„New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent”

Resistance and dissent in former socialist Europe 1945–1989 constitute a remarkable chapter of Europe’s recent past, which not only informs in a decisive way the identities of post-socialist societies but has also reshaped the continent as a whole and still provides an important reference for contemporary social movements worldwide. However, after a period of growth and consolidation, this field of study and the respective domain of cultural heritage have stalled and fell short of its true significance. This situation results from (1) the inheritance of Cold War-era conceptual distinctions, (2) confinement of research within national milieu and (3) neglecting the problem of access to original archival sources for digitally enabled research due to both their heterogeneity and uneven investment in research infrastructures. The main aim of the project was to trigger a new discovery phase of this legacy through forging a new, reflexive approach and providing a platform for incubating networked, transnational, multidisciplinary and technology-conscious research with creative dissemination methods. The project employed a new, reflexive approach, spotlighting diverse, hitherto underresearched, manifestations of cultural subversion and fostering understanding of the many and diverse ways in which the concept of “dissent” (and related categories such as opposition or resistance) has been constructed, perceived, used, and acted upon by a broad variety of actors. The researchers did not take “dissent” as a given category, but rather problematized this notion, guided by such questions as: (1) when or why was someone or something designated as “dissident” and how this has subsequently influenced archival and, more broadly, documentary practices; (2) which phenomena of resistance have been captured through the lenses of different collections of documents, artefacts and testimonies, or embodied by symbolic spaces; (3) which manifestations have been rendered invisible by the prevailing definitions of cultural dissent; and (4) how is the legacy of dissent shaped by the broader memory culture in its multiple, state and non-state, local and transnational contexts.

Main results:

• Gaižutytė-Filipavičienė, Žilvinė. Silent Voices of Cultural Dissent: Artistic Oriental Movement in the Late Soviet Period, Creative Dissent – Final Conference, Warsaw: Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw, 2021, 2021 04 13. COST Action: CA16213
  https://nep4dissent.eu/activities/3/
• Nikiforova, Basia. 2022. The Archive as Witness of Intertextual Lithuanian–Russian Dissent’s links. International conference Histoire, Archives et Memoires des Dissidents et Exiles de L’urss et de l’europe Socialiste [|Dissidents AND Exiles from Socialist Eastern Europe and the USSR: history, archives and memories. (1945–1991)]. June 2–3 2022, La Contemporaine, Nanterre University, France.
  https://nep4dissent.eu/news/cfp-dissidents-and-exiles-from-socialist-eastern-europe-and-the-ussr/
• Nikiforova, Basia. 2022. Short Term Scientific Mission (STSM) title: “The Phenomena of Polish dissidents in Central European Intertextual Panorama of Ideas”. STSM dates: 2022-03-16 - 2022-03-30. Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology (Poland).
• Nikiforova, Basia. 2022. The Archive as Witness of Intertextual Lithuanian-Russian Dissidence Links [Les archives, témoins des liens de la dissidence intertextuelle russo-lituanienne], Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, The University of Nanterre university (France), (forthcoming).
• Nikiforova, Basia. 2022. Central European Literary Intertextuality: case of Lithuanian-Russian Dissidents. Magazine Horizontok. The Renaissance of the Idea of Central Europe during the 1970s and 1980s (forthcoming).
• Žukauskienė, Odeta. 2019. Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent: Joint Review Report. Report prepared by the participants of the COST Action CA16213, [Research Report] Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, pp.223nt. ffhal-02144983.
  https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02144983/document
• Žukauskienė, Odeta. An Aberrant Poser. Mikutis, Blog4Dissent. COST New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent, February 21, 2022.
  https://nep4dissent.eu/odeta-zukauskiene-an-aberrant-poser-mikutis/