The Interview with prof. dr hab. Beata Możejko

The Interview with prof. dr hab. Beata Możejko, Faculty of History, Institute of History, Department of Polish Medieval History and the Auxiliary Sciences of History

Professor, considering your research interests and scientific achievements, please tell us how you understand sustainable development.

I’m a medievalist, I research the late Middle Ages, but I also deal with history auxiliary sciences. I also think that historical geography, i.e., research on changes that have occurred in the environment over the centuries, is important. Sustainable development is a topic that is slowly becoming important for medievalists. It seems that ecology is closer to our contemporary generations, and this is indeed the case, while medievalists also try to ask questions about what it was like in the past and how a certain change in thinking about nature and our surroundings occurred. A symbolic example of this is the fact that in 2021 the motto of the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, organised since 1994, was climate, climate change and various issues surrounding climate. We from Gdańsk talked about water, about the importance of water and the Baltic Sea for ancient societies. It seems to me that regardless of my research field, I don’t need to be convinced that the issues of ecology, climate change, water and plastic are very important things. We are also very pleased that the Centre for Sustainable Development was established at our university. For me, as a researcher, it’s important when a person becomes interested in nature and what surrounds them, and here we can cite a very beautiful example of the medieval Japanese. Our Middle Ages and the Middle Ages in Japan were two different worlds, both chronologically and mentally. In Japanese poetry, for example, admiration for nature, interest in wind, water, seas, and mood swings related to weather changes appeared much earlier than in European poetry. This was the first issue that surprised me when I compared medieval poetry, e.g., European poetry, in which no attention was paid to matters of nature, to the Japanese approach. Sustainable development, from a global perspective, concerns social changes that have taken place over the centuries, striving for what one of the points of the agenda talks about, i.e., gender balance. We need to understand why today I and my colleagues are at this point at the university and not another, why we need to encourage our female students to speak more often, e.g., during course classes. It’s also thinking about the language that has changed, analysing how it is changing today, and making us sensitive to the way we speak and address other people, because sometimes we think that the use of an adjective doesn’t hurt anyone, but it does. This is more socially open thinking, and I would call it more sensitive, and this sensitivity has been developing over the centuries. These issues are a very interesting research subject for me, e.g., why certain topics discussed in the Middle Ages later become taboo, it’s no longer appropriate to talk about something, and in turn certain issues are the order of the day. Equally interesting is the study of the issue of changing the attitude towards the individual, towards man as such. Here I mean, for example, the issue of the eighteenth- and ninteenth century (Professor Jerzy Zajadło wrote about this in one of his books) attitude to slavery: a slave as a thing and a slave as a person in a court case. Seeing all changes from a historical perspective, trying to understand why we are at this point and not another. For the historian, sustainable development would, on the one hand, be related to ecological issues, and on the other – gender equality, equal opportunities, and a change in a certain sensitivity to language. Czesław Miłosz said long ago that we, the people of the university, are on an island and it’s important that we get off this island. However, it’s important that we first know that we are on an island and today there is a nice word for it – a bubble: this is my bubble, not my bubble, we are in our own bubble. According to the 2030 Agenda, the university also means cooperation with the environment, but it doesn’t have to be what we, humanists, are a bit afraid of because we imagine that it’s supposed to be cooperation with industry. What can we do for industry or business? I think it’s worth taking a broader look at this problem. Humanists’ involvement in the environment may begin with supporting various sectors in the dissemination of ideas and products, e.g., by explaining some phenomena or processes. As humanists, we can try to speak a simpler language, that is, not a university-like, hermetic one. The agenda forces us to think about 2030, but trying to understand the world around us, for example, the phenomena of the coat of arms, logo, or the recently changed symbols of the University of Gdańsk, explaining how important the sign and brand are – this is a task for us. We can cooperate with colleagues from psychology, sociology, economics, or management, thus becoming interdisciplinary. Of course, not everyone will want to listen to us, but there will always be a group that will say: yes, we want to listen to popular science lectures, we want to know what is happening at the university. I will refer to “my field” of the Uphagen House Society, with which I cooperate and run its fan page on Facebook. It isn’t a large society, nor is it particularly numerous, but its goal has always been to popularise the history of Gdańsk. The pandemic showed that our regular or occasional participants got used to our activities and wanted to continue our meetings. For a long time, I’ve been asking myself why, for example, the inhabitants of the Tricity willingly come to events popularising science organised in the city: lectures, team games and city games, but they don’t come to the university. We announced that we were preparing a popular science conference at the university. There were many questions in response from those interested: whether they could come, whether there would be tickets, whether the event would be open, whether there would be an entrance fee. There was no such barrier when we organised a university conference, but online. When we prepared a popular science conference about celebrities, we had numerous participants. I saw on the list that people came from everywhere, not just from the university. On the one hand, time is indeed a barrier – you have to get there, you have to devote some time to participate in the event, but on the other hand, I’m afraid that the reason for this phenomenon is the invisible walls of the university and it’s not even about the fact that there is a gate, and it doesn’t concern only our university. The problem concerns the university as an institution not only in Poland but also around the world. People are afraid to cross this threshold, lest they stand with a grade transcript, be questioned, and feel uncomfortable. I think that the goal of a sustainable university is to try to find a tool to open the university. When I sometimes send an invitation to my collegemates, many of them shyly ask if they can come, if it will be an open event. Even graduates who finished their studies some time ago and previously attended seminars, lectures and additional events are reluctant to return, probably not only because it’s a place of stress and exams. But why? It would be interesting to diagnose where this invisible barrier comes from to build a sustainable university. We can create our internal model and answer important questions for us, the people of the university: academic staff and students, but the point is to open to the outside world so that people want to come here after work and not be afraid and they feel that it is a friendly and open environment. A great example of this type of activity was the science picnic that took place at the university in autumn 2021.

