Description

The presentation and representation of Cold War conflicts in Soviet fictional and documentary cinema of the 1940s and 1950s.

Sergei Kapterev specializes in the stylistic, intellectual and political interaction between American and Soviet cinema, and is presently writing a monograph on this topic.

Description

Heritage. Homeland. Diaspora. The analytic tools of transnational and migration studies may help us understand these terms, but the question remains: How do we define what is ours, and what is theirs? This roundtable will address questions of heritage in the context of post-Soviet Eastern Europe. The massive violence of the 20th century resulted in demographic changes creating far-flung diaspora communities preserving and contesting the heritage from home. Who has the authority to define heritage? How do diaspora groups function within larger post-Soviet communities? How does heritage intersect with history? What are the political and social challenges of creating and contesting heritage in practice?

Participating in the roundtable will be scholars and practitioners of heritage: Dr. Sofia Dyak, Academic Director of the Center for Urban History (Ukraine) speaking on “competing” diasporas in Lviv; Alti Rodal, Co-Director of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter Initiative (Ottawa), on the challenges of heritage in practice with multiple communities; Dr. Adriana Helbig, University of Pittsburgh, on transnational exchange creating a new “heritage” in Ukraine; and Gabriela Kasprzak, University of Toronto, on nationalism and religion in Canadian Polonia. Following the presentations we will have questions by discussant Dr. Mayhill Fowler, Petro Jacyk Postdoctoral Fellow, and then open the floor to the audience.

Description

The talk will be followed by a discussion in the Buzek Lounge (102N) from 4-5pm.

“Africa” has figured strongly in the Russian imagination, going back to the gift of Hannibal to Tsar Peter the Great, the alternate erasure and lauding of Pushkin’s blackness, the portrayals of Africa in Soviet cartoons, and the role that Africa plays vis-à-vis post-Soviet notions of class and race today. Musically, racial imaginings have been more closely tied with African Americans, a mediated sense of blackness imposed on all with dark skin. Musicians such as Paul Robeson were instrumental in shaping Soviet ideas about pan-African identity, reinforced through circulations of jazz during the Cold War. In post-Soviet spaces, hip-hop has taken on this role of reinforcing ideas about race. This paper explores the changing notions of “blackness” as it was mediated in pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet society through performances of spirituals, jazz, and hip-hop. It analyzes how these musical genres intersected with discourses on slavery/serfdom in pre-revolutionary Russia, the notion of equality in the Soviet era, and racialized concepts of class identity in the post-socialist era. Drawing on figures such as Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and 50 Cent among others, this presentation analyzes the complex ways that music figured into racial discourse in Russian-speaking lands. Taking into account the triangular relationship of the U.S., the USSR and Africa, it seeks to uncover the ways in which ideas about race and racism are circulated, reinforced, broken down, and recast through African American-based music genres that have had a far-reaching socio-political impact across the globe. The presentation builds on Paul Gilory’s concept of the “black Atlantic” to include a discussion of Russian lands that was omitted from black music history analysis until recently, with the growing presence of African migrants in former Soviet spaces. The presentation makes the argument that the complex ways that race has worked its way into politics and social networking in the former Soviet Union, a society that once claimed “racism did not exist” has much to do with how musical networkings both reinforce and alleviate growing xenophobia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Adriana Helbig is an assistant professor of music and an affiliated faculty member in Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, Global Studies, and at the Center for Russian and East European Studies in the University of Pittsburgh. A member of the graduate faculty, she teaches courses on global hip-hop; world music; music, gender, and sexuality; music and technology; and cultural policy. She is also founder and director of the Carpathian Music Ensemble, a student performance group that specializes in the music of Eastern Europe, including klezmer and Romani/Gypsy music. She is the recipient of numerous grants and research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Councils for International Education, IREX, and Fulbright. She has held a research fellowship at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and was an inaugural research fellow at the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Her articles on Romani (Gypsy) music, post-socialist cultural policy, music and piracy, music, race, and migration, and global hip-hop have appeared in edited collections and journals such as The Yearbook for Traditional Music, Current Musicology, and Popular Music. She is the co-author, with Oksana Buranbaeva and Vanja Mladineo, of The Culture and Customs of Ukraine (Greenwood Press, 2009). Her book Hip-Hop Revolution: Music, Race, and Migration in Ukraine will be published by Indiana University Press.

