Eastern Europe and US foreign policy: A cultural history 4219-SG056

Knowledge: Graduates to possess comprehensive knowledge and understanding of:
- US foreign policy post-1945
Become fluent in talking about basic chronologies, key phases, main political actors. Proper use of terminology, methods, tools, and techniques
Theories of International Relations
Examples include applied post-colonial theory
Selected sociological theories related to stereotypes, hierarchies and power relations in IR
Knowledge and application to real-world cases
Culture as a factor in defining IR
Eastern Europe and the US – comparing and contrasting.

Skills: Graduates are able to:
- discuss complex issues, analyzing the causes and course of cultural processes and phenomena in the United States using sources
- use theoretical knowledge to describe and analyze cultural processes and phenomena in the United States
-read, understand, and interpret texts in this field

Social Skills: Graduates are able to:
- speak with confidence
-present complex ideas
- utilize interdisciplinary knowledge acquired to formulate own opinions

1. Essay 600 words (30%). Does Eastern Europe exist?
2. Presentation (30%): choose a US cultural representation of
Eastern Europe, analyse its meanings. 10 minutes.
3. Make your own 2-min. film. Does Eastern Europe exist?
(30%)
4. Engagement and presence (10%).

Cadier, David, “Populism, historical discourse and foreign
policy: the case of Poland’s Law and Justice government,”
International Politics (2020).
Cianciara, Agnieszka K., “De-bordering and re-bordering the
EU after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine,” Studies in
European Affairs, University of Warsaw, Vol. 27, No. 4,
(2023).
Eksi, B., Wood, E.A. Right-wing populism as gendered
performance: Janus-faced masculinity in the leadership of
Vladimir Putin and Recep T. Erdogan. Theor Soc 48, 733–751
(2019).
Etkind, Alexander, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial
Experience (Polity Press, 2011).
Galbraith, M, “Between East and West: Geographic
metaphors of identity in Poland,” Ethos 32, no. 11 (2004):
51–81.
Gesson, Masha, “How has Gaza 2024 changed perceptions of
the Holocaust?” The New Yorker, December 9, 2023.
Hobson, John M., “Is critical theory always for the white
West and for Western imperialism? Beyond Westphalia
towards a post-racist critical IR,” Review of International
Studies (2007), 33, 91-116.
Korek, Janusz (ed.), From Sovietology to Postcoloniality:
Poland and Ukraine from a Postcolonial Perspective
(Södertörns högskola, 2017)
Krastev, Ivan & Holmes Stephen, “Imitation and its
Discontents,” Journal of Democracy, (2018) 29, 3: 117–128.
Hans Kundnani, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in
the European Project (C Hurst & Co Publishers, 2023).
Kuus, Merje, “Europe's eastern expansion and the
reinscription of otherness in East-Central Europe,” Progress
in Human Geography 28, no. 4 (2004): 472-489.
Laczó, Ferenc, “Revisionism instead of reinvention: How
CEE countries have impacted European remembrance and
vice versa,” New Eastern Europe, December 18, 2019.
Miller, Alexei, 2012. “The Turns of Russian Historical
Politics, from Perestroika to 2011” in The Convolutions of
Historical Politics, edited by Alexei Miller and Maria Lipman
(CEU Press, 2012), 253–278.
Orenstein, M.A. 2019. The Lands in Between: Russia vs. the
West and the New Politics of Hybrid War. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Rotengruber, Przemysław, “The Problem of Polish (Self-)
Stereotypes: The Perspective of Applied Cultural Studies,”
Journal of Applied Cultural Studies 2 (2016): 29-44.
Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory (Alfred A. Knopf,
1995).
Scherer, Frank F., The Freudian Orient: Early
Psychoanalysis, Anti-Semitic Challenge, and the Vicissitudes
of Orientalist Discourse (Routledge, 2015).
Snochowska-Gonzales, Claudia, “Post-Colonial Poland: On
an Unavoidable Misuse,” East European Politics & Societies
26, no. 4 (2012): 708-723. 
Steinlauf, Michael, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the
Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse University Press, 2006).
Sztompka, Piotr, “Looking Back: The Year of 1989 as a
Cultural and Civilizational Break,” Communist and Post-
Communist Studies 29, no. 2 (1996).
Tascón, Sonia, "Refugees and the Coloniality of Power:
Border-Crossers of Postcolonial Whiteness" in Moreton-
Robinson, A. (ed.). Whitening Race: Essays in Social and
Cultural Criticism (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004).
Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe (Stanford University
Press, 1994).
Zarycki, Tomasz & Warczok, Tomasz, “The Social
Construction of Historical Traumas: the Polish Experience of
the Uses of History in an Intelligentsia-dominated Polity,”
European Review, Vol. 28, No. 6, 911–931 YEAR.
Zarycki, Tomasz, Ideologies of Eastness in Central and
Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2014).

Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system:

• Description of 4219-SG056 in USOSweb