CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

The presentation discusses the stylistic, pragmatic, phraseological, lexical-semantic problems of literary translation from Uzbek into English and introduces the online poetic dictionary as a solution to overcome them. Gulnoza Odilova is an Uzbek scholar of Translation Studies. She did her PhD in 2011 and DSc in 2021. She works as an Associate Professor at Tashkent State University of Uzbek Language and Literature. She has published more than 200 articles, 2 monographs, 2 textbooks, 1 encyclopedia, and patented a mobile app “Dictionary of gastronomic terms”. As a translator, she has translated Erkin Vohidov’s poems into English and poems of Shakespeare, Byron, Tomas Moore, Robert Burns and Edgar Allan Poe into Uzbek. In 2019 her project “www.poetiklugat.uz” achieved the recognition of the President of Uzbekistan and she was awarded the national medal “Shuhrat” (Glory) for her contribution to the science and literature of Uzbekistan. She is the chairperson of the Gastronomy Tourism Association of Uzbekistan and the coordinator of several projects such as “Gastromahalla”, “Delicious Uzbekistan” and “restoservice.uz”.

“Eurasian Responses to the COVID-19 Crisis: Between Fact and Fear” with Caress Schenk, Associate Professor of Political Science, Nazarbayev University. Description: Amid the economic and health crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, underlying questions of state-society relations loom large in Eurasia: why do people follow or not follow regulations that the government deems healthy for them? Do people trust the scientific underpinnings of state modernization projects? How do states increase public buy-in or compliance with their policies? This talk will outline the origins of the project and preliminary findings from a study that Schenk conducted, analyzing the linkages between state and society as they together navigate a world of uncertainty and crisis. To empirically study questions related to fear-based and scientific-based decision making during times of crisis and uncertainty, Schenk’s project uses a three-pronged approach. First is an investigation of public attitudes towards health behaviors, including the choice to be vaccinated against COVID-19, using interviews, surveys, and social media analysis. Second, she investigates expert opinion and the construction of official data using interviews, media analysis, and various analyses of available empirical data. Third, Schenk analyzes the policies and policymaker perspectives in addressing COVID-19, using data from the CoronaNet Project, interviews, analysis of policymakers’ rhetoric, and the messaging of public awareness campaigns. This project uses these approaches to probe linkages between political rhetoric, policy, and people’s attitudes and behaviors. Bio: Caress Schenk is an Associate Professor of political science at Nazarbayev University (Astana, Kazakhstan) with teaching and research expertise in the politics of immigration and national identity in Eurasia. Her new book, published with the University of Toronto Press, is called Why Control Immigration? Strategic Uses of Migration Management in Russia. Current and previous research has been funded by the American Councils for International Education, Nazarbayev University and the Fulbright Scholar Program and has been published in Demokratizatisya, Europe-Asia Studies, and Nationalities Papers, and in edited volumes published by Edinburgh University Press and Oxford University Press. Dr. Schenk is a member of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia).

"Technological Solutions for Complex Problems: Emerging Electronic Surveillance Regimes in Eurasian Cities" with Erica Marat, Associate Professor at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University Description: ‘Smart city’ is the new buzzword in cities across Eurasia. Most large urban areas in the post-Soviet space have embraced smart city technologies, and those that have not are in the process of finding smart technology solutions to criminal and disorderly behavior. This use of technologies serves the larger ideal of a society in which even minor crimes are meticulously documented, a habit dating back to the Soviet tradition of criminological research. On the example of Kyiv, Almaty and Bishkek, this presentation will discuss how the pursuit of smart cities in Eurasia strives to attain modernity without the burden of deeper political change. It will review how smart city initiatives rapidly emerging across the region on two dimensions: first, local initiatives to modernize law enforcement and, second, global pressures to innovate fueled both by transnational state-controlled firms promoting their own security products. The spread of surveillance technologies in Eurasia shows how cities and countries aspire to follow global trends for smart city technologies. Bio: Dr. Erica Marat is an Associate Professor at the College of International Security Affairs of the National Defense University. Dr. Marat’s research focuses on violence, mobilization and security institutions in Eurasia, India, and Mexico. Her book The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries (Oxford University Press 2018) explores the conditions in which a meaningful transformation of the police is likely to succeed and when it will fail.