Description

Alexander Motyl is a professor of political science and deputy director of the Division of Global Affairs at Rutgers-Newark. He is noted for his prolific writings on contemporary politics in Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and Russia, as well as for more theoretical explorations into the nature of nationalism, empire, and revolution. Over the past two and a half decades, he has written six books of nonfiction and contributed dozens of articles to academic and policy journals, newspaper op-ed pages, and magazines. He also has managed, by dint of enviable self-discipline and resourcefulness, to publish two novels, while also pursuing a career as a painter. He is also the co-editor of the soon-to-be-released “Holodomor Reader”.

Description

The talk will focus on the activities of a privately funded institute of historical scholarship in Lviv. Dr. Sofia Dyak, director of the Center, will discuss the two primary areas of the Center’s work – research and public outreach projects – to explain both how such an institution developed in Ukraine, and the challenges facing it in the future. Dr. Dyak will also address the larger question of the meanings of “public history”: how to prevent history from being abused for political ends in contemporary Ukraine; how to offer fresh intellectual impulses and promote scholarly exchanges; how to offer young Ukrainian researchers opportunities to do advanced, internationally recognized work in their own country and thus address the issue of the “brain drain” emigration of qualified scholars; how to go beyond academia and participate in contemporary society in productive cooperation with public and cultural institutions. Special attention will be paid to the use of technology in realizing “public history” and the digital history projects realized at the Center.

Dr. Dyak holds a PhD in Sociology from the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw), an MA in History from the Central European University (Budapest), and a BA in History from Lviv University. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, and a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Her current book project, (Re)imagined Cityscapes: Lviv and Wroclaw after 1944/45, focuses on rebuilding, heritage, and urban space in the postwar socialist space. Her talk will focus on the work of the Center for Urban History, both as a research institution, and as a vehicle for shaping public discourse on history and memory in a region where such debates are greatly politicized. She will also cover the challenges of negotiating between public history and scholarly research, and academia East and West.

Description

Mr. Gabor will be interviewed by Professors Taras Koznarsky and Maxim Tarnawsky.
Vasyl Gabor is the author of numerous short stories collected in volumes entitled “A Book of Exotic Dreams and Real Events,” 1999 and “And that which People Are Thinking,” 2012. His stories have been translated into English, German, Serbian, Slovak, Croatian, Czech, Japanese and Bulgarian.
Mr. Gabor is also known as a literary critic and publisher. He is best known as the editor of an award-winning series of books of contemporary Ukrainian literature published under the general title Pryvatna Kolektsiia (A Private Collection).

Description

Consentement patriotique or “patriotic consent” was an uncontroversial construct when historians of France and the Great War of 1914-1918 began to employ it beginning in the late 1980s. It became much more so in the late-1990s, and remains so today. What is at stake in this surprisingly durable debate?

Description

This paper examines developments in early Soviet nursing and assesses the type of system that emerged after years of war and revolution as the Bolsheviks sought to separate nurses from their Tsarist era image of a religious Sister of Mercy and convert her into a proletarian “red sister”. However, in attempting to transform the social and political perception of the nurse, the nurse’s social status was not improved. Inhabiting almost the lowest rung on the medical professional ladder, the nurse struggled to gain respect and professional recognition. With largely inadequate training facilities, mixed attitudes to their competency by both colleagues and the authorities, and frequently poor living and working conditions, nurses seemed to be engaged in a constant battle to verify and legitimise their right to professional recognition. Using a variety of archival and printed sources in Russia, Britain and the United States, I aim to bring into focus the role and status of the Soviet nurse during this formative period of Russian history and draw on various Soviet, gender, and medical discourses to shed light on the position of the nurse within Soviet society.

Description

Born on July 21, 1969 in Baku, Azerbaijan, Mr. Shafiyev was educated at Baku State University where he studied history. Amidst his professional career he went on to Harvard University Kennedy School of Government where he obtained a Masters Degree in Public Administration. In addition, Mr. Shafiyev acquired a Law Degree at Baku State University.

Mr. Shafiyev served in Armed Forces in 1987-1989. His professional career began at the Azerbaijani National Academy of Sciences in the Institute Ethnography and Archeology in 1994.

