>>> Programme: HERE
>>> More about the conference: HERE
>>> More about the speakers (Krzysztof Czyżewski, Moha Ennaji, Chris Keulemans, Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, Elżbieta Matynia, Christopher Merrill, Paul Scheffer, Isabella Thomas): HERE
>>> More about Cafe Europe - Native Realm: HERE
>>> Practical (addresses + maps of DeMarkten, PassaPorta, East Poland House ): HERE
Contact persons from the Borderland Foundation:
Joanna Kulas and Mikołaj Golubiewski: agora@pogranicze.sejny.pl
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Programme
>>> November 18, 2011 @ De Markten (De Spiegelzaal) - Adresse + map
Moderator: Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine
Speakers: Krzysztof Czyżewski, A Native Realm - Challenge for the Future
Isabella Thomas, Who Do We Think We Are? The Native Realm, History Teaching and Immigration
10:30 - 12:00 – Symposium, session 1: Isabella Thomas
12:00 - 12:30 – Coffee break
12:30 - 14:30 – Presentation: A Handbook of Dialogue. Trust and Identity at Passa Porta bookshop (Adresse + map)
14:30 - 16:00 – Lunch
16:00 - 17:30 – Symposium, session 2: Krzysztof Czyżewski
17:30 - 18:00 – Coffee break
19:00 - 21:00 – Concert of the Sejny Theater Klezmer Band at De Markten (Adresse + map)
>>> November 19, 2011 @ East Poland House (Adresse + map)
Moderator: Krzysztof Czyżewski
Speakers:
Chris Keulemans, Opening up New Space in a Country that is Closing Down
Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, Europe as Native Realm versus Europe as a Domain of Acute Nationalism: Milosz’s Prophetic Vision to Overcome the New European Crisis
Moha Ennaji, Maghreb-Europe Cultural Dialogue
10:00 - 11:30 – Symposium, session 1: Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine
11:30 - 12:00 – Coffee break
12:00 - 13:30 – Symposium, session 2: Chris Keulemans
13:30 - 15:00 – Lunch
15:00 - 16:30 – Symposium, session 3: Moha Ennaji
18:00 - 19:30 – Dinner
20:00 - 23:00 – Café Europa at Passa Porta bookshop >>> More information onhttp://www.culturepolonaise.eu/CafeEuropa
>>> November 20, 2011 @ East Poland House (Adresse + map)
Moderators: Chris Keulemans
Speakers:
Elżbieta Matynia, Active Edges: Sites for Conversation and Reframing
Paul Scheffer, „Facing Too Large an Expanse:” Europe in the Wider World
Christopher Merrill, Inscripts: Notes for a Poetics of Intercultural Dialogue
10:00 - 11:30 – Symposium, session 1: Elżbieta Matynia
11:30 - 12:00 – Coffee break
12:00 - 13:30 – Symposium, session 2: Paul Scheffer
13:30 - 15:00 – Lunch
15:00 - 16:30 – Symposium, session 3: Christopher Merrill
16:30 - 17:00 – Coffee break
17:00 - 19:00 – Dolina Issy (The Issa Valley) film presentation
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EUROPE – NATIVE REALM
How to build a Europe of Bridges? International Symposium New Agora “Europe – Native Realm” stems from the belief that a society too much concentrated on diversity and defence of identity has a problem with ethos of communality. The problem is also a growing concern for the inhabitants of the post-Cold-War, post-industrial, and post-modern era. The solution is not to erase borders but to gain competences in border-crossing, which in a culturally diverse world enable the creation of community-binding cements. Art and knowledge have the tools which support the long term creation of the cements in local communities.
The title comes from a famous book by Czesław Miłosz, Rodzinna Europa (Native Realm). For Miłosz, “native” is a problem of a Central-European with being ingrained in common European heritage and of the faint knowledge the West had about the Eastern part of its continent before the tearing down of the Berlin wall. However today dialogue between the East and the West is much more advanced, there is still much work to be done. European communality as a whole is becoming a bigger problem: How do all the Europeans feel in the new Europe? What is their intercultural competence? Does it enable living together in a world of migrations, new cultural borderlands, and open borders?
