Jānis Daugavietis participated in a punk research conference

Jānis Daugavietis, researcher at the Department of Art Studies at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia (UL ILFA), participated in the conference “Negotiating the Revolt: Punk in Times of Political Transformation”, held in Prague on May 17, 2025.

He presented a paper titled:
“Is It Easy to Be the Last Generation of Soviet Punks?”
Available here: https://zenodo.org/records/15504675

The presentation marks the beginning of a case study focusing on the first (and last) generation of punks in Soviet Latvia—youth who also appear in the 1986 documentary “Is It Easy to Be Young?” (dir. Juris Podnieks), which captured the social and cultural tensions of the era.

The conference was organized by the Institute of Czech History at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, in collaboration with the Punk Scholars Network (www.punkscholarsnetwork.com), the Czech and Slovak Subcultural Archive (https://ziny.info), and the Centre for the Study of Popular Culture (https://en.cspk.eu).

The presentation and conference participation were supported by the project
“‘Primitive and Noisy Music’ in Soviet Latvia (1956–1986): Mechanisms of Control and Practices of Evasion under Authoritarian Rule” (No. lzp-2024/1-0059).