Conferences

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On Sunday, November 18th, 2018, 11.00 a.m., in the NTB Small Hall, Prof. Dr. Dumitru Bortun shall hold a conference on Romania - an enigma, a miracle and a paradox. Tasks for the next generation!

About the Conference

After 1989, a single generalized consensus emerged in Romania that can be considered a public interest: Romania's integration into the Euro-Atlantic structures. In 2018, precisely in the year of the Centenary, some political figures began to express their dissatisfaction with the insistence whereby the European Union is asking us to observe the standards that we are committed to observing. But integration into the European Union is only a means; the goal is to complete Romania's modernization process - a process that began in the nineteenth century. We have no place in the European Union with horse-drawing peasants, growing their geese on the roadside, with employees skipping work and stealing from factories, physicians and teachers accepting bribe, pupils and students copying at the exams, with ungrammatical and irresponsible journalists, with corrupt policemen and magistrates, civil servants opaque to citizens' needs, apolitical citizens, civic conscience, and cynical, amoral and stateless politicians.

Under the current circumstances, joining the European Union has proved to be a boomerang: in the post-accession period, we witnessed tensions, contradictions and conflicts - in short, a conflictual integration that could generate an anti-Western reaction, rejection of the values ​​of the European Union and integration into the European Union. Romania is not just "an enigma and a miracle", as George Bratianu wrote. I dare say that it is also a great paradox. Before leaving Romania, the former head of the European Union Delegation in Bucharest, Jonathan Scheele, made a statement as a sentence: "Romania is a country that the more you know, the least you understand it." Regarding lucidity, Romania appears to be a country full of unsurpassable contradictions, moral dilemmas, ideological conflicts, fractures between large groups of society. At first sight, their causes are economic; in my view, they are cultural, they are based on the ideals, values ​​and norms that govern our life. To understand the concept of modernity, the first step is to identify the "values ​​of modernity" that I shall present for the clarity of exposure, in contrast to pre-modern values. Romania's cultural resetting is one of the tasks of the next generation. As Karl Popper said, each generation can give meaning to history by formulating its own purposes. The choice of goals can not be dictated neither by nature nor by an alleged "sense of history"; it can be done by ourselves as responsible beings. In this sense, I shall make some suggestions for the next generation of Romanian citizens. Univ. Prof. PhD. Dumitru Bortun, National School of Political and Administrative Studies

About Univ. Prof. Dumitru Bortun

Dumitru Borţun holds a PhD of philosophy and is a professor at the Faculty of Communication and Public Relations of the National School of Political and Administrative Studies in Bucharest - SNSPA, where he teaches the courses "Public Speech Analysis", "Semiotics. Theories of Language ", "Ethics in Communication" and "Corporate Social Responsibility". At the SNSPA Faculty of Management, he teaches the course "Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility". In 2009, the National Alliance of Student Organizations in Romania - ANSOC awarded him the title of Bologna Professor, granted to teachers who "are appreciated by the students, add value to education in Romania and are role models for students". In 2015, he was awarded the "Personality of the Year 2015" by Legal Point Magazine for "promoting moral values ​​in communication techniques," and in 2017 the Excellence Diploma for "Integrity, Good Governance and Social Responsibility" awarded by Eurolink - the European House. He has published over 130 studies, essays, articles and interviews in collective volumes, specialized publications, and culture magazines. He is the author of several university courses and the books Epistemic Fundamentals of Communication (Ars Docendi, 2002), Public Relations and the New Society (Triton 2005, 2012), Corporate Social Responsibility: from Public Relations to  Sustainable Development, coordinator (Triton , 2012), Epistemic Fundamentals of Communication - Second Edition, Revised and Added (Tritonic, 2013), The Black Tide: Romanian Language Under Siege. Errors of Wording in Romanian Media (Tritonic, 2015), Misprints, Meanings & co. The interdisciplinarity of communication, semiotics and multimodality, ed. (Springer International Publishing AG, 2018). He is a member of the editorial board of several specialized publications, as well as in the scientific committee of international conferences. Since 2016, he is the chairman of the Organizing Committee of the International Conference on Semiosis in Communication, organized once every two years by SNSPA, in collaboration with the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS). He is a founding member of the Romanian Association of Public Relations - ARRP (since 1995). The General Assembly of March 2nd, 2005 elected him ARRP President, position he held until May 2008. He is currently the President of the ARRP Jury of Honour.

Translated by Simona Nichiteanu