Luka Ekhvaia
Research Area 2, Research Area 4 and Research Area 5
About myself and my Project: The Patriot Camps as experimental Spaces for Exercising the Memory Politics of the Post-Rose Revolution Regime and for Mass Mobilization of the Youth
Luka Ekhvaia is a graduate student of the master program in Interdisciplinary Research and Studies on Eastern Europe (MIREES) at the University of Bologna. During the two years long international joint program, he has spent one year at the Forli Campus and another at the partner Corvinus University of Budapest where he wrote his master thesis Fate of the Radical Left in Europe: Confrontation and Resistance with Modernity.
His research was an attempt to understand the fate of the radical left under the pressure of neoliberal and austerity policies. The first part of the analysis is based on the theoretical observations and the second part particularly studies the recent political shifts in Greece and the rise of the radical left-wing party Syriza. This case was carefully extracted among others, because of the path which Syriza went through, mistakes what were done within it and the outcomes of the confrontation with austerity policies. Based on Syriza’s experience he has tried to re-think leftist struggle and strategies, also carefully looked at the main reasons for the defeat of Syriza.
In October 2018 Luka Ekhavia started his PhD Studies at the Graduate School Global and Area Studies (GSGAS) at Leipzig University. The working title of his dissertation research is The Patriot Camps as Experimental Spaces for Exercising the Memory Politics of the Post-Rose Revolution Regime and for the Mass Mobilization of the Youth.
His research intends to investigate how memory can be used as a political weapon and how individual and alternative memories can be suppressed by imposing a hegemonic model of collective memory and what was the role of the Patriot camps in these processes. He assumes that there is much more than the official part of the story around the Patriot camps. That’s why his research intends to cope with such questions as if these spaces were used by the ruling party to experiment on their hegemonic memory project, also if the camps were transformed to the major spots for the mass mobilization of Georgian youngsters and if the infiltration schemas were present.
In the course of the research, he will be interested not only with the infiltration schemas and how the loyal participants of the camps were dragged into the youth wing of the party and other state institutions but also with the different actors, spaces, various modes of memory mobility and their intersections.
Video Interview with Luka Ekhavia:
#1-Please present yourself and your research project
#2-How did you get to know EEGA ScienceCampus?
#3-What are the links between your research Project and EEGA ScienceCampus?
#4-The benefit of EEGA ScienceCampus to me is…
