Annual Conference Talk: Nataliya Gumenyuk, “Regaining Public Trust in Times of Populism. Lessons from Ukraine”

On November 20 and 21st 2018, the Annual Conference “Knowledge and Society in Times of Upheaval” of the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland took place in Berlin. It was jointly convened by Andreas Eckert (HU Berlin/Forum Transregionale Studien), Simone Lässig (GHI Washington) and Franz Waldenberger (DIJ Tokyo) and funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF).

During the Conference, former Prisma Ukraïna Fellow Nataliya Gumenyuk presented a paper “Regaining Public Trust in Times of Populism. Lessons from Ukraine”. In her talk, Nataliya Gumenyuk argued that the acute issues Ukrainian society is facing are very similar to those in Europe and the USA: growth of populism, distrust towards the institutions, polarisation and fragmentation of the audience, and urban-rural divide.

Nataliya Gumenyuk is a Ukrainian journalist specializing in conflict reporting and foreign affairs. She is head of independent TV-channels Hromadske, a Ukrainian public broadcasting platform, and Hromadske International. Gumenyuk has reported from the field during the Euromaidan Revolution of 2013-14, the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine (Donbas). As an independent international correspondent, she has covered major political and social events in nearly 50 countries. Gumenyuk is the author of Maidan Tahrir. In Search of the Lost Revolution, a collection of her own various reports from Egypt to Iraq and other countries in conflict in the Middle East, covering not least developments after the Arab Spring. Gumenyuk cooperates with a number of Ukrainian and international media outlets, and speaks at many media events. In 2015-16, she was a Fellow of Prisma Ukraïna – Research Network Eastern Europe at the Forum Transregionale Studien. In 2017, she was selected by the Warsaw-based journal Res Publica, Google, the Visegrad Fund, and the Financial Times as one of ‘New Europe’s 100 Top Leaders’, an annual list of Central and Eastern Europe’s brightest citizens changing their region.