subject of Western reflection.

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In our latest FRINGE  Centre blog, Eric Gordy of UCL SSEES and the FRINGE Centre considers informality in the Balkans – the focus of a major new project ‘Closing the Gap between Formal and Informal Institutions in the Balkans’, which recently received a 2.4 million euros from the Horizon 2020 programme, and which is being led by Eric from UCL SSEES. 

The research project on which we are now working came to life in a bar in Belgrade. I had arranged to meet my colleague in Serbia, Predrag Cvetičanin, to discuss an offer we had received to propose a work package for a Horizon 2020 proposal that was being assembled by our colleagues in economics. After looking at the general framework we decided that being the “social science on-the-side” team for a project in another discipline did not interest us, and that we would decline the offer. And probably because a few drinks had made us foolhardy, we decided that we would put together a proposal of our own (“What’s the success rate, 9%? Great!”).

Eric Gordy and Predrag Cvetičanin (photo: Eric Gordy).

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In the latest entry on the FRINGE Centre blog, Tomáš Cvrček of UCL SSEES considers statistics and their shortcomings. 

Breaking somewhat with the run of blog posts on big intellectual words, here is an entry about statistics, a mundane yawn of a word that starts with S. Where does the letter “S” come in the word “FRINGE”? It does not, although it could perhaps be appended at the end, making it plural. There are many ways in which things can stand on the fringe and one of them is the frontier of measurability. In line with the other themes in the acronym – such as invisibility, elusiveness and grey zones – the letter S can then stand for things that are somewhat in the statistical shadow, out of the gaze of the data collector.

To open with a confession, I think that data, numbers and statistics are a wonderful thing. They can tell us a great deal about lots of things that people are doing. When used properly, they can help one distinguish what is random and what is systematic. At the same time, as primary sources on various social phenomena, data have their limitations but that does not make them useless – rather, the limitations themselves are interesting.

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In the sixth of our series of blogs celebrating the launch of the UCL SSEES FRINGE Centre, Uilleam Blacker considers the elusive pasts hidden in the fabric of many east-central European cities.

There are cities in East-Central Europe – like Wrocław, L’viv or Kaliningrad – which were transferred from one state to another after World War II. As a result of the decisions to redraw borders that fell at Yalta, these cities had their populations deported, and new inhabitants forcefully resettled to them. Thus, German cities became Polish or Russian/Soviet, and predominantly Polish ones became Ukrainian, Belarusian or Lithuanian. The Holocaust also played its part in this drastic and violent urban reconfiguration, destroying the large Jewish communities of cities across the region.

Photo by Uilleam Blacker

Cities are living records of those who build them and live in them. In literature, from urban cultural theory to popular fiction, they are endlessly compared to archives, libraries, or palimpsests: cities are treated by those who represent and study them as memory texts that retain a chaotic, often fragmented record of the past, a record that is constantly reinvigorated, edited and refined. Yet what happens when the previous writers, librarians, and archivists of this urban text are dead or deported, and replaced by new custodians who may not know the language in which the text is written, or who may, indeed, fear and resent what is written in that language? (more…)

In the fifth of our series of blogs celebrating the launch of the UCL SSEES FRINGE centre, Udo Grashoff considers the letter G – for grey zones.

Photo by Cornelia Ogilvie, used with author’s permission.

Today, after the criminalisation of illegal housing in Western European ‘heartlands’ of squatting such as the Netherlands and Great Britain, there is not much squatting or illegal housing left. In England, for example, squatting in residential properties is now a criminal, rather than civil, offence. In recent years, the troublemakers and mucky pups have been shooed away from many European metropolises. Is squatting now merely a historical quirk? And does it hold any interest for the present? If the answer is yes, this is perhaps due to two reasons.

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In the fourth of our blogs to mark the launch of the UCL SSEES FRINGE centre, Tim Beasley-Murray considers the concept of neutrality.

The story of Icarus, his father Daedalus, and their fateful escape from the labyrinth that Daedalus himself had designed for the cruel King Minos is well-known. Father and son fashion wings from feathers and wax and take flight, leaving Crete behind and the sea far below. Thrilled with the sensation of flight, Icarus soars ever higher. Deaf to the warning cries of his father below that he is flying too high, he climbs closer and closer to the sun. The heat of its rays melts the wax that holds his wings together and Icarus, who had wished to rise to the height of the Gods, falls, only too mortal, to his death in the sea below.

The Fall of Icarus, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, c. 1558 (Photo: Wikimedia commons)

This story, like all myths, is structured by a series of complementary oppositions that give it meaning: father versus son; the wisdom of age versus the foolishness of youth; the Gods on high versus mortals below; the warmth of the sun versus the icy waters of the sea; hubris versus nemesis; life versus death. ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’, painted in the 1560s and traditionally attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Elder, tells us this story. But this story is not at the centre of the painting. (more…)

In our third Fringe Centre blog, Alena Ledeneva of UCL SSEES discusses invisibility and informality.

In the beginning was … blat. The colloquial Russian word blat, best remembered as Bacon, Lettuce And Tomato, and just as common as BLT, refers to practices of getting things done through personal contacts. It was the knowhow of survival in the Soviet Union, totally invisible for outsiders but vital. The idiom ‘po blatu’ (‘through acquaintances’) was colloquially widely used but banned from official discourse. It certainly does not feature in any of the editions of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. As Joseph Berliner, the pioneer of the Harvard Interviewing Project, observed: ‘If we were totally reliant on the written sources of the Soviet society, we might hardly have guessed the importance of blat’ (Berliner 1957: 184). Just like most economies of favours – guanxi in China, jeitinho in Brazil, kombinacja in Poland, pituto in Chile, veze and vruzki in South Europe, wasta in the Middle East and torpil in Turkey, invisible for outsiders but common in their own societies – blat practices are associated with sociability, i.e. the use of personal contacts or networks, but also serve the instrumental purpose of gaining influence or accessing limited resources.

The Global Informality Project, led by the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies and the UCL IAS FRINGE Centre, provides the first multimedia online resource that explores such informal practices and local knowledge in a global perspective. Quite literally, we put local ‘ways of getting things done’, understood by insiders but invisible for outsiders, on the map, and develop a global collection of authored contributions, including ethnographic investigations, socio-economic analyses, historical expositions etc, and also provide visual images that are representative of informal practices. We also aim to establish informal patterns that elude discipline-based method and area studies focus. The project plan includes the online version of the Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, the World Map of Informality, open access publications and FRINGE workshops.

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