Authors

Discussion

The Department of Belarusian Studies (University of Warsaw) is currently the only and oldest such unit in the democratic world. For years, it has been popularizing the language, culture and literature of the real Belarus, implementing projects to support the Belarusian identity and language in a situation where Belarus is strongly russified and Belarusians are deprived of their national identity. As an expression of our support, we publish journals in the Belarusian language, which is persecuted in Belarus, and organize conferences and open events aimed at breaking down stereotypes about the language, literature and culture of Belarus. The Department has also been running the Belarusian language Olympiad for 30 years, and organizes open spelling contests in which anyone can participate. The Department also provided language support to Belarusian refugees who were forced to leave their homeland after the 2020 demonstrations.

Currently, the goal of the Department is to promote Belarus in Poland under the slogan “Belarus is not Lukashenko”. In addition, the informative and promotional activities are also to be undertaken in other democratic countries, hence one of the goals is to create scientific articles, prepare open lectures or informational materials in English. One of the biggest challenges and dreams is to create an online platform for learning the Belarusian language and promoting the Belarusian culture, as well as to support the opening of new research units that would like to start research into Belarus (it is important for us to establish contacts with Slavic scholars at various universities and help them to create Belarusian studies). We want to co-create a network of Slavic units dealing with Belarus in partnership and prove that Belarusian issues are wrongly marginalized in favor of other areas of Slavic studies. The presentation will outline the Department’s experience in popularizing Belarusian studies, as well as future projects that can be implemented with other partners, including through international grants.