"Calling the Future: What Names in Russian and East European Science Fiction Reveal" with Sibelan Forrester, Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College. Description: In Eastern Europe and Russia/the USSR, science fiction has often offered ways to make implicit assertions about the future. In Socialist Realism, representations of the future were constrained by Marxist theory. Science fiction enabled authors to craft more creative plots and adventures; a story could assume “socialism in space” without specifying how that happened. Naming was one narrative technique Soviet science fiction writers used to shape notions of the future. Names with ethnic and national associations, for example, were used to suggest that this future would be international. This talk will present a number of examples from Czech, Polish, and Russian science fiction, bringing in not only nationality but also race and gender, to address questions of how the names could be, or have been, effectively translated into English.  Bio: Sibelan Forrester is the Susan W. Lippincott Professor of Modern and Classical Languages and Russian at Swarthmore College. She has translated fiction, poetry, and scholarly prose from Croatian, Russian and Serbian, including science fiction from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Olga Larionova, and Davor Slamnig. Her current research includes a study of how the Russian “technical intelligentsia” interacted with science fiction as both authors and readers.

"China and the Uyghurs: Cultural Genocide in the Name of Counterterrorism" with Sean Roberts, Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the International Development Studies program at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. Description: This presentation seeks to explain both the motivations and justifications for the Chinese state’s mass human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, highlighting how intentions and explanations are inextricably linked. The motivations for what the state is doing are reflective of settler colonial ambitions in this region and an ardently colonial attitude towards Uyghurs and related peoples as inferior and expendable. However, the justifications have their origins in the Global War on Terror and its characterization of ‘terrorists’ as less than human and irrational. Like the ‘savages’ of European colonialism, China’s imagination of Uyghurs as ‘terrorists’ provides a rationalization for carry out destructive harm to a people that is framed as benevolent and in the best interests of those are the victims of that harm. Bio: Sean Roberts is an Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the International Development Studies program at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. Dr. Roberts is an anthropologist who has studied the Uyghur people of China and Central Asia for thirty years, writing his dissertation on the Uyghurs of the China-Kazakhstan borderlands while a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California. He has published numerous articles in academic journals, edited volumes, and in policy-oriented publications about the Uyghurs, and he is the author of the recently published book, The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign Against a Muslim Minority (Princeton University Press, 2020).

“Queer Budapest: Sex, Society and the Illiberal State, Past and Present” with Anita Kurimay, Associate Professor of History, Bryn Mawr College Description: The presentation discusses the strange and enduring alliance between queer life and a series of illiberal Hungarian regimes throughout the first half of the 20th century, which had been silenced by subsequent political regimes. It details how the legacy of deliberate silencing and erasure of non-normative sexualities from historical records helps to explain more recent emergence of anti-LGBTQ politics in Hungary. Bio: Anita Kurimay is Associate Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College (USA). Her main research interests include the history of sexuality, women’s and gender history, conservativism and the politics of the far right, the history of human rights, and the history of sport. Her book Queer Budapest, 1873 -1961 (Chicago University Press, 2020) examines the history of Hungarian politics of non-normative sexualities from the late 19th century to the present. She has published articles on Hungarian gay and lesbian history in Sexualities and Eastern European Politics and Societies (EEPS).

“Putinism and its Discontents” with Brian Taylor, Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University. Description: What is Putinism? Taylor argues that Putinism is both a mentality and a system of rule. In this talk, Taylor describes these two aspects of Putinism and examines the current challenges facing Vladimir Putin and Russia. Bio: Brian Taylor is a Professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. Taylor is the author of three books on Russian politics: The Code of Putinism (Oxford University Press, 2018); State Building in Putin’s Russia: Policing and Coercion after Communism (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1689-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2003). He received his B.A. from the University of Iowa, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Mixed Messages: Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia” with Kathryn Graber, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Lecture co-sponsored by Indiana University. Description: Focusing on language and media in eastern Siberia, Mixed Messages (Cornell University Press, 2020) engages debates about the role of minority media in society, alternative visions of modernity, and the impact of media on everyday language use. The book demonstrates that language and the production, circulation, and consumption of media are practices by which residents of the region perform and negotiate competing possible identities. What languages should be used in newspapers, magazines, or radio and television broadcasts, and by whom? What kinds of publics are and are not possible through media? How exactly do discourses move into, out of, and through the media to affect everyday social practices? In this book talk, Kathryn Graber will address these questions through her ethnography of the Russian Federation’s Buryat territories, a multilingual and multiethnic region on the Mongolian border with a complex relationship to both Europe and Asia. Bio: Kathryn E. Graber is an assistant professor of Anthropology and Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. A linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist, she researches minority language politics, multilingualism, mass media, materiality, and intellectual property in Russia and Mongolia. She is the author of Mixed Messages: Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia (Cornell University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Storytelling as Narrative Practice: Ethnographic Approaches to the Tales We Tell (Brill, 2019). Graber’s award-winning writing on Buryatia has appeared in journals such as Slavic Review, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Language & Communication, and Inner Asia, as well as in Russian collections. Since 2014 she has been researching how value is negotiated in the Mongolian cashmere industry, based on fieldwork at sites along the commodity chain. Her research has been funded by agencies including the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education/Fulbright-Hays, and the Social Science Research Council. Dr. Graber is also an award-winning teacher, teaching courses at IUB that bridge anthropology and area studies. She holds an A.B. in Anthropology and Linguistics (University of Chicago), M.A. in Russian and East European Studies (University of Michigan), and M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology (University of Michigan). She previously held postdoctoral fellowships at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at IUB.

