Aniko Szucs

(Queen’s College, CUNY)

Friday April 12 2024

2pm to 3pm (New York Time)

In person at CUNY Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center (room 5203, Ralph Bunche Institute)

and Zoom

REGISTER HERE FOR ZOOM LINK AND DRAFT PAPER

Workshop format: We ask that participants read the paper in advance. At the workshop, Dr. Szucs will give a brief presentation, after which we invite discussion with the in-person and online audience.

Aniko Szucs is a theater and performance studies scholar, dramaturg, and curator. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Drama, Theater, and Dance at Queens College. Dr. Szucs completed her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University and earned an M.F.A. in Dramaturgy from the University of Theater and Film Arts in Budapest. She has worked as a resident and a production dramaturg in theaters across the US and Hungary. Dr. Szucs’s research interests include Central and East European political theater, feminist protest movements and performances, politics of memory, and the genealogy and critique of state surveillance.

Abstract:

 Seditious Bodies: The Subversive Aesthetics of Vulnerability in East European Feminist Performances 

In the recent transnational crisis of neoliberal austerity and rising neo-authoritarianism, there has been increased scholarly attention placed on forms of cultural resistance and social protest that—through performative gestures—foreground bodily vulnerability, mobilizing it as a site of connection and potentiality. Vulnerability, in this context, is a socio-political predicament that is perceived as a condition of resistance. This talk, however, considers vulnerability as an affective-aesthetic quality that distinctively characterizes contemporary East European feminist performances. Building on the genealogy of feminist body art and theory of the region, performance artists Maria Kulikovska (Ukraine) and Mikolt Tózsa (Hungary) yet again turn the female body and feminine corporeality into a vehicle of feminist resistance. The vulnerable body at the center of these performances is not merely a product of the precarious social and material conditions but a matrix of affective forces, symbolic gestures, and performative routines, one that liberates the artists from the ontological precarity of their existence. 

Friday, February 9, 2pm to 3pm (New York Time)

on Zoom with

Alina Mozolevska

Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University (Mykolaiv, Ukraine)

Please join us for our first session of Spring 2024, with Prof. Mozolevska on “Unveiling the War and Constructing Identities: Exploring Memes in Ukrainian and Russian Social Media during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.”

The paper examines the generation and deployment of visual narratives in Ukrainian and Russian digital participatory cultures, with a specific focus on internet memes in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It analyzes the form, content, and functions of these memes and highlights their similarity in mobilizing and conveying political messages despite variations in their visual components. The study indicates that Ukrainian memes are used not only to promote political agendas but also serve as trauma coping and collective identity construction mechanisms in times of crisis, helping to promote new war narratives that are engaged in the construction of the self and the other.

Alina Mozolevska is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philology, Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University (Mykolaiv, Ukraine). She holds a PhD in Linguistics with a major in Romance Languages from Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv, Ukraine (2015). Her research interests include media studies, discourse analysis, and border studies, and she has published on borders and identity in literary and political discourses.  Alina Mozolevska was a visiting professor at the UniGR-Center for Border Studies, Saarland University (Volkswagen Foundation project “Borders in Crisis”, Saarbrücken, Germany). Currently she is a ZOiS UNET Ukraine-based Fellow 2023-2024.

Format: We ask that participants read the paper in advance. At the workshop, Prof. Mozolevska will give a brief introduction, after which participants are invited to ask questions and make suggestions based on the paper and presentation.

To receive the paper and Zoom link REGISTER HERE

This presentation is also part of the
Brooklyn College 
Women’s & Gender Studies Endowed Chair 
Miniseries on “Russia’s Continuing War against Ukraine”  

Zoom registration link

Professor Ivan Simic, Charles University

Please join us Friday, September 8, 2pm to 3pm (NY Time) when we welcome:

Bénédicte Santoire, University of Ottawa

Women, Peace and Security Agenda in Long-term Protracted Conflicts: Exploring the Cases of Moldova and Georgia

Bénédicte Santoire is a PhD Candidate and Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She researches and teaches in the areas of feminist international relations theories and feminist security studies. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda in the post-Soviet space, more specifically in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia.

This meeting will take place on Zoom. Register here

We ask that registered participants read the paper in advance. At the workshop, Santoire will provide a brief (20 min) presentation, after which attendees are invited to share questions and suggestions based on the presentation and paper. The paper will provided one week in advance.

Join us for our April 21 meeting at 2pm to 3pm (New York time) on Zoom, when we welcome Adriana Zaharijević, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade.

In this presentation, Zaharijević examines a myth within East/West feminist venues. By addressing it, she tackles several issues that are marring feminist scholarship and also feminist public life. The first will refer to hierarchies within feminist postsocialist scholarship, the second to the incompatibility of myth to different feminist realities, and the third to the entrenching of divisions within feminisms, this time thriving on recognition/redistribution, economy/culture, class/gender divides.

We ask that participants read the author’s short paper in advance. Zaharijević will give a short presentation at the workshop, and then participants will be invited to share their comments and suggestions.

Please email mara.lazda@bcc.cuny.edu for the paper.

Register for Zoom link here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAtce-qrDotHND52CDOruKwi7SpF0MMSY5U

Questions: Mara Lazda (mara.lazda@bcc.cuny.edu) or Janet E. Johnson (johnson@brooklyn.cuny.edu)