One can fear the total decline of agora in the modern multicultural democratic societies. We pride ourselves with cultural diversity and act as if preserving distinct identities. However, are agora and culture of dialogue, which accompanies her, still present? If not, how is then the rebirth of agora possible? Do we need „New Agora” at all? Would it not be in contradiction with strong emphasis put on diversity and distinction? What are the sources of the contemporary crisis of multiculturalism and what are the possible ways out? These are some of the general questions for the Symposium in Brussels to be raised.
SYMPOSIUM FORMAT
The New Agora is not a typical scholarly conference, but a forum for debate and exchange that is open to the public, especially students. About 6 speakers meet for three days in Brussels theatre De Markten and East Poland House to engage in a discussion on three key issues. In addition to their formal contribution during sessions, all speakers and participants take an active part in the discussions during all three days. The speakers’ contributions are treated as an introduction into a free, open and informal debate.
The official language of the New Agora Symposium is English.
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SPEAKERS
KRZYSZTOF CZYŻEWSKI
Krzysztof Czyżewski is a cultural animator and the co-founder and president of the Borderland Foundation in Poland. His early experience as an alternative theater artist led him to a concept of cultural animation that would promote and develop the unique experience of multicultural borderland regions. The Borderland Foundation and the associated Borderland Center that he also heads, both based in northeast Poland, a region with strong multicultural traditions, since the early 1990s have been implementing this concept of broad and multi-disciplinary cross-cultural work. For their activities focused on promoting dialogue between cultures and nations the Borderland Foundation and Krzysztof Czyżewski personally have been awarded many prizes by institutions and organizations from Poland and abroad. Krzysztof Czyżewski is also a poet and essayist, the author of numerous articles devoted to the heritage and socio-cultural, ‘bridge-building’ potential of the borderlands.
MOHA ENNAJI
Moha Ennaji is one of Morocco’s leading scholars with research interests in multiculturalism, education, gender issues, and migration. He is the author and/or editor of numerous books and articles on language and culture. His most recent publications are: Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco (Springer, 2005), Language and Gender in the Mediterranean Region, IJSL Issue 190 Editor (2008), Migration and Gender in Morocco, co-authored with F. Sadiqi (2008, Red Sea Press). Moha Ennaji is Professor of Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Fès University, was a visiting professor at Rutgers University. He is the president of the South North Center for Intercultural Dialogue in Morocco.
CHRIS KEULEMANS
Chris Keulemans is the artistic director of Tolhuistuin, a new arts centre in Amsterdam.
The centre will open in December of this year, after 4 years of preparation and a full-scale reconstruction of the main building. Tolhuistuin will have three stages for performing arts, two exhibition spaces, a large cafe-restaurant, a park and 4 smaller buildings filled with artists, musicians, theatremakers, designers and architects. Including an artist in residence program. De Tolhuistuin aims to be both rooted in the local neighborhood and internationally oriented in its programming. It aims at creating a new public space, open to all, based on the old values of hospitality and curiosity. During the nineties, Keulemans was the director of De Balie, centre for culture and debate in Amsterdam. As a traveling writer, he published six books of fiction and non-fiction. He published numerous articles on cinema, war, football, refugees, theatre, pop music and cities. He participated several times in conferences and literary programs organized by the Borderland Foundation.
ALEXANDRA LAIGNEL-LAVASTINE
Alexandra Lavastine is a french PhD philosopher and historian born in Paris in 1966. As a specialist of Eastern European Intellectuals in the 20th Century she has published several books and essays, all translated in different languages, including Polish: Esprits d'Europe: Autour de Czeslaw Milosz, Jan Patocka et Istvan Bibo (Calmann-Lévy 2005 and Pocket Folio-Gallimard, 2010), awarded in Lausanne the Prix Européen de l’Essai “Charles Veillon” in 2005; Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: L’Oubli du fascisme (Presses universitaires de France, 2002); Jan Patocka, L’Esprit de la dissidence (Michalon, 1998).
