Between Individual and Collective Trauma

The international scientific colloquium, titled “Between Individual and Collective Trauma”, took place on March 12–13, 2020, in Tartu, Estonia. It was organized in collaboration between the Estonian Literary Museum, the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies, the Research Center for Cultural Studies and Cross-cultural Communication (Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia), and the Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones (Sociological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Branch of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences). Liisi Laineste, Natalia Artemenko, and Sergey Troitskiy from these institutions constituted the organizing committee. The colloquium was devoted to the issues of interrelations of different cultural topoi, setting the context for social and cultural communication and traumatizing events, stirring discord in collective memory and identity, and demanding the reconfiguration of cultural topology. A number of papers were delivered by scholars from Belarus, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, the USA, Finland, and Estonia. The two-day colloquium comprised fourteen papers, round table summarizing discussions, as well as a presentation of a monograph on a topic related to the main theme of the colloquium. Two evening workshops provided the participants with the scope for the informal conversation.