Editors: Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ, Agata Pietrasik

In recent years, the various fields of the Academy (such as anthropology, history and museology), and the institutions that co-create culture (museums, galleries and exhibition initiatives) have both become spaces for discussions aimed at confronting how a thinking rooted in the colonial project continues to shape the production of knowledge and culture. Reacting to (and also shaping) changing paradigms in knowledge and cultural production, these discussions often critically address the positionality of individuals, institutions and social mechanisms, in reproducing scripts of whiteness. Such scripts often have normative overtones and are internalized by individuals both in the majority as well as in minority positions, and by institutions which determine, for example, the visibility of archives. Interventions, exhibitions, subaltern knowledge production, community building and solidarity are some of the ways these established structures are critically engaged. The goal of this engagement is to develop not only ways to confront a problematic legacy, but also to create a new, inclusive language.

For this issue of View, we want to focus less on declarations, demands, proposals for change, or visions for the future, and instead explore both historical and contemporary interventions and reflections on practices and contestations of visibility policies of minorities and racialized people (including those racialized as white and intersectional). We are interested in how archives structure and create knowledge regarding relations with countries of the Global South, as well as the history of local immigrant communities in Europe. We are also interested in how the archives themselves, the institutions, and the production of knowledge and culture, are altered by these contacts and immigrant activism:
- How is the visibility of art produced outside Western centers or created by artists from marginalized communities in art galleries and museums being shaped?
- What are examples of immigrant community activism around visibility and knowledge production in both institutions and public spaces?
- How has the historical visibility of artists and communities from Jewish, Roma, Tatar, Black and Asian communities, among others, in Central and Eastern Europe, been shaped, and has this affected the contemporary politics of visibility of these minorities?
- How is whiteness constructed and established, especially in the context of Central and Eastern Europe? How do other minorities relate to it?

Contact Information

We are accepting abstracts (maximum A4 page) until February 1, 2024.

Deadline for submission of the first version of the text: April 15, 2024.

Please include: author's bio, abstract (in Polish or English) and bibliography of the text (Chicago-style format). Please send to the editor's email address: redakcja@pismowidok.org.