Salzburg Lecture: Olga Shparaga

Olga Shparaga is a philosopher and activist from Belarus and was a professor of philosophy at the European College of Liberal Arts (ECLAB) in Minsk until 2020. She is a member of the Coordination Council of Belarusian opposition politician Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the political organ of the opposition to dictator Alexander Lukashenko, and co-founder of the fem group of this council. As a member of the feminist group, she was imprisoned in October 2020. To escape a threatened criminal trial, she fled at the end of October 2020, first to Vilnius, then on to Berlin, where she was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg. In Berlin, she completed her book Die Revolution hat ein weibliches Gesicht. The Case of Belarus (Suhrkamp, 2021, translated from Russian by Volker Weichsel) on the role of women in the protest movements in Belarus in the context of European and global emancipation movements. Since July 2022, Olga Shparaga is now Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. Within the framework of this fellowship, she is delving into concepts such as caring solidarization, sisterhood, and new social alliances beyond identity politics - related to experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic as well as to the current war situation in Europe. On the occasion of the award of an honorary professorship of the Mozarteum University to the Belarusian flautist and activist Maria Kalesnikava, Olga Shparaga held a laudation in October 2022. Her theses on the Belarusian "revolution-in-progress" form a crucial theoretical basis of the University Mozarteum's Practicing Care program to support oppositional artists* in exile.