“The Past as a Source of Democratic Growth in the Present (The Politics of History in Georgia)”
News
Ilia State University has been awarded the 2023 U.S. Embassy Democracy Commission Small Grant (DemCom) for a project entitled “The Past as a Source of Democratic Growth in the Present (The Politics of History in Georgia).” The project will be carried out by a research team comprised of members from the Memory Studies Center in the Caucasus at Ilia State University and the Soviet Past Laboratory (SovLab), in collaboration with the Georgian Studies Program at Harvard University's Davis Center.
The project aims to document oral histories from the 1980s and 1990s and establish an open-access resource portal hosted online at Harvard that will be available for a scholars, students and the wider public. A regional outreach program will amplify the voices of key participants and ordinary citizens of Georgia, sharing their stories about the national movement in the late Soviet period and the early days of independent statehood across the regions of the country. This initiative seeks to educate a new generation of students about pivotal events from the recent past through the firsthand accounts of those who experienced them. The project team will take the lead in incorporating oral histories into curricula at Georgian universities and schools. This effort will raise awareness about the complex and challenging history of the 1980s and 1990s, a critical juncture in Georgian national history during the 20th century.
2023