Technology, Justice, & Creative Practice
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Political Concord or Digital Divide? Repertoires of Civic Activism in 2020 Belarus
Discussion with Dr. Vasil Navumau
Faculty-led
May 24, 2021 at 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Online event hosted by European Humanities University
This webinar brought together students of the Media and Communications and Political Science programs, as well as faculty from the European Humanities University (EHU) and internationally to discuss the role of information and communications technology (ICT) in the political activation of Belarusian society in 2020. The event addressed the learning process of Belarusian civil society in the course of the ‘Belarusian Awakening’ which began in spring 2020. Participants considered how civic mobilization has launched multiple forms of self-organization and civic initiatives, both in Minsk and beyond. In particular, the speaker traced the most innovative civic initiatives found in the Belarusian context, to explore the instruments protesters utilized to organize collective actions and help the protest participants. These developments were discussed in the context of the societal trends of 2010s Belarus, and in the context of a longer international history of social movements. Special focus was placed on the long-term impact of digitalization on the current political disposition in Belarus.
Dr. Vasil Navumau, guest speaker
Organized by European Humanities University Siarhei Liubimau is a co-founder and lead of the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism (2007) and Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the European Humanities University in Vilnius (2014). For his doctoral research, he worked with the issue of trans-border urbanism and studied changes of EU internal and external border regimes as urban scale specific processes. Empirically, he worked on towns on the German-Polish and Polish-Belarusian borders (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Science, 2005-2010), as well as with the borders of Luxembourg (Bauhaus-Dessau Kolleg 'EU Urbanism', 2006-2007). Starting from 2015, he has been engaged in the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism in various research, educational and soft planning projects in the former 'nuclear' town of Visaginas in Eastern Lithuania (satellite of the decommissioned Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant). Together with Benjamin Cope, he has edited a book 'Re-Tooling Knowledge Infrastructures in a Nuclear Town' (2021), documenting LCU work in Visaginas in 2016-2020. From 2018 he is part of CityIndustries research network. He has been a fellow at the Central European University (Budapest), the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna) and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.Siarhei Liubimau