Some passers-by even ask if they can enter the university premises. This is an area to work on. In the context of your statement, I must ask about the practical turn in the humanities and the desire of humanists to open laboratories. Is this a step towards sustainable development, towards interdisciplinarity, or is it a desperate attempt to find their own place in the modern world?

Both. I am a historian, we are historians, and as humanists, we are very focused on individual work. Everyone, either in the privacy of the library or in the privacy of the archive, works individually in their office, and the first barrier is group work. This is also my view because I had an opportunity to cooperate, and I do cooperate with colleagues from the Faculty of Biology and the Department of Plant History. Initially, I looked at them with envy because they work as a team, they created a team and understand each other without words, and know what they are talking about without blinking an eye. A dozen or so years ago, even the language differences between us were striking, e.g. my colleague and I understood the word manuscript differently and when she said that she would come to us with a manuscript, obviously meaning a computer printout, a colleague from my Department was terrified that she would bring something written by hand because for us a manuscript is a text that is most often in the archive and written by hand. But it turned out that we had to find the proverbial Ariadne’s thread that would connect us. On the one hand, there is, at least in me, because I don’t want to speak in the name of others, a longing for interdisciplinary work, which is a great experience. Even without looking for cooperation with faculties dealing with exact sciences, cooperation between humanists can be an extraordinary adventure: with art historians, philologists, archaeologists. On the other hand, you asked whether the desire for cooperation is not desperate. It seems to me that when we talk about sustainable development and cooperation with, for example, the industry, it varies. The industry is also changing, but we humanists associate the industry with the 19th century, a century that had little to do with sustainable development. We associate it with large factories, with production halls where women stood at machines while producing yarn, or with large industrial Łódź, with Reymont and his “Promised Land”, that is, with nothing interesting, but with something that was depressing and sad, which contributed to the condition of the planet, with profit-oriented thinking. Of course, we still see a profit-oriented approach, but today it’s no longer that type of industry. We participate in discussions about the problem of coal and energy, obtaining energy sources, and new technologies. I think that in the context of new technologies, it’s important whether and how an individual, a person and a story about a person will be perceived. Are we the proverbial hamster running around in a cage, or are we, in other words, a cog in this great machine, or can we build relationships? I really like the Erasmus programme, for example, because it builds and this is also a part of my research, i.e., research on the Hanseatic League, cooperation, networking, networks of connections. Modern technologies can help us build networks, as we saw during the pandemic. What would we do without the Internet in times of pandemic? How would we find ourselves in this whole story? What would we be condemned to without these Teams and Zoom, hated by some? To phone and sending traditional letters? Someone wrote that some people had learned how to use a computer at an accelerated pace. I can’t imagine my functioning without it, surviving through this first pandemic year, with all flights suspended, without the possibility of going to conferences or talking to students. I recently had such an experience: in the morning I signed up for a workshop broadcast from Helsinki, where most of the lecturers were English from various places in the UK. It was about domestic violence, a very valid topic, but we also talked about domestic violence in the Middle Ages and modern times, how to research it, how to ask questions. Later in the evening, I took part in a meeting of the scientific circle of students and PhD students from the University of Warsaw, where the speaker talked about emotions in the Middle Ages. In fact, without leaving home, I travelled all over Europe, I could be here and there. Then I thought that it would end soon, on the one hand, it will be fantastic, it will open opportunities to meet in person again, travel to conferences, go for a coffee break, but on the other hand, I will no longer be able to attend such a seminar because no one or few will organise it. I believe that the best form of meetings after the pandemic would be a hybrid one…

