Articles₇

What is volunteer tourism? Is it connected to the white savior complex? Can we actually help by sending volunteers for week-long trips around the world?

Tourism is an extremely interesting social phenomenon. Due to constant development, it is one of the keys to understanding the modern world. It is a movement in which the inhabitants of the rich North go on vacation to the countries of the South. Hundreds of millions of intercultural encounters each year add up to form relationships between entire societies. This is how billions of photos, videos, stories, and TikTok messages are created. It is a comprehensive documentation of exchanges among cultures. A tourist aware of global interdependencies, causes and consequences of tourist behaviors as well as conscious of being subject to psychological, commercial, and ideological processes is a post-tourist. Where does he go? What kind of accounts does he prepare? What is he talking about and to whom is he addressing his words?

The border separating Poland and Belarus, a point on one migration route from the east, has become the site of a humanitarian crisis. The closure of the border on the Polish side has left many people seeking to reach Europe in an extremely precarious position. Many of them have fled their countries because of political […]

The topic of the meeting is racism – a belief that one race is superior to another. It is a heterogeneous phenomenon, and it can be effectively analyzed only in a clearly outlined historical context. Our field of research will be capitalism, i.e. an economic system based on private property. We will look at how this system divides and rules, creating hierarchies and identity contradictions. An example that we will subject to detailed analyses is Eurocentrism, which takes the form of colonialism, culturalism and orientalism.

Language fundamentally impacts our perception of the world. How we talk about other people and places reveals how we feel and think about them. Stories are narrated to us in specific ways that can influence our worldview. Listen to Lera Boroditsky’s talk for an in-depth examination of this issue.

Christopher Columbus, as a historical persona, is familiar to most Europeans. We have long been taught that Columbus was an intrepid explorer who discovered unknown lands, catalyzing a “golden age” of global expansion. However, this is a simplistic and one-sided narrative that fails to examine this period of history in all its dimensions, including the iniquities spawned by conquest and colonization. In his animation, Alex Gendler sheds light on aspects of the story that schools have long turned a blind eye to.

The lecture “Colonial History – Postcolonial Societies: On the Politics of Selective Memory in Europe” examined the problematics of postcolonialism and postcolonial societies. The lecture was delivered, by Professor Gurminder K. Bhambra of the University of Sussex, as a part of the CoHERE “Who Is Europe?” conference, which took place, on November 22–23, 2018, at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.