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In cooperation with the Belarusian Institute of Public History, the Center for Belarus and Regional Studies at European Humanities University, Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, and Universität Bremen, the Department of Public History at the FernUniversität in Hagen is organizing the Belarus Colloquium in the academic year 2024/2025. This Colloquium aims to create a platform for scholars focusing on Belarus to share and discuss their research.

Aliaksei Bratachkin

How is historical knowledge produced in an authoritarian context? How does the public function of science work under authoritarianism? Is citizen participation in the emergence of citizen science infrastructure and “citizen science” itself possible? Having experienced several peaks of “liberalization” and consolidation of authoritarianism, social sciences and humanities in Belarus create a challenging case for analysis. The presentation focuses on two periods of modern Belarusian history, the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s and 2010-2020, and discuss the connections between the production of historical knowledge, social movements and authoritarian censorship.

Short biography

Aliaksei Bratachkin is a Belarusian historian. From 2013 to 2021, he headed the Public History Department at the independent European College of Liberal Arts in Belarus (ECLAB). Since 2022, he is a member of staff at the Institute of History at the FernUniversität Hagen (Chair of Public History). His research interests include politics of memory, post-socialist transformations, and civic education.