ELŻBIETA MATYNIA
Elzbieta Matynia is Associate Professor of Liberal Studies and Sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York and director of NSSR’s Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, whose year-round activities include summer institutes in Poland and South Africa. Her own research in political and cultural sociology focuses on democratic transitions in Eastern Europe and beyond, and more recently on the concept of borderlands in the emerging “shared Europe”. Her main areas of interest are political sociology, the history of social thought, sociology of culture and art, democratic theory and practice, women and democracy, and public memory in the context of globalization. She is the author of Performative Democracy (Yale Cultural Sociology Series, Paradigm, 2009).
CHRISTOPHER MERRILL
Christopher Merrill has published four collections of poetry, including Brilliant Water, and Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; translations of Aleš Debeljak’s Anxious Moments and The City and the Child; several edited volumes, among them, The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature and From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O’Keeffe as Icon; and four books of nonfiction, The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of Soccer, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, and Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain.
His work has been translated into twenty-five languages, his journalism appears in many publications, and his awards include a knighthood in arts and letters from the French government. He has held the William H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, and now directs the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa.
PAUL SCHEFFER
Paul Scheffer is professor of European Studies at the University of Tilburg. From 2003 till 2011 he was professor of urban questions at the University of Amsterdam. He won renown with the essay The Multicultural Disaster (2000). In this book Scheffer dissolved the Dutch myth of the open society in which coexist the members of various religions and traditions. Scheffer studied philosophy, sociology and political sciences. In the 1980’s worked as a press correspondent in Paris and Warsaw. In 1986 took up work at the Wiardi Beckman Institute, think-tank for the Dutch social-democratic group Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA). Scheffer remains an influential member of the PvdA. Since 1992 he has been publishing in the Dutch press, mostly in “NRC Handelsblad” newspaper, and in the foreign periodicals: “Die Zeit”, “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, “Le Monde des Debats”, “El Pais”, “Politiken” or “Tagesanzeiger”. Scheffer is concerned mostly with the issues touching upon the model of multicultural Europe, migrations, integration with the open society or the redefinition of the civic community. His latest book is Immigrant Nations (Cambridge, Polity, 2011).
ISABELLA THOMAS
Isabella Thomas is Senior Adviser to the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation and Axess TV in Stockholm (where she holds the position of program director). She has acted as convenor of European conferences on the theme of the Secular State and Society and on the future of the West. She led the development of the Blackwall Debates in East London, an initiative designed to bring individuals from different estates and different ethnic groups together in a debating forum. She is a graduate in Modern History from Cambridge University, and has a Masters’ Degree in Development Studies from SOAS, University of London. She worked as a journalist and researcher in Spain (where she lived for 3 years), Cuba, Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. She wrote for a study group that looked at communist countries in transition, and for The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politica Exterior, The Guardian, Prospect, openDemocracy, The Sunday Times and others. She also co-produced several documentary films for Channel 4 and the BBC and helped to launch the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum in Bristol in 2002.
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ADDRESSES + MAPS
>>> DeMarkten (Oude Graanmarkt 5, 1000 Brussels)
tel.: + 32 (0)2 512 34 25
>>> PassaPorta (Dansaertstraat 46, 1000 Brussels)
tel. +32 (0)2 223 68 32
>>> East Poland House (Av. de Tervueren 48, 1040 Brussels)
tel: + 32 2 738 02 20
Links
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Bordeland Foundation: http://www.pogranicze.sejny.pl
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HetBeschrijf: http://www.beschrijf.be
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PassaPorta: http://www.passaporta.be
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ULB: http://www.ulb.ac.be
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DeMarkten: http://www.demarkten.be/
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MKiDN: http://www.mkidn.gov.pl