Archiwum Edukacji #38 - Potential History Symposium. Aleksandra Szczepan and Robert Kusek

Weekend international symposium with participation of artists, curators and invited speakers who have been engaged for years in both theoretical and practical fields (artistic, curatorial, academic, activist) of potential history. They all have worked at the complex and creative intersections of topographies, methodologies, heritages, languages and politics. Drawing on this experience, they will share their research and engagement and will discuss possible scenarios of collaboration and solidarity, refusal and resistance to dominant narratives, affects and aesthetics in the face of violent forms of feeling and representation.

Aleksandra Szczepan and Robert Kusek (Potential History of ECE group members) on researching potential history of Central and Eastern Europe, the approaches practiced, the methodologies applied and the process of unlearning regional histories and identities.

- Robert Kusek is Associate Professor at the Department of Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, Faculty of Philology, as well as Head of Research Centre for Transnational Literary Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. His research interests include life writing genres, the contemporary novel in English, queer heritage, as well as a comparative and transnational approach to literary studies. He is the author of two monographs and several dozen articles published in books and academic journals. He was a researcher in a number of Polish and international projects – currently he is a principal investigator in the National Science Centre funded project entitled (Un)accidental Tourists: Polish Literature and Visual Culture in South Africa in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

Aleksandra Szczepan, is a post-doctoral researcher in the project “Adjustment and Radicalization: Dynamics in Popular Culture(s) in Eastern Europe” at the University of Potsdam. She is a literary scholar, a co-founder of the Research Center for Memory Cultures at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She has also been engaged as a researcher and interviewer in oral history projects undertaken by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Poland, Spain, and Kazakhstan. She has received scholarships from various institutions, including the USHMM, New York Public Library, Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, and the Polish National Science Centre. She is currently working on a book on forms of solidarity in Polish culture from the 19th century until now.

- Curator of the programme: Katarzyna (Kasia) Bojarska, Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies of the SWPS University in Warsaw. Founder and head of Center for Comparative Research on Memory Cultures (CCRMC). Co-founder and editor of View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture journal. Scholar of visual culture, contemporary art and memory cultures. Translated among others Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2016). Author of a book Wydarzenia po Wydarzeniu: Białoszewski – Richter – Spiegelman [Events after the event: Białoszewski – Richter – Spiegelman] (2012). Editor and translator (among others) of Ernst van Alphen’s Criticism as Intervention: Art, Memory, Affect book (Polish edition 2019). Member of the Polish section of AICA.