Category: Conferences/Seminars

Deadline: February 18, 2020

Migration is a constant feature of the current age of ‘liquid modernity’, transforming societies into a collection of diasporas(Bauman). Research in Russian speaking mobility offers a valuable contribution to both the theoretical and empirical aspects of migration and mobility studies. While Russian speakers have crossed state boundaries for centuries, the collapse of the Soviet Union has created an unprecedented environment for mobility and diasporic processes of Russophones, destabilising hegemonic relations between the centre and the periphery and producing emerging conditions including ‘beached diasporas’, ‘Global Russians’, ‘virtual Russophonia’, and ‘transnational Russian cultures’, to name but a  few. Currently, the geography of Russian-speaking communities outside Russia is wider than ever with the overall population comparable in  size to that of the Russian Federation. Discourse perspectives have recently marked a theoretical shift in migration research. Mobility is intrinsically discursive as space, communities,identities and belonging are constructed in narratives-those produced by migrants and those about migrants. What do these stories –written and oral, visual and multimodal, fictional and real –tell us about Russian-speaking movers across the world? As the Russian speakers populate the ‘third space’ (Bhabha) of diasporic sites, and as these sites turn to the ‘zones of  intense  cutting-edge  creativity’(Karim),  what  are  the  discursive  manifestations and articulations of this condition? And how do the current migration narratives of Russophones compare with those produced in other ‘waves’ of migration from Russia and the Soviet Union?

Deadline: February 29, 2020

GWZO Annual Conference 2020
Decentred and Asymmetrical? Eastern Europe in a Comparative Perspective

6–8 July 2020

Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig

Comparison is one of the most frequently used approaches in the humanities and social sciences. Several disciplines comprise established fields dedicated to comparative research, ranging from comparative history, politics to literature. In recent decades, however, comparative research has also been subjected to continuous methodological debates. While comparative frameworks had been promoted by some researchers as a means to overcome methodological nationalism and exceptionalism, others have criticised comparative approaches for homogenising research subjects and defining artificial boundaries of container entities. In response to such criticism, many recent approaches have sought to integrate comparative methods with research on transfer, exchange and entanglement. This discussion also shed light on the role of circulation and changing points of reference, as actors and objects moved within and across different spaces. Differences in perspectives and the relevance of change, mobility and border-crossings came to the forefront of scholarly enquiries, which again inspired the formation of new subdisciplines (most notably, the discussion on world literature emerging from comparative literature). At the same time, reservations towards illegitimate comparison, presented by the figurative apples and oranges, have been considerably weakened as researchers start paying more attention to social, economic, cultural and other asymmetries, thus raising the question of how comparative research may consider apparent inequalities.

Deadline: January 14, 2020

February 21-22, 2020
NYU and Columbia University

A workshop for graduate students in the social sciences and humanities, studying Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus to present work-in-progress.

This workshop is organized by a group of graduate students working in the broader Eurasia region, spread throughout the Comparative Literature, History and Anthropology departments at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and Columbia University. Our goal is to build community with colleagues along the East Coast (and beyond!) and to create a forum for sharing and workshopping research in progress. Graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania have been holding similar annual workshops for over 5 years. This year, we will be holding the event in New York City for the first time, a collaborative effort between graduate students from the University of Pennsylvania, NYU and Columbia University. The workshop is intended to bring together graduate students with an interest in the region, in order to familiarize ourselves with each other’s work, and to speak across disciplines.