St Andrews HCI Research Group

28

Mar 2025

Seminar: Radical Imagination: Knowledge Through Generations 2nd April 2025


Abstract:

We will engage with insights from a young Greek interlocutor who did not live the Cold War period firsthand. She relates to the legacies of the Cold War through radical imagination, projecting that it is only logical that the affects of the era have left irreversible psychological marks on the people who experienced it. The talk proposes a theory of psychic time and generational battles for belonging. There is a critique of history as taught in school textbooks when compared to the lived experiences of history in the present.

Bio:

Stavroula is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, Founding Director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Minorities Research and editor of the interdisciplinary book series Routledge Advances in Minority Studies. She works on minority politics, displacement, governance, and the Cold War. She is the author of “The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Minority Politics” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and “Lurking Cold War: Life Through Historical Communion” (Berghahn 2025). Lurking Cold War explores the entangled registers of the Cold War that continue to stalk the social landscape in Italy and Greece. Critiquing the connections between global categories and individual experiences, Lurking foregrounds Cold War resonances through materiality, imagination, speculation and affect, in literature, bureaucracy and in the family. A theory of methexi illustrates how people and history are brought into communion, blurring the boundaries between known and unknown, reality and imagination, and form and interpretation. The result is an articulation of history that matters in a way that matters.

More about Dr Stavroula Pipyrou

Event details:

  • When: 2nd April 2025 13:00-14:00
  • Where: Jack Cole 1.33A