Book launch
Culture Wars in Europe
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Monday, May 22, 2023
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (EDT)
5:00 PM - 6:00 PM (CET)
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This event is on the record and open to the public. |
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The culture war is a concept developed in the US and for grasping the country’s cultural polarization. As often with US hegemony in academia, the concept has traveled to Europe. As other loaded concepts like populism and illiberalism, the notion of culture wars is often used not in analytical terms but in political debates to delegitimize the opponent. In this series published between May 2022 and May 2023 – now compiled as an e-book – we looked at some of the current cultural debates in Europe, such as race, LGBT, reproductive rights, cancel culture, woke, covid-19, climate change, and take a reflexive stance at how they are morally loaded – both on the conservative and the so-called progressive side, both in political movements and discourses as well as in academia.
While we, scholars who initiated this project, also have our own positions in the addressed debates, we strive to provide a broad intellectual platform for different theoretical approaches. While we are aware that academia is embedded in society, including current power hegemonies, we believe that one can and should draw a line between academic knowledge production and social movements and politics. Where this line is to be drawn is subject to constant negotiations and the debate is not settled yet, or probably will never be.
The goals of this series and the e-book were to:
- popularize existing research to the related topics, in a balance of established and junior scholars;
- foster academic dialogue between US and Europe; and between Western and Eastern/Southeast Europe;
- present challenging, sometimes even provocative ideas to highly emotionalized topics to jointly reflect on the responsibility of academia to tackle these challenges to democracy;
We cordially invite you to our book launch.
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Eszter Kováts, PhD, political scientist, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna, Austria. During the period of the compilation of this series she was a non-resident associate fellow at the Illiberalism Studies Program at George Washington University.
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Massimo Perinelli, PhD, historian, senior adviser of migration at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Until 2015, he was a researcher on sexuality and film at the University of Cologne. He is co-editor, with Lydia Lierke, of the anthology Erinnern stören – Der Mauerfall aus migrantischer und jüdischer Perspektive (2020) and with Mia Neuhaus and Lucas Mielke of the anthology Solidarität – eine reale Utopie (2023).
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Ondřej Slačálek, PhD, works in the Department of Political Science in the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague. With Zora Hesová and Pavel Barša he edited the volume Central European Culture Wars: Beyond Post-Communism and Populism (2021) and with Ágnes Gagyi The Political Economy of Eastern Europe 30 Years into the “Transition”: New Left Perspectives from the Region (2022).
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Marlene Laruelle, Ph.D., is Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies; Director of the Central Asia Program; Director of the Illiberalism Studies Program; Co-Director of PONARS Eurasia; and Research Professor of International Affairs at The George Washington University. She works on political, social, and cultural changes in the post-Soviet space. Marlene's research explores the transformations of nationalist and conservative ideologies in Russia, nationhood construction in Central Asia, as well as the development of Russia's Arctic regions.
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Illiberalism Studies Program
Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES)
Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University
1957 E Street, NW | Suite 412 | Washington, DC | 20052
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