Author: Mara Lazda

Categories
Announcement Schedule

Friday December 6

2pm to 3pm (New York Time) on Zoom and in-person at the CUNY Graduate Center

Sandra Russell (Mt. Holyoke College)

Traveling Dreamwork: Black Feminist Epistemologies and Anticolonial Resistance in the Post-Soviet “Periphery”

Russia’s war against Ukraine has provoked recent, and somewhat contentious, dialogue around the question of race, whiteness, and colonialism in Eastern Europe. As race, gender, and sexuality have been mobilized in media discussions of the war, there has been an absence of nuance regarding the instability of these categories. Frequently taken for granted is the extent to which these identity categories form through political, social, and ideological conditions, reflecting and refracting the contexts through which they emerge. This conversation has become even more contentious given Israel’s brutal attacks on Gaza, wherein many leftist activist spaces have excluded the Ukrainian case from anticolonial resistance movements.

Such conceptualizations of race, gender, and sexuality quickly become monolithized in a Western political imagination, as is often the case with colonialist hegemonies. In my attempt to reckon with these urgent questions, I look to Audre Lorde’s 1976 “Notes from a Trip to Russia” as well as the USSR’s involvement in the “Free Angela Davis” movement (1971-72) as starting points to consider the translational, transmittable, and collaborative possibilities of Black feminist epistemologies and anticolonial and queer feminist movements in the peripheral contexts of the former Soviet Union—in Ukraine specifically, but also Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Georgia.

Dr. Sandra Joy Russell is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Trained in Comparative Literature and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, her work explores the material and cultural expressions of gender, sexuality, and race in Ukraine, with a focus on the biopolitical entanglements of state and nation-building projects, as well as on contemporary queer, feminist, and anticolonial solidarities in the region.

Dr. Russell’s latest chapter, “‘Are These Guys Gay or Merely from Moscow?’: Homonationalism and Martyrology in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Literature” was published in the edited collection Queer Transnationalities in March 2023. Her forthcoming article, “‘She’s Our Fathers’ Daughter’: Angela Davis, Black American Subjectivity, and the Soviet Imaginary,” will be published in American Communist History next year. In addition to her research and teaching, she is also the Associate Editor of Ukraïnica: Ukraine’s Primary Database—an online catalogue of English Translations of Ukrainian Literature and Film supported by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

To register for the workshop and to receive the paper, use this link

In-person: CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York room 5203, Ralph Bunche Institute

Questions? Mara Lazda ([email protected])

Categories
Announcement Presentations

Anti-Gender Politics in Contemporary Poland and Beyond

with Professor Elżbieta Korolczuk

Södertörn University & American Studies Center, Warsaw University

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

11am to 12:15pm

Please join us for a special session of the Gender & Transformation workshop, sponsored by

Brooklyn College, Gender & Women’s Studies Program series, Feminist Futures: Studying Eastern Europe.

On Zoom, Registration Required, Here

In recent years patriarchal gender norms and ideologies have become an integral part of the right-wing populist parties programs. Right-wing leaders, including Jarosław Kaczyński, Victor Orban and Giorgia Melloni have invested in creating their image as defenders of traditional family and the nation against the excesses of what they call “gender ideology.” Such a stance have helped them to gain and sustain public support: in a 2019 opinion poll researchers asked about the biggest threats for Poland in the 21st century, and the majority of young men and older people declared that their biggest fear is the threat of the “gender ideology and LGBT movement.” In the Polish context, fighting against “gender ideology” has become a central objective of the right-wing coalition which came to power in2016. Anti-gender campaigns in the country have involved efforts to impose a total ban on abortion, assaults on LGBTQ rights, the demonization of ethnic minorities, and interventions in education and knowledge production.

