All Ages

Populism has a complicated relationship with power and democratic institutions. Conventional wisdom assumes that populists cannot last in power; they either become mainstream or turn authoritarian. Such hypotheses are arguably rooted in systematic, anti-populist theorizations, which view populism always as a threat to democracy, connecting it with demagogy and irresponsibility and understanding it as a force that belongs to the opposition.

This talk puts these claims under scrutiny, as they distract our attention from populism’s ‘essence’—the construction of collective identities in the name of ‘the people’ against ‘the elites’. Using a discursive and performative perspective, Giorgos Venizelos focuses on the charismatic function of populism to mobilize emotions and interpellate identification through antagonistic discourse and transgressive aesthetics. Such an account offers a rigorous yet flexible conceptualization that allows one to grasp the rhetorical and affective dynamics of populism in power.

Giorgos Venizelos is Fellow in Political Polarization at the Democracy Institute, Central European University. His research is situated at the intersections of contemporary political theory and comparative politics with a special focus on populism, anti-populism and discourse theory. He has published in journals including Political Studies, Constellations, Critical Sociology and Representation . He co-convenes the Populism Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association ( www.giorgosvenizelos.com).

The Latino & Iberian Film Festival at Yale (LIFFY):
https://liffy.yale.edu/liffy-2023#overlay-context=

Screening of the award-winning documentary The Land of Azaba, a Spanish-language film set in Western Spain that closely observes the largest land preservation and ecological restoration project in Europe. Followed by a Q&A with the film director Greta Schiller, an Emmy-Award-winning veteran documentary filmmaker based in New York, and Carlos Sanchez, the film protagonist and President of Fundación Naturaleza y Hombre.
The Land of Azaba is the first feature documentary on the subject of ecological restoration, and it is set in one of the world’s first “hot spots” for increasing and maintaining bio-diversity, Campanarios de Azaba Nature Reserve in Western Spain. The Land of Azaba immerses the viewer in a magical world where humans and wildlife work together to restore the largest remaining tract of wild nature in Western Europe.

Movie screening on Thursday, April 13th, 2023 (25mn) followed immediately by Q&A session (35mn).

We have lost 75% of the world’s global seed diversity. Restoring seed biodiversity is important to ensure our food systems are resilient to climate change and protect our cultural diversity – recipes using ancient, diverse, heirloom varieties that enrich our lives here on planet Earth with one another. The film Frø - Nordic Seed Heroes explores the intersection of people and seeds, from all the way up to the Arctic Circle at the Svalbard Global Gene Vault to the middle of a wheat field in rural Denmark.

The film features the following seed heroes based in the Nordic regions (in order of appearance): the Brinkholm Andelsgaarde farm, the Nordic Genetic Resource Center and Crop Trust’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum, Frøsamlerne (the Danish Seed Savers), Kørnby Mølle, Grønt Marked, Losæter urban farm, Drys Nu, and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center.

The documentary is a research initiative by Charly Frisk, a student at Yale School of Environment, and a collaborative initiative with the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum, funded by the Garden of Club of America, the Scandinavian Seminar, the Program on Refugees, Forced Displacement, and Humanitarian Responses at Yale, and the Danish Heritage Society.

The Q&A will be led by Ulla Kasten, Council on Middle East Studies Research Scholar at the MacMillan Center at Yale and former Associate Curator and Museum Editor of the Yale Babylonian Collection.

Lyudmila Huseynova is a resident of the temporarily occupied Novoazovsk region of Donetsk region where she worked as a safety engineer at a local poultry farm. At the time of her arrest, she had spent the past five years caring for orphans and semi-orphans from the temporarily occupied village of Primorske. She was detained on October 9, 2019 for volunteering, espousing a pro-Ukrainian position (a blue-yellow flag hung over her house in Novoazovsk for a long time), and for her social media activity. Lyudmila was initially detained in the Izolyatsia prison, where she was severely tortured. She was later transferred to a pre-trial detention center in Donetsk and charged with “espionage.” During the three years of Ludmila Huseinova’s imprisonment, the local “courts” never delivered the so-called sentence.
Anna Olsen is a senior combat medic of the chemical and biological protection company of the 36th separate brigade of marines. She, along with her siblings and stepsisters, was at the Ilyich factory in Mariupol. She was captured and spent six months in captivityat Olenivka, undergoing physical and psychological torture, and held with over 3 dozen others in a cell designed for just six individuals.
Tetiana Katrychenko is a journalist, coordinator of Ukrainian NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights (MIHR), and author of the 2019 report Prisoners of War and Civilian Hostages of Donbass. Since the beginning of the armed conflict, her journalistic focus has been on covering the topic of illegally detained persons in eastern Ukraine. Katrychenko later shifted from journalism work to conducting advocacy campaigns in support of detainees’ families and subsequently joined the MIHR’s team. Since February 2020, Katrychenko has been a member of the Commission launched by the Ministry of Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories in Ukraine, which deals with issues related to the recognition of persons deprived of liberty as a result of armed aggression against Ukraine. Katrychenko manages the Female Face of Donbass Hostages project: she compiles lists of hostages held by representatives of illegal armed groups in Donbas, maintains contact with relatives of hostages, and interviews ex-hostages after their release. She also provides advice to relatives of newly detained persons, as well as to the Ukrainian law enforcement agencies dealing with the issue.