WarSAW: Go & Explore is an initiative started by students of the American Studies Center and the Volunteer Centre of the University of Warsaw. This project has been created for those who look for inspiration, would like to get to know Warsaw even better but not necessarily want to read tourist guides.

For whom?

​Perhaps due to the pandemic you have been stuck at home or lacked energy to go out? Or maybe you just didn’t know where to go? It doesn’t matter if you just came to Warsaw for a student exchange, you are a first year student or you have already been living in Warsaw for a while but still feel like you don’t know the city well enough, WarSAW: Go & Explore is here for you!

You know what they say— New Year, New Me! So join us and explore Warsaw’s districts from a local perspective. Beginning of the New Year is always a good time for changes, new ideas and new experiences. That’s why we encourage you to go outside and explore all places you didn’t know that Warsaw has to offer. Walks combined with sightseeing are a perfect solution to clear your head, take a break from your responsibilities or just another idea to spend time with friends and family.

Join us!

WarSAW: Go & Explore is an initiative that you can participate in as well— all you have to do is add your ideas, favorite places and recommendations for future walks in the comments under a post about a certain district.

Let’s be honest, this pandemic has given us a hard time and we all have felt that. That’s why we want to motivate you to discover new places, take your close ones and make plans to try out new food as soon as restaurants will open again!

So what’s the plan?

Every two days, on the event site we will upload a post presenting one of Warsaw’s districts prepared by one of our team members. The selection of places is rather subjective and shows how different a perception of a certain space, that not everyone might consider interesting, can be. We hope that thanks to our project you will discover new murals, buildings, and cafes not mentioned in regular tourist guides, which are an integral part of the city we all live in, and therefore, feel more at home in Warsaw.

Join the Facebook event to stay updated and start exploring Warsaw with us!

FACEBOOK EVENT

You can also check this interactive map with recommended places:

MAP WITH PINS

… but safety first!

Please remember to follow current COVID-19 restrictions and take care of your safety! Stay home if you feel sick and postpone the exploration for better times, if necessary.

The event is organized by students of the American Studies Center in cooperation with the Volunteer Center of the University of Warsaw as part of Practical Project: Multicultural Volunteering at UW, which constitutes a part of the Master’s program, co-funded by the The University’s Integrated Development Programme (ZIP).

Year 2024/2025

January 9: It’s a True Story – It Happened to a Friend of a Friend (online)’: Urban Legends and Television in the Contemporary Era

December 31, 2024

Join us for the first Weird TV lecture in 2025! Whether centering talk programming, news television, or fictionalised accounts, urban legends nest themselves in the minds of viewers, propagating, and ultimately regressively metamorphosing & returning to oral tradition, shared from viewer to non-viewer to non-viewer, so on and so forth. The oral links which are core to the Urban Legend are recreated anew. While found near universally across televisual programming, our interest rests in the anthology format television has adopted. The stories told are familiar, but not entirely static. The narrative transaction shifts and subsumes itself to the socio-cultural changes. Each technological revolution in communication ripples and renders the narrativization of urban legends transposed onto television. It is in this vein that we will discuss the conceptualisation of the Urban Legend, the televisual forms it has taken, and its existence within the internet era.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 19: Between The Mundane and the Heroic: Vietnamese Presence in State Socialist Poland

December 19, 2024

We are delighted to invite you to the fifth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2024/2025 Fall semester! This talk will examine the depictions of the (North) Vietnamese as freedom fighters within the context of the state socialist public sphere and the everyday life of Vietnamese students in Poland across generations. From idealized wartime reportages to mixed-race couples, the Vietnamese presence was marked by a multifaceted experience of adaptation, challenges, opportunities, and dynamic, interactive bonds with Polish society. This history continues to exert a profound influence on the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora and Polish-Vietnamese relationships.

Year 2024/2025

December 18: The Trump Transition – What is New and What is Not

December 18, 2024

Leadership Research Groupis inviting all those who would like to put the Trump transition to a presidential scholarship context and better understand the Trump transition decisions, the prospects for the future in domestic and foreign policy areas they bring, and the impact that Trump leadership may have on the political scene in Washington to a talk followed by a Q&A session by Professor Stephen Farnsworth.

Year 2024/2025

December 17: We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice

December 17, 2024

During the workshop “We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice”, Aleksandra Julia Malinowska, a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw,will delve into the history of feminist manifestos and their pivotal role in the women’s movement in the United States. We’ll explore how activists of the second wave of feminism used grassroots publications to raise awareness, voice the demands of emerging women’s groups, and build communication networks between organizations spread across the country. Together, we’ll analyze the literary techniques that make the manifesto genre a powerful tool for inspiring activist mobilization beyond the pages of the text.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 12: Technological Imaginaries and the Universal Ambitions of Silicon Valley

December 12, 2024

Drawing on her new book, Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge: Activist imaginaries and the politics of digital technologies (University of California Press), in this talk Ferrari shows how these discourses, which she calls “technological imaginaries”, shape how we experience digital technologies. She discusses how, for the past 30 years, Silicon Valley tech actors have produced and popularized a specific way of thinking about digital technologies, which has become mainstream. This dominant technological imaginary brings together technocratic aspirations and populist justifications. While arising out of the peculiarities of Silicon Valley and of the American 1990s, this dominant imaginary has posited its universality by presenting its tenets as if they were global, unbiased, and equally suitable for everyone, everywhere. She argues that to really curb the socio-political influence of Big Tech companies we also need to understand, critique, and resist the power of their technological imaginary.