Warszawa 15.07.2021 r. Agnieszka Graff i Elzbieta Korolczuk. fot.Krzysztof Zuczkowski

Elżbieta Korolczuk is an Associate professor in sociology, working at Södertörn University in Stockholm and at the American Studies Center, Warsaw University. Her research interests involve social movements, civil society and gender. She is currently engaged in a projectfunded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, which focuses on grassroots activism in the context of multiple crises in Central and Eastern Europe and Sweden (SUSTAIN ACTION), and studies feminist responses to anti-gender and anti-democratic forces in Horizon Europe project (CCINDLE). Her most recent publications include a co-authored volume co-edited Women’s Rebellion. Black Protests and Women’s Strikes, published by European Solidarity Centre in 2019 (with Beata Kowalska, Jennifer Ramme and Claudia Snochowska- Gonzalez) and a monograph co-authored with Agnieszka Graff Anti-gender Politics in the Populist Moment (Routledge 2021). Korolczuk is also longtime women’s and human rights activist and a commentator.

Sponsored also by Brooklyn College’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences; Departments of Anthropology, History, Judaic Studies, Modern Languages and Literatures, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology;  and the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, Brooklyn Phi Beta Kappa Chapter, the Women’s Center, and the LGBTQ+ Resource Center

Categories
Presentations

Friday October 18

Hybrid session: In-person and on Zoom

Gendering the Saeima: The Politics of Women’s Substantive Representation in Latvia

Laura Dean (Millikin University)

Does higher representation mean more feminist policies?

The 2018 parliamentary elections were a watershed year for women in Latvian politics. In this election, women’s descriptive representation increased from 19% to 31%, the largest increase since the re-establishment of independence

in 1991 with no gender quotas or institutional mechanisms for gender equality. Paxton and Hughes (2017), categorize this 12% increase as a big jump in women’s representation. This presentation, part of a larger book project, questions if the sharp increase in women’s descriptive representation corresponds to better substantive representation for women in Latvia. Using data from in-depth political ethnographic research in the Saeima (Latvian parliament), including participant observation and 44 interviews with female members of parliament, I examine substantive representation in the Latvian case. I use interviews to explore if women MPs believe they take women’s interests
into account in their daily parliamentary work. Then I compare this to differences in parliamentary voting patterns, bill sponsorship, and speeches.

Workshop format: We ask that participants read the paper in advance. At the workshop, Prof. Dean will give a short summary, after which participants are invited to ask questions based on the paper and presentation.

Use this link to register for the Zoom and to receive the paper

Join us in-person! CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, room 5203, Ralph Bunche Institute. Light refreshments and conversation after the talk.

Categories
Presentations

Fall 2024 Schedule

We are excited to offer several hybrid sessions this semester. Please join us in person at the CUNY Graduate Center or on Zoom.

Friday September 13

2pm to 3pm (New York time) on Zoom

Vanja Petrović and Nađa Bobičić (University of Belgrade)

The Never-ending 90s in Serbia: What Came before the Phantasm of Gender

Register for Zoom link here

Friday October 18

2pm to 3pm (New York time) Hybrid in person and Zoom

Laura Dean (Millikin University)

Gendering the Saeima: The Politics of Women’s Substantive Representation in Latvia

Register for Zoom here

In-person address: CUNY Graduate Center, room 5203, Ralph Bunche Institute

Special zoom session and time: Tuesday November 19

11am to 12:15pm (New York Time)

Brooklyn College Endowed Chair in Women’s and Gender Studies Event

Elżbieta Korolczuk (Södertörn University & University of Warsaw)

Anti-Gender Politics in Contemporary Poland and Beyond

Register for Zoom link here.

Friday December 6

2pm to 3pm (New York time) Hybrid In-person and on Zoom

Sandra Russell (Mt. Holyoke College)

Traveling Dreamwork: Black Feminist Epistemologies and Anticolonial Resistance in the Post-Soviet “Periphery”

Register for Zoom here

In-person address: CUNY Graduate Center, room 5203, Ralph Bunche Institute

Categories
Announcement Presentations

Sept 13: Petrović and Bobičić on Anti-Genderism in Serbia

Join us Friday, September 13, 2pm to 3pm (New York Time) for our first meeting of the Fall 2024 semester, on Zoom, when we welcome