…so that you can still listen to valuable statements from around the world and take part in various events.

So that you can click and take part in such a seminar. I think that the pandemic opened new opportunities for us. Many people emphasise that the gain of the pandemic, apart from many, many losses, is the opening of the world of universities to a wider audience who don’t have to turn on the camera, they can only write “good morning” in the chat, sit quietly, and listen. And people with various mobility problems who won’t go to a conference due to their health condition can participate in various events online. This is a clue for us. I think today we need to redefine the sustainable development goals. The seventeen goals described in the agenda require the addition of certain tasks that the pandemic taught us about. Among people who worked in front of a computer during the pandemic, there is a problem with returning to stationary mode, because some people felt good sitting on the other side, not having to speak, not having to be seen, i.e., not participating in social life, even our academic one.

 

I think some of us got used to the online mode because sometimes it’s easier to give a lecture at home and then switch off the computer than to come to the university, meet fifty students and try to interact with them.

I think that some meetings will be held online. For example, a meeting of the doctoral committee can be successfully held on MS Teams without having to leave home. This is part of human nature – we also get used to it and thanks to this we can survive. But I’m thinking about one thing that is slowly emerging in the discourse. One of the SDGs talks about gender equality, and we even discussed it at the Social Responsibility of Science Committee to expand this committee to include men, because their perspective is also interesting and important.

Great!

It would be against the principle if only women were on the committee. We also wanted to invite men who are also interested in this topic. Coming back to your question, the research we have access to shows that the share of women in publications and grants has decreased. All in all, women are burdened with home office work and taking care of their children. It isn’t a problem only in Poland. For example, I’ve talked to my friends from the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Germany, and it’s the same everywhere, even though we are talking about equalising opportunities. In some Western European countries, equalising opportunities has been a top topic for a long time. However, it turned out that during the pandemic, it was mainly my female colleagues who complained about working from home, and only one male colleague who explained his delay in editing texts by the fact that he had children to take care of. We see that this is a big problem, after all, we have single mothers who had no support at home, or mothers whose partners simply didn’t work at home and the woman was left with the children in the home office. I think that interesting research will emerge from the pandemic period, but the fact is that the decline in women’s participation in grants and articles is visible.

It was particularly difficult during this period when kindergartens and schools for grades 1-3 were closed. Older children, however, cope better, although, as observed, not entirely. I watch friends who have older children. They also constantly check whether teenagers participate in lessons.

​It’s not just about those children who are absorbing all their time and to whom it’s difficult to explain that mommy or daddy must work at home. Sustainable development after the pandemic poses new challenges.

Undoubtedly. Let’s go to the next question: how does the concept of sustainable development manifest itself in your activities?

