Summer school “From the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean: A Shared History of Northern Eurasia.”
KRES Poliskola and Ab Imperio journal invite you to spend 2 weeks in the summer of 2017 in Riga, the capital of Latvia, studying and discussing the history of Northern Eurasia. The goal of the summer school is to find a common modern language to properly describe the multi-century history of the vast territory from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean.
The way people picture social groups and driving forces of the past directly influences the way they see modern society. Social thinking is based solely on historical materials with this knowledge being later projected onto modern realities. This is why today, in the era of globalization, the history of a region that can be referred to as Northern Eurasia acquires a particular importance. Having no “natural” geographical or cultural borders, this territory can be seen as a whole in one sense only–as a zone of intensive intercultural cooperation and diversity management. Self-organization and contacts between groups that inhabited this territory and belonged to different cultures took the shape of trade, wars, imperial rule and insurrections but had always required a certain common language of communication. This is why the analysis of the language of social thinking–both the one used in the past and the modern one we use ourselves–represents a key element of the offered history course.
The summer school curriculum was developed by a team of editors of the international journal Ab Imperio and based on the history course “New imperial history of Northern Eurasia from the 7th to the early 20th century.” The most advanced studies on the history of the region published in Ab Imperio from 2000 by representatives of nearly 40 national academic traditions served as a basis for this work. Focused on bringing order into multidimensional human diversity, the history course overcomes the two-century-long tradition of writing the region’s history through the prism of a “state” or a “nation” (or else a “nation state” as the synthesis of the two).
The school welcomes all Russian-speaking college-aged people. Lessons will be held in downtown Riga on July 17-29, 2017. This course is not about “how it all really was.” This course is designed for those who want to learn today how to reflect on the past– and consequently on the future.