In 1996 Mr. Shafiyev joined the Foreign Service. Within the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry in Baku, he has worked in the Political-Military Issues Division and in the United Nations Affairs Division.

His assignments include a posting to the Permanent Mission of Azerbaijan to the United Nations in New York in 1998-2001. In 2005 he was posted as Counselor at the Embassy of Azerbaijan in Canada. In 2007-2009 he served as Chargé d’Affaires and was then promoted to Ambassador in May of 2009.

Mr. Shafiyev is the author of several academic publications and has lectured in the field of International Security at Western University in Baku. He was Associate Member of the Jury of the Supreme Court of Azerbaijan in 1995-2000.

Description

In the first electoral defeat for Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili, the country’s recent parliamentary election brought to power an opposition coalition led by Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili. What does this election mean for the future of democracy and the rule of law in Georgia and the rest of the post-Soviet region? What major foreign and domestic policy changes will Ivanishvili’s government introduce? Join us for a panel discussion with journalist and Caucasus expert Thomas de Waal (senior associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), Dr. Anna Dolidze (Faculty of Law, University of Western Ontario), and Dr. Gavin Slade (Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto).

Thomas de Waal is a senior associate in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C. He is a writer and analyst on the Caucasus, Russia and the Black Sea region and the author, most recently, of The Caucasus: An Introduction (2010). In the 1990s de Waal worked as a journalist in Moscow, specializing in Russian politics and events in Chechnya. He is the co-author with Carlotta Gall of Chechnya, A Small Victorious War, (1997) and sole author of Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War (2003), which has been translated into Armenian, Azeri and Russian. De Waal has also worked for the BBC World Service and for the NGOs, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and Conciliation Resources.

Gavin Slade is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies, University of Toronto. He has conducted over two years of research in Georgia and has a book out next year on the decline of organized crime since the Rose Revolution of 2003. He has also written on the independence of the judiciary, school security and the reform of the prison system.

Anna Dolidze is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at Western University where she is also a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Transitional Justice and Post Conflict Reconstruction. At Western Anna teaches Public International Law and Property, Law and Development. Anna is also a Joachim Herz Fellow at the Transatlantic Academy of German Marshall Fund, working within a multi-disciplinary research group of towards the Academy’s annual theme: The Future of the Western Liberal Order. Anna’s research interests are in property law and theory, exploitation of global commons, law and development, and international law. Her regional expertise lies in post-communist countries. Anna has published in international law journals, peer-reviewed publications and collected volumes. Anna has also authored reports for a number of international organizations, including the United Nations Development Program and Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Description

Numerous regional security organisations have emerged in Central Asia since the end of the Cold War, under the leadership of one entrepreneur nation. Starting from the insight that cooperation makes the exercise of power possible, this paper assumes that since the end of the Cold War, major powers have relied on multilateral security institutions as a vehicle for wielding influence in the region. To the extent that security provides the link between power and space, it offers a lever to influence order through the articulation of joint policies. Therefore, it is suggested that multilateral institutions present a strategic option for major powers that bilateral agreements do not match. Their specific value is that they generate opportunities to form the coalitions necessary to promote norms and crystallize power relations. This talk examines the role in shaping the norms underpinning security governance in the region respectively of China in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Russia in the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and the United States in the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. The distinctive discourse promoted by each of these institutions reveals the extent to which security is a contested term in this highly strategic region.

Description

Despite substantial economic interdependence in the energy sphere, officials in Kyiv have historically failed to make the country less reliant on Russian energy sources, thus making it possible for the authorities in Moscow to employ its ‘energy weapon’. This asymmetric interdependence has become a source of conflict between the two states, undermining Ukraine’s security, political democratization and market liberalization. In addition, conflicts in the energy sphere between Kyiv and Moscow have become a security concern for the EU and its member states, encouraging EU’s efforts to diversify its energy supplies away from Russian sources and Ukrainian pipelines. However, recent developments in global and regional energy markets, coupled with the attempts by the Ukrainian authorities to diversify country’s energy supplies, for the first time point to the reduction of Ukraine’s dependence on Russian energy sources, opening a possibility of a more independent security and foreign policy conduct. The lecture will discuss how market changes in the energy sphere within Ukraine, Europe and the globe bear on Ukraine’s transit capacity, security, and domestic political and economic transformations.

