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The human rights situation in Belarus has long been catastrophic with repressive legislation, oppressive mechanisms and interventions regularly exercised by state actors and bodies (Frear 2019, Bedford 2021). Until 2020, democratisation, social criticism and human rights were primarily issues that engaged opposition actors and organisations. Belarusians have been seen as apolitical, generally unconcerned with politics. This drastically changed after the 2020 election, when a significant part of the Belarusian population protested and demonstrated against the election results. This created a momentum for change, yet we know very little about how various actors have been able to utilise this shift – and the repressive measures that followed. Previous research indicates that students and student organisations have played a crucial role in democratic change, connecting democratisation, students and higher education. Exploring this further based on interviews with Belarusians in exile, this project aims to explore how Belarusian student organisations understand, use and implement human rights, both strategically and in their daily work, and if and how this is related to higher education.

Venue: Tidskriftsläsesalen (TLS), Carolina Rediviva.

The seminar is part of Democracy and Higher Education's seminar series and is organized in cooperation with HERO.

Towards a Historical Sociology of the Social and Human Sciences

Johan Heilbron, Uppsala universitet och Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP-CNRS-EHESS), presenterar sin forskning.

The historical understanding of the social and human sciences (SHS) has, over the past decades, gone through a major shift from predominantly presentist to historicist accounts. Various programs for historicizing the SHS have shaped the formation of a subfield of ‘SHS studies,’ as it may be called, and contributed to significant changes in the (self)understanding of the disciplines involved. While the institutionalization of this subfield is relatively weak and its intellectual unity quite limited, a major challenge today is to go beyond the approaches that have defined the broadly ‘historicist’ turn (Cambridge contextualism, German Begriffsgeschichte, neo-institutionalism). In my talk I will argue that historical sociology represents a fruitful, general framework for ‘SSH studies’, and that the work of Pierre Bourdieu, in particular, provides some guiding principles. After presenting these, I will indicate some research areas that seem particularly significant for such a historical sociological program.

Lokal: Rausingrummet, 6-3025, Engelska parken.

Anordnas av Högre seminariet i idé- och lärdomshistoria.