Dr Ivan Kozachenko is working on the project that explores discursive construction of Polish-Ukrainian past in the cities of L’viv and Kharkiv. The Euromaidan revolution followed by the Russian aggression forced re-negotiation of political and symbolic boundaries in Ukraine. In this context, the active support of Poland coupled with a greater cultural awareness due to intensification of migration flows between Poland and Ukraine create a powerful drive for the re-evaluation of the Polish-Ukrainian past. The goal of this project is to provide a conceptual framework for understanding of these developments and to examine the role of social media therein. Using the combination of online and offline data collection techniques the study seeks to trace the changes of the urban memory in the wake of the Russian aggression against Ukraine.

Taylor Robertson McDonald holds a Master's in International Relations and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Florida. His research broadly examines the relationship between state identity and foreign policy in the cases of Canada and the United States. While at the Taube Centre, McDonald is completing a book-length manuscript elucidating the centrality of identity discourses to Canada's involvement in the War on Terror. Titled The Ambiguity of the Canadian Self: Discourses of Canadian Foreign Policy in the War on Terror, this book examines how popular historical discourses of Canadian identity were habitually invoked and adapted by Canadian parliamentarians to legitimize certain contemporary foreign policies in the War on Terror. It shows that diverse and even opposing representations of Canadian identity were repeatedly expressed through familiar identity narratives that take on drastically different meanings and can legitimize different foreign policies during the process of parliamentary debate. McDonald argues that an understanding of Canadian foreign policy, both then and now, must account for the intractable relationship between this tendency to discuss Canada's place in the world through familiar identity narratives and the various ways these narratives are re-imagined and re-articulated. In the spring of 2022, McDonald is  teaching the undergraduate course International Political and Economic Organizations in the department of Global and Development Studies at Jagiellonian University.

Tore Bernt Sorensen is a post-doctoral fellow whose research focuses on contemporary trends and developments related to European and global governance of learning, education and training. Tore’s project at the Taube Centre has the title "The myths and promises of education: The cultural political economy of educationalisation in European Union governance". Based on an extensive set of interviews and documents, the project analyses the variety of ways in which major actors in EU policy-making have advocated lifelong learning and education reform as solution to wider social and economic issues of European societies over recent decades. Tore’s work has been published in academic journals such as Comparative Education Review, Globalisation, Societies and Education and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the European Educational Research Journal.

For more information go to Tore Sorensen