Vanja Petrović and Nađa Bobičić (University of Belgrade) on

The Never-ending 90s in Serbia: What Came before the Phantasm of Gender

Abstract: Many of the same conservative politicians, intellectuals and clergy members of the Serbian Orthodox Church have been dominating Serbia’s political landscape for the better part of the past 35 years and have played a central role in the formation of the local anti-gender movement. Here, we seek to contribute to the ongoing efforts of making sense of how and why anti-gender mobilization is making such steady headway in our society. Using archival documents, we map actors and showcase the ideological imaginary held by the conservative elite during the 1990s. We argue that this ideological imaginary serves as the foundation of anti-gender mobilizations today. As right-wing actors did not act in a vacuum, we also highlight the unwavering feminist and pacifist left-wing opposition.

Nađa Bobičić (PhD) is a literary critic, socialist feminist and queer ally who lives and works in the region of the former Yugoslavia. She has been the co-editor of several collective volumes on the topic of gender-based violence, including Non/violence and responsibility: between structure and culture(Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe, 2020). Recently, she was a member of several research projects concerning unpaid housework, the position of women cultural workers in Serbia, and countering gender backlash in Serbia and Montenegro.   

Vanja Petrovic is an organizer, activist, and PhD candidate in social policy and social work at the University of Belgrade – Faculty of Political Science. Her research is interdisciplenary, spanning across gender studies, social policy, and ethnography. They are a founder of the Novi Sad Summer School for Abolition Feminism.  

Workshop format: We ask that participants read the paper in advance. At the workshop, the presenters will share a brief overview, followed by an open discussion. We invite participants to ask questions based on the paper and the discussion.

To register for the Zoom link and receive the paper use this link

Categories
Presentations

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

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. 

 

 

Categories
Announcement

Jewish Women in Post-World War II Eastern and Central Europe

with Prof. Eleonore Lappin-Eppel and Prof. Andrea Pető

Friday, March 8 2pm to 3pm (New York time, on Zoom)

For the workshop link and articles: Register Here

Please join us for a special workshop session with Prof. Lappin-Engel and Prof. Pető to discuss the Spring/Summer 2023 issue of Nashim. This special issue of Nashim analyzes Jewish women’s history in post-World War II Eastern and Central Europe, a topic long overlooked by scholarly investigation, owing to overlapping circles of forgetting.  Addressing this gap in the scholarly literature is all the more timely in the context of the political turmoil occurring in many countries. History can be inspirational: It can show how destroyed and disappearing communities, nationalized educational and cultural infrastructure, collaboration with secret services, betrayal, and loss can be told in different ways. All these horrors, loss, destruction, misery and trauma contributed to the formation in East Central and Central Europe of a reactive and negative Jewish identity. However, the 1980’s brought an important change in Jewish life not only in the former Communist states but also in Western oriented countries. A new generation of women worked towards Jewish renewal and a new appraisal of the Jewish women of the generations preceding them. By offering a pivotal gesture of creative elaboration of new histories of Jewish women in this vast region, we hope to participate in reclaiming the future and creating models of a proactive, positive Jewish identity. All four papers by Andrea Peto, Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, Elisa Klapchek, and Galina Zelenina deal with different forms of Jewish women’s agency within the Jewish and non-Jewish environment.

For the issue see: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/50101

Workshop format: At the workshop, Prof. Lappin-Engel and Prof. Pető will have a short presentation, after which participants are invited to ask questions based on the presentation and the articles.

Andrea Pető is a historian and a Professor at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna, Austria, a Research Affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest, and a Doctor of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her works on gender, politics, Holocaust, and war have been translated into 23 languages. In 2018 she was awarded the 2018 All European Academies (ALLEA) Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values and the 2022 University of Oslo Human Rights Award. She is Doctor Honoris Causa of Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. Recent publications include The Women of the Arrow Cross Party. Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War. Palgrave, Macmillan, 2020. And Forgotten Massacre: Budapest 1944. DeGruyter, 2021. Pető tweets about academic freedom and state of gender and Holocaust studies as @petoandrea