I can see that the scientific and humanities community is opening to new research topics, e.g., issues of demographic development. The topic of pandemics and their effects is obviously a new and old topic that has become extremely fashionable because we are trying to see what the problem looked like in history, that is, to tell what epidemics were and how long they lasted, what social effects they had and how society dealt with these effects when they were not yet called psychological. Research is being carried out, e.g., on the cholera and Covid-19 epidemics, or the flu epidemic, which affected Europe and the world demographically more than World War II and Covid-19. We already know that we need to react quickly and not wait with research because society is interested in the issue and is trying to find answers in history. Looking more broadly at the humanities, I think activism is important. Activities such as sorting waste and saving water can change a lot if we build a network of people who will think and talk about it. Sooner or later society will slowly change its thinking and habits. We achieve the goals of sustainable development through such activities as ecological education, awareness-raising and introducing habits. I’ve recently reviewed a work on the attitude of pre-industrial societies towards animals, and the medieval debate on whether animals had souls. If so, they should be held accountable and treated differently, because it’s one thing to kill an animal that has a soul and another thing to treat it as soulless, which is immediately accompanied by a story of sin. It seems to me that our task of humanities scholars is to try to tell an interesting story. The only question is whether anyone will want to listen to us. We should remember that it’s worth telling interesting stories so that people want to listen to us because the fact that we are today at this stage of development didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s not that we were born in the 21st century with a laptop and a mobile phone in our hands, but we are the heirs of our ancestors, and it’s not easy to understand our place here and now through the prism of history. I’ll refer to my bailiwick. I ask my students why children are interested in history and then, as teenagers, they are not, and where the mistake has been made. I don’t want to blame the school, the teachers, the overloaded curriculum. Under the influence of various factors, history ceases to be an interesting story and becomes boring. Why are chemical experiments more interesting? Crowds often come to watch experiments but not to listen to our story. Where have we lost interest? Do you remember the moment from the film “Out of Africa” when the main character, when asked: “What can you do?”, replies: “I can tell stories.” People want to listen, but maybe it must be a 30-second or a 5-minute story, I don’t know.

You probably must adjust the right narrative to a specific target group, and this is my childhood experience. Why did I stop liking the history? It stopped being a beautiful story told by my grandmother and grandfather, my uncle and became dates in a notebook, the causes, and effects of specific historical events. If there hadn’t been this story of my family, or my uncle, who isn’t a historian but a regionalist and writes books about Teutonic castles, and if these stories hadn’t been present in my house all the time, I would have probably chosen experiments. If my uncle hadn’t created his narrative and continued this story at every possible meeting and if he hadn’t given me access to his library and to those beautiful stories that were everywhere in his house. I remember that for me it was an entry into another world, extraordinary, crossing the world of stories. In his words history was alive, but in school it was dead.

Exactly, in school it was dead. I was so lucky to have history teachers who could tell interesting stories, but I was equally happy to go to history lessons and to chemistry lessons in primary school, where I had a fantastic chemistry tutor who taught us these simple formulas, all these connections through experiments. I remember these revelations from my litmus test class. I remember the laboratory, test tubes and our beloved chemistry teacher with the litmus paper that was changing – I still remember it to this day. Her lessons were also stories, with various tools in the background, but still about this world, which on the one hand has the past and on the other – the present. I also think, half-jokingly, half seriously, that preserving our childhood curiosity when building a sustainable world is crucial. Good quality education is not about scoring, a fear that the teachers will ask us about things we are no longer interested in, a fear of getting bad grades. We must, on the one hand, write our scientific works, which are hermetic works, because this is what the academic discourse requires (we write for a degree, we overcome subsequent barriers or steps in the academic career), and on the other hand, which is also difficult, translate the research results into a more understandable language. When I meet my friends or colleagues, I expect a popular science explanation of the world of physics or mathematics, which for me at school was terribly depressing, I had a knot in my stomach. We shouldn’t limit ourselves only to the Polish reality, as I said, Erasmus is very important. I also see it in my students who dare to go because it’s some kind of courage to leave home, even if someone lives in a dormitory, they must find another dormitory abroad and overcome their fear of the language barrier. Not everyone will speak English in each city where the university is located. Students must overcome the natural human fear of foreignness to go on a scholarship. When they come back, various new doors open for them, and they start to see a new horizon. In this case, we can simply cooperate with our students and cultivate these contacts, and then they will form their own groups, have their own peer groups and do fine.

