A Social Imaginary – Beyond the National
The Closing Keynote by Elzbieta Matynia at the National Theaters: missions, tensions, transformations international conference held in Porto, Portugal, October 22-24, 2021
TCDS Director, Prof. Elzbieta Matynia delivered the closing keynote address at the recent National Theaters: missions, tensions, transformations international conference held in Porto, Portugal, October 22-24, 2021
“Neither the emergence of new transnational political structures and institutions, global markets, movements, and publics, nor the rise of new overlapping identities, have tempered the tenacity of national and ethnic attachments. Indeed, it seems it has become an important ingredient of the air we breathe daily. But between the solid legacy and appeal of the national and the alarming dismantling of the democratic, there is a âthird spaceâ: the borderland, a recently challenged and abused, but still capacious topos, whose promise in creating a different kind of public cannot be reduced to to that of a nation or a nation-state.â
