Webinar “Europe’s East and Latin America in dialogue: what we (mis)understand about each other?”

In this inaugural RUTA exchange between scholars from Eastern Europe and Latin America, we set out to map what we understand — and what we fail to understand — about building dialogue between activists and academics across both regions. How do we move beyond surface encounters toward something more generative, more reciprocal? The challenge is partly structural: in much of the Latin American academic world, Eastern Europe tends to be filtered through epistemic frameworks that center Russia, while genuine Latin American expertise on the region remains scarce in Europe’s East. In this asymmetry, solidarity becomes difficult and mutual understanding is thin. So what might it look like to work against these inherited blind spots — and what resources, already at hand, might we be underusing?

Speakers:

Assoc. Prof. Ieva Giedraitytė – Vilnius University Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Lithuania

Prof. Olga Onuch – University of Manchester, UK/Ukraine

Dr. Manuel Ferez Gil – Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile.

Moderator:

Gražina Bielousova – RUTA Board Member, and Head of the Initiatives Committee at RUTA Association, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Vytautas Magnus University; senior lecturer, Vilnius University Institute of International Relations and Political Science.

This webinar is happening with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation. It’s content is the exclusive responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the International Renaissance Foundation.