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Actuvirtual Symposium „Decoloniality in Eastern Europe“

Organised the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg (JIAS-UJ)

Wednesday, September 27, 2023 at 16h

The Actuvirtual Symposium, hosted by the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg (JIAS-UJ), commenced on May 28, 2020, at 4pm South African Standard Time. It is a significant global space for critical learning, research, and contemplation on the ecological, social, political, ethical and artistic issues of our contemporary world as well as the enduring specters of historical and current political injustices. Notably, it has fostered relations, collaborations, and conversations that are central to the pursuit of knowledge.

We extend a warm invitation to you to join us for the forthcoming Actuvirtual Symposium scheduled for September 27, 2023, at 4pm South African Standard Time.

“Decoloniality in Eastern Europe” 

This Actuvirtual Symposium, engages with Decoloniality in Eastern Europe: A Lexicon of Reorientation (kuda.org, 2023), edited by Ana Vilenica. Some of the contributors discuss how the global, transnational, transregional and local colonial processes shape the colonizer/colonized condition as well as decolonial trajectories in Eastern Europe. 

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Manuela Boatcă is professor of sociology and head of the Global Studies Program at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She works on global inequalities in the modern world-system, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, gender and citizenship in modernity and coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. She is the author of "Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism" (Routledge, 2016) and the co-author (with Anca Parvulescu) of "Creolizing the Modern. Transylvania across Empires" (Cornell University Press, 2022).

Ana Vilenica is a post-doctoral research fellow with the ERC project 'Inhabiting Radical Housing' at the Polytechnic of Turin's Inter-university Department of Regional & Urban Studies and Planning (DIST) and a core member of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab. Vilenica is a co-investigator with the project 'Sustaining Civil Society in the Context of Multiple Crises: Hubs of Engagement in Central and Eastern Europe and Sweden' funded by the Baltic See Foundation. She is a member of the Radical Housing Journal Editorial collective. Ana Vilenica has edited six books, most recently Marginality and Urban Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge, forthcoming), Decoloniality in Eastern Europe: A Lexicon of Reorientation (kuda.org, 2023) and Radical Housing: Art, Struggle, Care (Institute of Network Cultures 2021). Vilenica's work on housing, feminist, and no-borders activism has taken place in Serbia, the UK, and across Europe and Americas. Her current research focuses on international organizing in and beyond radical housing struggles.

Zhivka Valiavicharska is Associate Professor at Pratt Institute, New York. She works in the spheres of political and social theory, postcolonial theory, gender and sexuality, visual studies, and contemporary art. She is the author of studies on the social, cultural, and visual history of socialism and postsocialism in Bulgaria and Eastern Europe, including the book Restless History: Political Imaginaries and their Discontents in Post-Stalinist Bulgaria (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). Currently she is working on a series of projects about the land communes and social movements influenced by the work of Russian writer and social thinker Lev Tolstoy, and their history and legacy in Bulgaria, Russia, and Eastern Europe throughout the twentieth century.

Ana Sladojević is an independent curator and art theorist. In combining curatorial and artistic methodologies in her work, she points at in/visible privilege and in/visible violence perpetuated through the heritage field, which posits itself as normative and paramount in construing social memory and remembrance. She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies – Group for Theory of Arts and Media, with a focus on the coloniality of knowledge in museums, in particular regarding the construction of African arts, and an MFA and BFA in Art and Design, all from the University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia. Among her recent exhibitions are An Anticolonial Museum (Museum of African Art, Belgrade, 2022) and On Perseverance (Centre for Cultural Decontamination, Belgrade, 2021). She also took part in the following projects: “Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned”, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova/Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana (2019) / Asia Culture Center, Gwangju (2020);  “Tito in Africa: Picturing Solidarity”, Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade (2017) / Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (2018) / Wende Museum, Los Angeles (2019); “NYIMPA KOR NDZIDZI, One Man No Chop, (Re)conceptualization of the Museum of African Art – the Veda and Dr. Zdravko Pečar Collection”,  MAA, Belgrade (2017-2018); “Non-Aligned Modernisms”, Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade / ERSTE Stiftung (2011-2016). 

Zoltán Ginelli is a geographer and global historian at the National University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary. He follows a world-systemic and decolonial approach in studying the global histories of Hungarian semiperipheral coloniality and raciality, as well as the economic, cultural, and political relations between Eastern Europe and the Global South. His recent research includes the Hungarian histories of colonial trade, the colonial diaspora, blackness, Pan-Africanism, and 'Indian play' (representing and performing Native American culture). In 2020, he co-founded the Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy Research Group, in which he focuses on the Hungarian anti-communist discourse of 'Soviet colonialism' during Afro-Asian decolonization. In 2021, he co-curated the exhibition ‘Transperiphery Movement: Global Eastern Europe and Global South’. He is also founder of the group Decolonizing Eastern Europe (Facebook and Twitter). Currently, he is finishing his book ‘The Global Histories of the Quantitative Revolution’ and a co-written book on the global histories of Hungarian coloniality for Cambridge University Press.

Erin McElroy is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in transition to an Assistant Professor job in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. McElroy’s work focuses upon intersections of gentrification, technology, digitality, empire, and racial capitalism in the US and in Romania, alongside housing justice organizing and transnational solidarities. This informs the focus of a forthcoming manuscript, Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times with Duke University Press.McElroy is cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project—a data visualization, counter-cartography, and digital media collective that produces tools, software, maps, reports, murals, zines, oral histories, and more to further the work of housing justice. McElroy additionally runs the Anti-Eviction Lab where much of the research focuses upon Landlord Tech Watch—a platform dedicated to producing collective knowledge about landlord-driven data grabbing and algorithmic techniques. McElroy has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and public scholarship pieces, and co-edits the Radical Housing Journal—an open access publication that foregrounds housing research and organizing transnationally.

Fazil Moradi is visiting associate professor at Faculty of Humanities, Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg (JIAS-US); associate researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences; and affiliated scholar at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes against Humanity at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, Graduate Center—CUNY. He has engaged in collaborative research with medical scientists from the University of Gothenburg, studying the long-term effects of modernity’s technologies of destruction, chemical warfare agents, and convenes the Actuvirtual Symposium at JIAS. Moradi is the editor of Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation (co-ed. By M. Six-Hohenbalken and R. Buchenhorst, Routledge 2017); author of Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq (Rutgers University Press, January 2024) and editor of In Search of Political Futures: Engaging Mahmood Mamdani’s Neither Settler Nor Native (Special Issue in Anthropological Theory, forthcoming 2023). His scholarly contributions also appear in Public Culture(2022); Palgrave Macmillan(2022); Critical Arts(2021); British Medical Journal(2020);Praesens Verlag(2020); Critical Studies(2019); PLOS ONE (2019); Routledge (2017) Rutgers University Press (2016); Journal of Higher Education in Africa (2010).