Eleonore Lappin-Eppel is an Austrian historian living in Vienna. After studying Comparative Literature and History of Ideas in the US and in Israel she worked at the Institute for Jewish History in Austria. In 2009 she became senior researcher at the Institute for Cultural Sciences and Theatre History of the Austrian Academy of Science and in 2010 staff member of the Centre for Jewish Studies at Karl-Franzens-University, Graz, where she habilitated in 2011. Areas of research are the Nazi persecution of Austrian and Hungarian Jews in Austria, transitional justice in Austria and memorial politics in Austria. Her major publications in these fields are: Ungarisch-jüdische Zwangsarbeiterinnenund Zwangsarbeiter in Österreich 1944/45. Arbeitseinsatz – Todesmärsche – Folgen, Vienna 2010; and Topographie der Shoah: Gedächtnisorte an das zerstörte jüdische Wien, zusammen mit Dieter Hecht und Michaela Raggam Blesch, Vienna 2015, 20172. She has also published on autobiographical writing of Jewish Austrians as well as edited a series of autobiographies of Jewish Austrians.

Categories
Schedule

SPRING 2024 SCHEDULE

Friday February 9 2pm to 3pm (New York time)

Unveiling the War and Constructing Identities: Exploring Memes in Ukrainian and Russian Social Media during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Alina Mozolevska, Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University (Mykolaiv, Ukraine)

On Zoom, 2pm to 3pm 

REGISTER FOR FEB 9 HERE

Friday February 23 2pm to 3pm (New York time)

Collective Mobilisation in Defence of Women’s Rights and Ukrainian Displaced Persons in Poland

Olena Morozova (V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University/University of British Columbia)

and 

Ania Switzer (University of British Columbia)

REGISTER FOR FEB 23 HERE

Friday March 8 2pm to 3pm (New York time)

Jewish Women in Post-World War II Eastern and Central Europe: Special Issue of Nashim

Eleonore Lappin-Engel (Vienna) and Andrea Pető (Central European University)

REGISTER FOR MARCH 8 HERE

 Friday April 12 2pm to 3pm (In-person, CUNY Graduate Center and on-line)

Seditious Bodies: The Subversive Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Hungarian Feminist Performances

Aniko Szucs (Queens College, CUNY)

REGISTER FOR APRIL 12 HERE

Friday May 3 2pm to 3pm (In-person, CUNY Graduate Center and on-line)

A Feminist Response to the War in Ukraine: Vlada Nedak in conversation with Janet Elise Johnson

Vlada Nedak, CEO of Project Kesher Ukraine and the Women’s Opportunity Fund of Ukraine

REGISTER FOR MAY 3 HERE

Categories
Presentations

Memes in Ukrainian and Russian Social Media

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”  

Categories
Presentations

Simic on Gender Policies toward Muslim Men in Socialist Yugoslavia and Bulgaria

Friday November 10

2pm to 3pm

(New York standard time)

Zoom registration link

Professor Ivan Simic, Charles University

This talk explores how Muslim men were targeted by a series of interventions aimed to change gender relations within Muslim communities. Yugoslav and Bulgarian communists were led by stereotypes about Muslim men, Muslim families, and Muslim communities, driven by socialist modernity notions. Heavily influenced by Soviet models from Central Asia, Yugoslav and Bulgarian communists aimed to create a homogenous and mobile population that would participate in the socialist project. Some policies that affected Muslim communities were universal for all, whilst some targeted Muslims explicitly. Namely, a series of interventions into Muslim communities started by introducing mandatory elementary education for girls, a ban on underage marriage, and the replacement of the Sharia law with the universal family law. Interventions continued with ban on circumcision, fez, and forced migrations. Muslim men were targeted and blamed for years for any failure of the communist modernising process, although interests of Muslim men were often fragmented – some eagerly supported new gender policies, some just wanted to be left in peace to their lives, and some found ways to resist the changes.

We ask that participants read the paper in advance. At the workshop, Prof. Simic will make a short presentation, after which participants will be invited to ask questions based on the paper and presentation. Registered participants will receive a draft of the paper.