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The TCDS 17th Annual Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institute in Krakow, Poland: “A pivotal experience – Personally, Intellectually, and Professionally”
More photos in our Krakow 2008 photo gallery!
From July 8 to 25, 2008, our increasingly competitive summer campus in Poland again became home to 35 talented young scholars committed to the strengthening of civil society. This year’s participants came from The New School for Social Research, Eugene Lang College, and universities around the world, representing 15 countries in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
They gathered at Krakow’s Przegorzaly Castle for almost three weeks of intensive study of 21st-century challenges – in politics, culture, and society – that are faced by recently constituted or aspiring, as well as long-established, democracies. The combination of diverse and seemingly ever more remarkable students, dedicated New School faculty, challenging curriculum, the magic of old Krakow, the genius loci of the Przegorzaly hillside with its breathtaking view of the Vistula valley, but also the presence of unsettling reminders of the last century’s darkest hours, again turned this year’s program into a pivotal experience personally, intellectually, and professionally.
Students attending the program chose two of four seminar courses offered. The course selection included Cosmopolitanism and its Discontents, taught by Professors Elzbieta Matynia and Andreas Kalyvas; Gender Stable & Unstable: Case Studies in the Changing Meaning of Gender by Professor Ann Snitow; Memory, Trauma, Genocide, Evil with Professors Richard and Carol Bernstein; and Political Culture, Then and Now taught by Professor Jeffrey Goldfarb.
Jeff Goldfarb: “The New School for Social Research is a special academic institution, with a distinctive social science tradition: theoretical, historical and critical. This tradition is alive and well in the courses at Krakow. Year after year I am moved as students from many different places, with a broad range of experiences, help us keep our tradition alive.”
The Institute’s intensive learning extended, as always, beyond the seminars to lively conversations day and night, screenings, and guest lectures exposing the participants to artists, public intellectuals, and scholars from the region. We hosted Adam Zagajewski, Poland's foremost poet and a professor at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, whose poetry reading turned into a late-night discussion on roots, belonging, and crossing cultural borders. We also hosted writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker Ewa Zadrzynska for an evening of selections from her international video project, Poetry Unites Us, which struck just the right note for the start of the Institute with its six-minute portraits of people from all walks of life who reveal their hopes and fears by presenting a favorite poem. Other guest speakers included Professor Jan Gross, Polish-born historian now teaching at Princeton and known for two recent Holocaust-related books, Fear and Neighbors, which address difficult issues of Polish-Jewish history and anti-Semitism.
Study tours on the Institute’s main themes provided further opportunities to engage with the history, culture and politics of Central Europe. Both historic (Renaissance and Baroque) and modern Krakow (above all Art Nouveau, and the period of socialist-realism) constitute a rich resource for Institute participants. We toured its old Jewish district of Kazimierz, and took a day-long trip to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. A visit to Nowa Huta, built adjacent to Krakow in the 1950s as a socialist model city of steel mills, offered students vivid insight into Poland’s communist past.
Participants were given an introduction to Krakow life and also to the revival of Jewish culture in the city by Institute alumna Karen Underhill, who hosted them at Massolit Books, her English-language bookstore and meeting place:
“When I attended the Summer Institute in 1996, the specific work that The New School is doing in Eastern & Central Europe immediately became a model for my own engagement in the region. Elzbieta Matynia, Ann Snitow, Jeff Goldfarb and their colleagues have created a unique intellectual environment that combines demanding theoretical and scholarly work with an ethos that encourages active engagement in building the institutions of civil society. More than that, what is unique in their model is that the Krakow program creates a space of community and friendship that excites its participants to believe that they can be active creators of the societies they want to live in. It is a community of scholars and activists that extends far beyond the summer session, in contacts and cooperation among alumni worldwide. This community electrified me, and I wanted to contribute to it on a more permanent basis. That is where the conception for Massolit Books came from. Our ongoing involvement with the Democracy and Diversity Summer Institute in Krakow—its faculty and incredibly talented and diverse student body— has continued to be the most rewarding part of our work here.”