"The Gendered Ambiguity of the Postcommunist Transitions" with Janet Elise Johnson, Professor of Political Science and Gender/Women’s Studies at Brooklyn College; Katalin Fábián, Professor of Government and Law at Lafayette College; and Mara Lazda, Professor of History at Bronx Community College. LECTURE DESCRIPTION: Kristen Ghodsee’s 2017 New York Times op-ed and subsequent popular book, "Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism"(2018), now translated into 12 other languages, is the latest foray into a central and longstanding debate as to whether the transition in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia was bad for women. Drawing upon four decades of gender scholarship of this region with more than 200 million women, we build on and move beyond this unanswerable question to examine why and how assessments have been and remain contradictory. Extending critical theory’s concept of intersectionality and interweaving the legacies of colonialism and informality, we ground our analysis and assessment in the concept of ambiguity. Ambiguity helps us make sense of the varied perspectives of women in this region–as shaped by class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and ability–and the varied and complicated processes of democratization, economic reforms, and redefining borders and alliances. This presentation comes out of our collaboration on "The Routledge Handbook to Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia" (forthcoming July 2021), which reflects on and advances the interdisciplinary, transnational, and multidimensional study of this part of the world. Over the last three decades, gender has become an integral, if derided, component of the study of the region across the social sciences. This study is also an important element of the decentering of the West in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, especially with its nuanced and innovative theorizing on the intersections of class, ethnicity, and race outside of western frameworks. SPEAKER DESCRIPTIONS: Janet Elise Johnson is a Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA. Her books include The Gender of Informal Politics (Palgrave 2018), Gender Violence in Russia (Indiana University Press 2009), and Living Gender after Communism (Indiana University Press 2007). In the last few years, she has published articles in Slavic Review, Human Rights Review, Journal of Social Policy Studies, Politics & Gender, Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Social Policy, and Aspasia as well as online in The New Yorker, The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, and The Boston Review. Katalin Fábián is a Professor of Government and Law at Lafayette College, Easton, PA USA. Her books include Contemporary Women’s Movements in Hungary: Globalization, Democracy, and Gender Equality (Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), Domestic Violence in the Postcommunist States: Local Activism, National Policies, and Global Forces (Indiana University Press, 2010), Democratization through Social Activism: Gender and Environmental Issues in Post-Communist Societies (Tritonic Romania, 2015), and Rebellious Parents: Parents’ Movements in Central-Eastern Europe and Russia (Indiana University Press, 2017). Mara Lazda is Associate Professor of History at Bronx Community College, City University of New York, USA. Her regional focus is on Latvia, with broader research interests on the intersections between gender, nationalism, and transnationalism in historical and contemporary contexts. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Baltic Studies, the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, and Nationalities Papers. She has served as the President of the Association of Baltic Studies (2014-2016), a coordinator of the Gender and Transformation: Women in Europe workshop at New York University, and an editor for Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History.

“Promoting US Policy in Eurasia—A Practitioner’s View” with Caroline Savage, career Foreign Service Officer and non-resident fellow at Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. LECTURE DESCRIPTION: Foreign Service Officer and REECAS alumna Caroline Savage will talk about her extensive career in international affairs. Savage will discuss various topics relating to her academic and professional career, including her work in public diplomacy as a Foreign Service Officer, how she has utilized her foreign language and area studies training in her professional life, and her experience facilitating inter-agency coordination. Conversation moderated by CREECA Director Ted Gerber. SPEAKER DESCRIPTION: Caroline Savage is a career Foreign Service Officer who served most recently as Director of the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Press Center. As non-resident fellow at Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, her focus is diverse diplomacy leadership in foreign affairs, a project she began during her tenure as Virginia and Dean Rusk Fellow at ISD from 2018-2019. Prior to Georgetown, she served as Public Affairs Officer at U.S. Embassies Azerbaijan and Mozambique. In Washington assignments, she was Director for Russia and Central Asia on the National Security Council and Political-Military Officer in the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Russian Affairs. She also served previously in Belarus and Luxembourg. A native of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, she graduated from Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, then received master’s degrees in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies and Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her languages are French, Russian, Portuguese, and Azerbaijani.