I’d like to continue the topic of education and raising students’ awareness about achieving the goals of the agenda. You mentioned Erasmus, and what other activities can be added when we think about the role of education and raising students’ awareness of attaining the sustainable development goals?

If we are talking about gender equality, then everything must be balanced, there must be multidirectional thinking, and we must be careful not only about gestures but also about language because language can easily hurt people, even unconsciously – there is a huge role of the university in such education and in various courses. We also talk about it at the Social Responsibility Committee. Someone will think about equal pay in a new way when they are shown the poster “Did you know that your daughter will earn less than your son?”, because we want our children to earn money, so that every child, regardless of gender, can live well. Only with such a poster, with such an action, can we show the problem so that someone stops and starts thinking. The recent appointment of a spokeswoman for equal treatment and counteracting mobbing at the university is certainly important. It’s a very important step that we have a spokeswoman who deals not only with unethical behaviour in education or society but also with mobbing issues because this problem concerns not only academic staff but also students, so opening a discussion on this topic is a challenge. There is a need for staff and student training, some kind of occupational health, and safety training, but it shouldn’t just be clicking. There needs to be a discussion about how to do this, and about what tools can be effective to engage the student community. Of course, there’s no denying that we won’t be able to engage 100% or even 90% of the community. Training, education and more education, Erasmus, all contacts, and foreign cooperation are important. The more people will come to us, the more open we are to others, the better it will be, in my opinion, because we’ll see that introducing changes for sustainable development isn’t so scary. Sometimes a very simple poster, a discussion about global problems, interviews, a university website that can also educate us, the use of social media – these are simple and effective tools. Let’s not be afraid of social media, let’s not say that Facebook is stupid. Students have recently explained to me that TikTok doesn’t have to be stupid at all, there are mostly images and videos, I haven’t used TikTok yet, but I’ll see what it is because I just want to know what new tools there that are appeal to young people. If we stop at Facebook, it will turn out that they have already escaped us and that we won’t speak to them. This doesn’t mean that I must produce videos for TikTok and use only it, but it’s good to know it, it’s good not to shut myself off from these new tools because using them is also a challenge. I’ll never speak a youth language again. There has recently been a programme that presented a youth language. I don’t understand anything from it anymore. Let’s not delude ourselves that we’ll speak the language of young people, but let’s ask ourselves what language they speak and what new technologies they use. Using them for sustainable development is, in my opinion, very important. If we say that computers repel us or that we don’t want e-books, then in my opinion we won’t get very far with sustainable development. Of course, I honour and respect a printed book and there’s nothing better than having a new book from a bookstore, from a printing house, but my possibilities of collecting books and shelves are increasingly limited. Maria Janion’s photo is beautiful, showing her in her studio or her own private library, sitting in the middle on a chair and surrounded by books, but this is not behaviour in line with the SDGs because it means the consumption of paper. We also use energy to produce readers… Aren’t we a bit too optimistic to set the agenda for 2030? After all, it includes goal 10, which is to eliminate barriers between poorer and wealthier countries. The pandemic teaches us that as the European Union, we have access to the vaccine, but in India it is very limited. Not only UNICEF and WHO are obliged to act, but grassroots initiatives, such as the work of social activist Janina Ochojska, are extremely important for sustainable development. So, on the one hand, we have huge, centralistic, organisational behemoths, from which the impulse comes, and on the other hand, we see that something isn’t working. If you talk to young people, they are very sceptical. On the one hand, there is an ecological group that will say that you need to cooperate with various UN agencies, but there will also be a group that will say that it’s a bureaucratic world and it needs to be reformed. I would probably have a Nobel Peace Prize if I knew how…

That’s true. The last question concerns the barriers and challenges related to the goals of the 2030 Agenda. We have already talked about many of them today…

