The Quiet and Velvet Revolutions ― Links between Religion, Politics, and Collective Memory during Political Transformation
Geneviève Zubrzycki, a U.S.-based scholar of nationalism, religion and collective memory, will deliver a lecture on ‘Quiet and Velvet Revolutions: The Impact of Political Transformations on Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec and Poland’ as part of the second methodological seminar of the Centre for Youth Studies (HSE St. Petersburg).
Geneviève Zubrzycki's research focuses on the links between religion, politics, and collective memory at moments of significant political transformation. In her report, she assumes that Poland and Quebec, Catholicism and the Catholic Church have historically provided symbolic, material and institutional resources through which national identity was constructed and through which political projects could be articulated throughout the 19th century and most of the 20th century. In both Poland and Quebec, however, moments of political transition and episodes of state (re)formation - the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s in Quebec and the Velvet Revolution in 1989 in Poland - inaugurated a redefinition of collective identity that countered ethno-religious principles with civic-secular ones.
Based on archival and ethnographic research Zubrzycki will discuss the impact the Quiet and Velvet revolutions have had on the relationship between nationalism, religion and state, and on the articulation of different forms of secularism in both Quebec and Poland.
Geneviève Zubrzycki is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Copernicus Program in Polish Studies at the University of Michigan. Before obtaining her PhD from the University of Chicago she graduated from McGill University (Montreal, Canada) and the University of Montreal. Zubrzycki studies national identity and religion; collective memory and mythology, political and social change, sociology of religion, and the debated place of religious symbols in the public sphere. Her work combines historical and ethnographic methods.
Date and time: Wednesday, May 28, 6:30 pm
Place: St. Petersburg, 14a Promyshlennaya Ulitsa (Taler Business Centre), 3rd floor (entry to the building requires a passport).