General Public

Panel Discussion & Reception

Prof. Jan Wouters (Jan Monnet Chair & Professor of International Law, KU Leuven)
Prof. Harold Honkju Koh (Sterling Professor of International Law, Yale Law School)
Consul-General Filip Vanden Bulcke (Belgian Consul-General to NYC, 2022-Present)
Ambassador Dirk Wouters (Belgian Ambassador to the US (2016-2020)
Prof. Susan Rose-Ackerman (Henry R. Luce Professor Emeritus of Jurisprudence, Yale Law School)

Sponsored by:
Yale Law School, European Law Association
European Studies Council, MacMillan Center
America Europe Fund

The RUSSIAN INDEPENDENT MEDIA ARCHIVE is preserving the last two decades of independent Russian journalism, guarding this irreplaceable historical record against erasure as media outlets not aligned with the regime of President Vladimir Putin are shuttered and their reporters and editors cast into exile.

The Russian Independent Media Archive is a project of PEN America, inspired by PEN America Trustee Masha Gessen and made possible with the support of Edwin Barbey Charitable Trust, advised by PEN America Trustee Peter Barbey. PEN America is partnering for this project with The Gagarin Center at Bard College, which has longstanding scholarly engagement with Russia. The project is also collaborating with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which contributes to archiving and securing data from Russian media and provides technical consultations. With the support of the Mass Media Defence Center, PEN America, where possible, is entering into licensing agreements with the participating outlets to protect their copyright while the archive serves as a secure home for the content.

Anna Nemzer, journalist, writer, documentary filmmaker, activist. Anna is responsible for the project’s mission and its media partnerships.

Ilia Venyavkin, historian of Soviet and post-Soviet culture, journalist, educational designer, activist. Ilia is responsible for the project’s online and offline events, and for creating a community around the archive.

Lunch @ 12:30 pm ET, Talk @ 1:00 pm
Location: ISPS, Rm A002 lower level, 77 Prospect St.
Part of the European & Russian Studies Community Lunch Seminar Series

Website: https://rima.media/en

Tanya Kotelnykova, Co-Founder and President of Brave Generation and MA student in European, & Russian Studies at Yale University, on “Youth Participation in the Ukrainian Recovery: Experiences from Two Wars in Ukraine”

Lunch @ 12:30 pm ET, Talk @ 1:00 pm
Location: Luce Hall, Rm 202, 2nd fl, 34 Hillhouse Ave.
Part of the European & Russian Studies Community Lunch Seminar Series

In this talk, Tanya will share her personal experiences and talk about the organization she has founded- Brave Generation, as well as explore how people can contribute to Ukraine through the efforts of young individuals.

BIO: Tanya Kotelnykova is currently pursuing an MA in European, & Russian Studies at Yale University. She holds an M.A. in Human Rights from Columbia University and a B.A. in Law from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Tanya’s journey began when she was displaced from her home in Eastern Ukraine in 2014 due to the Donbas occupation. In 2022, she was in Kyiv during the city’s encirclement by Russian forces and witnessed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Tanya is the founder of Brave Generation, a non-profit organization based in NYC, dedicated to uniting and empowering young Ukrainians for post-war reconstruction. She founded Brave Generation with just $10 in October 2022, shortly after arriving in NYC with a scholarship intended for displaced students. Today, Brave Generation has connected 153 young Ukrainians with Columbia University students. Out of the 44 young Ukrainians who applied to U.S. colleges in 2023, an impressive 37 have been awarded scholarships at institutions such as Columbia, Harvard, Bard College, LSE, and others. These scholarships have provided them with the opportunity to pursue their education away from the war zone. Additionally, the organization has provided essential psychological support to 103 youth affected by war, covered TOEFL exam expenses for 60 individuals, and offered English test preparation to 36 students, empowering more young people to apply to universities for the upcoming fall semester.

Additionally, Tanya serves as a project coordinator at the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom, where her role involves enhancing democracy promotion workshops, and the Nemtsov forum as well as overseeing the management of the scholarships related to Ukrainian students. Also, Tanya manages the “Ideas for Russia” project, exploring Russia in the era of non-transparency and isolation.

Low levels of social trust are widely seen as an impediment to economic development and social cohesion. Trust is measured mainly via surveys: metrics are used extensively in cross-national studies and percolate back to inform societal debates. However, the way in which trust is empirically approached is subject to two problems: measurement bias and the relation between attitudes and behavior. We address both problems focusing on Greece, currently ranked as one of Europe’s least trusting societies. We do so by using four methods: survey questionnaires, ethnography, trust games, and a field experimental exercise. Our combined findings strongly suggest both measurement bias and a discrepancy between attitudes and behavior. We explain this discrepancy and explore the drivers of trusting behavior. Our findings carry important implications about how we measure, study, and theorize interpersonal trust as well as the practice of assigning a unique trust score to entire societies.

Effrosyni Charitopoulou is a political sociologist. She investigates the dynamics of intergroup relations, focusing in particular on local and refugee interactions. She focuses on modern Greece, using both contemporary and historical case studies, but also on other European countries. Her ongoing book project, Encounters on the Migrant Trail, investigates the ways in which host communities in Greece interacted with asylum seekers in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis. She is also working on projects relating to the legacies of refugee integration as well as state exclusion policies on identity, trust, and social cohesion. She holds a DPhil in Sociology from Nuffield College at Oxford. Her doctoral studies were funded by Nuffield College, the A. S. Onassis Foundation, and the A. G. Leventis Foundation. She is currently a Hannah Seeger Davis Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton.

Complexities of Resistance: Partisan Films from Eastern Europe and the Balkans Film Series presents a film screening of FOUR WINTERS: a Story of Jewish Partisan Resistance and Bravery in WW2 with Q&A by Director Julia R. Mintz
USA, 2022. 1h 30m. DCP. New Moon Films.
Directed by Julia R. Mintz

on Tuesday, April 09, 2024, 7:00 p.m.
Auditorium, 53 Wall St. (first floor)
New Haven, CT 06511
Free and open to the public | All films will be shown with English subtitles

“All I owned was my camera, a leopard coat, and a grenade in case of capture…the pillow was the rifle, the walls were the trees and the sky was the roof,” says partisan Faye Schulman.

Over 25,000 Jewish partisans fought back against the Nazis and their collaborators from deep within the forests of Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and Belarus during the Second World War. Against extraordinary odds, they escaped Nazi slaughter, transforming from young innocents to courageous resistance fighters. These last surviving partisans tell their stories of resistance in this film, revealing a narrative of resilience.

Sponsors:
Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Program; European Studies Council; Whitney Humanities Center; Yale Film Archive; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; Film and Media Studies Program; and the Jewish Studies Program.

About the Film Series: In the aftermath of World War II, several European states started reconstructing and reimagining their identities and recent histories by producing a vast number of films that celebrated and commemorated their guerrilla struggles against fascism. These films ranged in scope and ambition from intimate psychological dramas to overblown military spectacles, from elegiac recollections to pure pulp fiction. Similar to Hollywood westerns, partisan films were the defining genre of the socialist film industry for a significant period. Moreover, in the late 60s and early 70s, both genres reinvented themselves and underwent a political revision that ended their respective “classical periods.” Despite being hugely successful in their domestic markets and often cinematically accomplished, many examples of the partisan films never traveled abroad, and most film prints today remain locked up and in dire need of preservation in various national film archives. Aside from a handful of canonical works, the majority of films we will screen have never been shown in the U.S.