Department seminar: Dace Dzenovska
The Department of Social Anthropology is happy to announce the upcoming seminar with Dr. Dace Dzenovska, University of Oxford. The title of the lecture is "Political Liberalism After the Cold War: Critical Perspectives from Eastern Europe".
Main content
Seminar paper
Following independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, economic and political liberalization projects were rolled out across Latvia and Eastern Europe. While economic liberalism was welcomed, political liberalism was contested. Many in Latvia did not want to give up their collective sense of self and insisted on the importance of the nation alongside individual liberties and respect for diversity. From the perspective of liberal Europe, this often led to the conclusion that Latvia’s residents exhibited too much socialist mentality or nationalist sentiment and thus required lessons in political liberalism in order to become fully European.
In this talk, I critically examine efforts to extend lessons in political liberalism to Latvia’s residents on the basis of an ethnography of tolerance promotion in Latvia in the 2000s. I argue that, rather than viewing Eastern Europe as falling behind, it should be viewed as the laboratory for forging post-Cold War political liberalism in Europe. Moreover, it provides insight with regard to the current crisis of political liberalism from a moment in time when it was still confident and from the perspective of a place and people that were thought to have never been liberal.
About the lecturer
Dr. Dace Dzenovska is Associate Professor in Anthropology of Migration at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Read more on her webpage: dacedzenovska.wordpress.com/