Barriers may vary. It may be simple indifference. What I mean here is this approach to life: “I am in my own world, and I don’t care about anything except myself.” It’s very difficult to overcome this barrier of indifference. When we study past societies, we find that most of them lived to survive. If someone was born in the Middle Ages, even in a higher social class, first, they had to survive: women – childbirth, children – childhood diseases, epidemics, invasions, wars. You had to live until you were thirty-something and take care of providing yourself with the necessities of life. Some time ago in some TV programme, someone explained that we buy so much food because we can afford it. We go to a shop and put more products into the basket without much thought. In my opinion, when building sustainable development, the barrier is indifference, resulting from various reasons. Another issue is building a community. What is the benefit of membership of the European Union? Some young people today will say that they don’t see any benefits from the European Union, that it’s a bureaucratic world that imposes on us that bananas should be yellow, and carrots should be orange. After all, the value for each of us is freedom of movement, democratic freedoms, and taking care of these democratic freedoms. It seems to me that all dictatorships, I may be wrong, do not strive for a sustainable world, this is not their goal, i.e. building a world without barriers, on the contrary, they create various barriers, starting with those we’ve already talked about here, i.e. communication barriers, access barriers, the fact that early education is included in various social programmes of various countries and some say that it deprives children of their childhood. But on the other hand, I also hear this from my students, they come from different backgrounds, from different homes, and some of them had contact with books, theatre, and art for the first at the early school stage, and in big cities we don’t think about it at all. When the UN was creating this agenda it certainly saw in sustainable development the elimination of the differences between the north and the south, between the more or less satiated Europe and Africa, between Africa, Asia, South America, the differences between the native populations that demand their rights in America, Australia or New Zealand, which is all very difficult, because if we grow up in a certain environment and we are stuck in our bubble again, it is difficult for us to step out. I try to be apolitical, and I don’t tell my students to vote for this or that party, it’s not allowed. I shouldn’t do it, but I can persuade them to vote, and I tell them that our great-grandmothers chained themselves to lampposts not so that you, ladies, can now say that you won’t vote. Someone fought for it, and in the 18^th century men also fought to be able to vote, the aim of the French Revolution was to allow a larger social group to influence change. I don’t think we would have enough time to say how many threats there are. There are also opportunities, for example in levelling barriers such as access to books, because again the pandemic taught us that open access was our chance. The more we agree to share, the more we will read. There was a discussion that maybe we should have online tickets to theatres because we understand that we must pay for these technical measures, but let people have access to the theatre. We won’t go to Warsaw because we don’t always have money or time. Social exclusion is an important topic, we also talk about it in Poland, and we are discussing the fact that many students escaped from the educational system because they lacked access to computers. Before we start setting great, enormous goals, we should first take these first, basic steps and actions: education, openness to different age groups, to explain to them, for example, the history of Gdańsk, but also to take advantage of the important opportunity that modern technologies give us and which we can take advantage of when crossing these barriers. It will also be important to build connections between us academics. It’s great that you invited me to this interview, and we can talk like a humanist with a humanist. What is valuable is that you invite people from different fields, from different disciplines, and that we try to talk about the same thing in our own language. Thanks to this, we are building a network of connections at the university, not only Polish or European ones. There are opportunities to expand our activities because we have EU funds. Perhaps my statement will be a bit political, but these funds should go to local governments, because in the local environment, people know best what needs to be changed around them and of course, it needs to be controlled, this is money from our taxes, but the local community knows best what the barrier is and has ideas on how to overcome it.

We should act locally, and what about a macro scale?

If we read about what is happening to glaciers, about endangered species, see what is in the water, read the reports of our chemists, we start to think differently, so global thinking about nature, about the fact that we want to leave something to the next generations after us, we must think globally…

Similarly, it is worth thinking globally about key competences, multilingualism, and developing intercultural or transcultural competences.

Intercultural competences are very important. We can plan to raise them in university activities and in our education system. After all, in the syllabus we have the so-called KRK system, we plan the improvement of social competences in learning outcomes. First, teaching our students conversation skills, encouraging them to develop social competences, which they develop from an early age because they start developing them as children when they learn that a toy isn’t just for one child. I think that developing social competences is what we can offer, regardless of whether we are humanists, chemists, or work at the Faculty of Biology or Mathematics and Computer Science.

Interview by Irena Chawrilska, PhD.