O altă poveste (a different story/ another story)
An interactive historiographic online platform
O altă poveste (a different story/ another story) is an interactive historiographic online platform comitted to the ideas of civil society collaboration and collective political learning. It is dedicated to the recent developments in the formation of Romanian civil society, namely the civic awakening occuring throughout the last 10 years as a clustered, progressing course of mass mobilizations, diverse protest actions, group forming and discourse shifts, leading to severe changes within the country’s political culture. Offering a moderated, interactive platform for the people implicated in these changes, as well as for the interested public, the project aims to facilitate collective political learning, to make the changes underway tangible and comprehensible, to empower civil society action, to spark dialogue and collaboration, to enable the sharing of resources with and among the platform users, creating a space of valuing and respecting each other. With to date no comprehensible overview over this piece of recent history available, the platform provides new ways of historiographic sensemaking, and a structured and searchable data collection based upon multimedia generic activist as well as professionalized public materials, in an up-to-date online environment.
O altă poveste aggregates actions, events, and series of events of importance for the ongoing development in a visually appealing timeline, enabling users to get an overview, browse details, and share themselves their knowledge, materials, and memories related to it. Dynamics of formation will be displayed in singular case-related group historiographies. Discussed topics, protest-related symbolic patterns and specific terms and protest tactics will be retraced in a consecutive blog/vlog-series.
The idea was developed throughout the last three years in close, ongoing consultation with different groups of political activists in and related to Romania. We have gathered a starting budget, set up a detailed project plan and technical specifications for the development of the site, obtained legal advice and contracted developers. The technical infrastructure for the platform is in its final testing phase to date, by August 2024.
Some first entries into the different branches of Romanian activist landscape could be provided building upon Sergiu’s consecutive work on a documentary film on Romanian activists’ theories of political change, for which he has interviewed very diverse politically implicated people throughout the country since 2016. This network, combined with insights obtained in Nina’s doctoral research – containing extended literature study, protest related social media following, and a series of scientifically prepared, repeated and member-checked collaborative talks with at the time being about 30 activists in Romania (effectuated by the two of us/ Nina respectively throughout three stays in Romania in June and November/December 2022, March to June 2023, and May to July 2024) – and with the help of to date seven student interns and two volunteers from SNSPA Bucharest, builds our basis for setting up a curated primary set of multimedia contents for the timeline, which will be provided before launching the website for the general public, anticipatedly in Summer 2025.
The project covers a recent transformation in Romanian political culture, often reflecting the country’s political and cultural transformation from the 1989 „stolen revolution“ on. Latest from 2012 on, Romanian civil society is gaining momentum, forming new collectivities, sparking political discourse on a wide array of topics, ranging from day-to-day policy to more structural and even systemic questions, and mobilizing a larger public to take part in this discourse, to educate themselves, to take position, and to take action.
Our methodological approach is inspired by both of our professions – on Nina’s side, by interpretative and poststructural social science methodologies and political ethnography techniques, especially collaborative methods, ontological conceptualization, and ons-ite field research; on Sergiu’s side, by participatory non-fiction filmmaking, with a background in serial storytelling and a focus to bring concepts from metamodernism and second order cybernetics into filmmaking practice.
We both understand our work as embedded societal and also political endeavors, daring to create knowledge, facilitate reflection, and empower political learning and agency-building from within the field we are trying to understand. Our project will enable individual reflection and participation in recent history writing, and at the same time give an ensemble view of the individual, collective, and professionalized (media, scientific, artistic) representations and understandings of the changes under way in Romanian (contentious) political culture.