As the TCDS network expands, we are visited every summer by nostalgic alumni of past Institutes – people who now in their respective countries hold positions of influence in academia, media, government, and civil society organizations. Ann Snitow’s Gender Studies course, for example, is justly famous for having trained a number of professors, writers, government policy makers, and activists on various aspects of the changing situation of women in post-1989 Europe, particularly in East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. It is a region where, as Prof. Snitow puts it,
“Our University has a long history of supporting human rights struggles for freedom and political participation. Indeed the summer Institute has fulfilled this special function, bringing formerly isolated students of the region into current debates and offering them the opportunity to talk openly and at length with students from The New School whose experiences and frames of reference are very different from their own. The results are dramatic and transformative. These are the young people who will craft the new institutions now being developed in a swiftly reorganizing Europe. It is immensely productive that they should know each other, debate each other, raise each other's consciousness, and, finally, stay in touch with each other as part of the far-flung, active TCDS network, participating in follow-up events and building long commitments to our University, its goals and values.”
A prominent journalist from a weekly magazine supplement to Gazeta Wyborcza, called Wysokie Obcasy, came to Przegorzaly to interview the Institute’s director, Elzbieta Matynia. Her extensive article, published on September 6, 2008, and devoted in large part to the Institute, is only the most recent testimony to the Institute’s widely established reputation.
Elzbieta Matynia:
“The Democracy & Diversity Institute, which in the 90's put The New School on the map for the new democracies of Central Europe, is now an object of the aspirations of junior scholars from the expanded European Union, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. We have been attracting the best students, have presented them with a very engaging, and challenging, sampling of American university life, and have managed to create an intellectual ‘home’ for them. And that's a lot.”
Excerpts from students’ impression papers (Krakow 2008):
It was an experience that opened potentialities; eyes, mind, and heart…Stories of experience were shared with candor. I was touched by the slices of life through which my peers had lived: having had one’s worldview develop through the veil of Soviet communism; active engagement against institutionalized racial segregation and terror; being a woman in gender-bound societies; having the inherent turbulence of one’s life compounded by war, genocide, hate, the worst of humanity, yet still harboring ideals strong enough to attend an institute promoting democracy and diversity.
- Jeffrey Purchla, Dept. of Sociology, NSSR
The teachers were amazing! I was impressed by their professionalism, extreme knowledge, ability to gain students’ attention, way of running lectures, attitude to students…For the first time, I had contact with an “American way” of teaching, which seems very different from that usually encountered at Polish universities. I found it very attractive and it made me think about changing the way of running my own lectures with students…
- Agnieszka Sznajder, Dept.of Political Science, Pedagogical University of Krakow (Poland)
For me personally the courses became a starting point for an enquiry into the construction and creation of identities, and the creation of an “other” that eventually leads to the annihilation of that “other”… Professors Richard and Carol Bernstein took us on a journey that revealed to me the tremendous underlying force that resists and fights against inhumanity even in the face of tremendous odds… The memoirs and testimonies I read in the course were some of the most profound literature I have ever read. As the course proceeded and we were exposed to a litany of crimes against humanity, one could feel the spirit of our class sagging under the sheer burden of evil that we somehow felt we were carrying. I recall Prof. Bernstein’s gentle warning, that neither recourse to despair nor blind optimism can resolve current or past genocides. There is no doubt that the work that I will do from now on will be deeply influenced by the classes I took at the Institute.
- Anberin Pasha, Serbian Reconstruction Women's Fund (India)
Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents stands out as one of the most thoroughly invigorating and enjoyable classes I have ever taken; each session was intellectually challenging in addition to being tremendously entertaining. Despite being a daily occurrence for three weeks, the class never failed to surpass my expectations. The dynamic between Andreas and Elzbieta was extraordinary…I know that this program has played an integral role in my intellectual development, in addition to welcoming me, comfortably and confidently, into a new-found academic community.
- Michael Gorup, BA/MA student, Eugene Lang College/NSSR
We at TCDS hope you will consider joining us (for a full semester’s credit) at our European campus next summer, or this upcoming January (January 6-22, 2009), at its sister institute, the Democracy & Diversity graduate Institute in Cape Town, South Africa. Please look out for TCDS announcements or visit the TCDS Website.