On 13-16 June 2024, the 29th biennial conference on Baltic Studies “The Baltic Way: Unity and Giving Aid” organized by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS) took place at Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut, USA). Over 100 panels and round-table discussions brought together several hundreds of scholars focussing in their research on a wide range of Baltic Sea region-related issues, including in the humanities and social sciences. The opening plenary reports by the rectors of the major universities in the Baltic countries and Ukraine focused on education and the Baltic countries in the twenty-first century. The plenary session on the second day of the conference by Egils Levits, former President of Latvia, was on the geopolitics in the Baltic region. The closing plenary session brought together Baltic ambassadors to the US to discuss the “Baltic Way” in the twenty-first century. 

Daugavpils University Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences was represented at the conference by Professor of the Centre for Oral History, Dr. hist. Irēna Saleniece and a senior researcher of the Centre of Cultural Research, Dr. philol. Ilze Kačāne. Prof. I. Saleniece participated in the panel discussion on Land Reform and Historical Memory in the Baltics and presented her paper on Latvian peasants in the circles of time focussing on the perception of agrarian reforms of the twentieth century. I. Kačāne participated in the working group “Language, Culture and Identity in Latvian Literature” and presented her paper “War, Child and Wartime Holidays in Latvian Writers’ Childhood Memory Narratives”.

Kaspars Strods (a researcher at the Latvian War Museum), a graduate of the University of Latvia and University of Daugavpils common doctoral programme in history and archaeology and a Ph.D. candidate participated in the AABS 2024 conference section “World War I and the Post-war Period in the Eastern Baltics” with his paper “Rights and Security: The Work of the Military Court of the Latvian Army (1919-1927)”.

I. Saleniece’s participation in the conference took place in the framework of the project VPP-IZM-Vesture-2023/1-0003 “Navigating the Latvian History of the 20^th – 21^st Century: Social Morphogenesis, Legacy and Challenges”. I. Kačāne’s participation in the conference was supported by the Stiftelsen till minne av Lena Neuland (Sweden).

More information:
Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences
Irēna Saleniece, e-mail: irena.saleniece@du.lv  
Ilze Kačāne, e-mail: ilze.kacane@du.lv