Dr. Nadiya Kravets is a postdoctoral fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian studies at Harvard University, completing a book on Ukraine’s foreign and security policy since independence and working on a comparative study of foreign policies of the former Soviet republics. She earned her DPhil at Oxford in Politics and International Relations in 2012 and was a 2011-2012 Shklar Research fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Dr. Kravets teaches and writes on foreign and security policy in the post-Soviet states, Ukraine-Russia relations, and international relations theory, and is currently working on three collaborative research projects: the Black Sea Security in a Changing Global Order, the Economy and Politics of Energy Intermediaries in Ukraine, and the Making of Ukraine’s Foreign Policy.

Description

Ukraine currently must negotiate the geopolitical challenge of its location between Europe and Russia. Ukraine possesses gas lines crucial for getting Russian gas to Europe, but they are dependent on deals with Russia. The Black Sea Fleet is Russian, but parked in Ukraine’s harbor. With all the vicissitudes of history, rigged elections, and personalities, can these two countries ever be friends? What are Russia’s foreign and security goals and challenges towards Ukraine? What are Ukraine’s towards Russia? This roundtable will discuss the challenges and possibilities for normalization of relations between Ukraine and Russia. Is politics even possible? Dr. Helena Yakovlev-Golani (Halberd Postdoctoral Fellow, Munk School of Global Affairs) will speak on Russia’s foreign policy towards Ukraine, and Dr. Nadiya Kravets (Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University) Ukraine’s towards Russia. Dr. Seva Gunitsky, University of Toronto, will serve as discussant.

Description

The Interim Country (A Film About Kyrgyzstan)
Directed by Thomas Lahusen, Gulzat Egemberdieva, and André Loersch.
Narrated by Eugene Huskey and Gulzat Egemberdieva.
47 minutes; English, Kyrgyz and Russian. English subtitles, 2011.

Shot in Spring and Summer of 2010 in Kyrgyzstan, the film chronicles the popular revolt that led to the toppling of president Bakiyev and his clan in April 2010, and the ever-deepening chaos into which the country plunged in its aftermath, culminating with the large-scale inter-ethnic violence in June 2010. Lacking power and legitimacy, and battling its own family network and clan-based divisions, the interim government has had a hard time to stabilize the country politically, economically, and socially. All this is documented through interviews with several top officials, former president Askar Akayev in his Moscow exile, and “people on the street.” From Bishkek to the southern cities of Jalal-Abad and Osh, over the breath-taking highway uniting North and South through the Tian-Shan mountain range, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Russians, Meshketian Turks, and a Volga German share their anger, frustrations, and hopes.

Description

Taras Kuzio is Non-Resident Fellow, Center for Transatlantic Relations (CTR), School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. In 2010-2012 he wrote the book A Contemporary History of Ukraine as a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, Japan, and as a Senior Visiting Fellow at CTR, SAIS, John Hopkins University, Washington DC. Previously he has been a Visiting Professor at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University and a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham. Taras Kuzio has been a political consultant to the American, Canadian and Japanese governments and legal and business consultant on legal and economic questions. He is the author and editor of 14 books, including Open Ukraine. Changing Course towards a European Future Democratic Revolution in Ukraine (2011), From Kuchmagate to Orange Revolution (2009) and Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives on Nationalism (2007). He is the author of 5 think tank monographs, including The Crimea: Europe’s Next Flashpoint? (2010) and EU and Ukraine: a turning point in 2004? (2003), 25 book chapters, and 75 scholarly articles on post-communist and Ukrainian politics, nationalism and European security. He has guest edited 6 special issues of Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, East European Politics and Society, Nationalities Papers and Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics. He has written numerous articles on contemporary Ukrainian and post-communist politics, and foreign policy for media publications. Taras Kuzio received a BA in Economics from the University of Sussex, an MA in Soviet and Eastern European Studies from the University of London and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Birmingham, England. He was a Post-doctoral Fellow at Yale University.

Description

The lecture will focus on the socio-political characteristics of Greece in the framework of the Euro-crisis. It will explore the causes the causes of current Greek political institutions and Greek politics, and will attempt to evaluate the impact of the Greek economic crisis on the possible reform of the system. The issue will be addressed in the framework of the current institutional and political challenges that the EU and the euro-zone face.

Description

Information is not yet available.