(2001) “Eastern European Studies: Culture”

The authors examine the state of the field of Russian and East European area studies by bringing student perspectives into dialogue with leading scholarly perspectives on the direction of area studies. They argue that the collapse of communism and increasing globalization do not necessitate the elimination of area studies. Instead, area studies helps to contextualize the shared histories and experiences of neighboring states as well as local particularities within the increasing integration of Europe.

2022

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and the ensuing war, is bringing about far reaching consequences for the entire region and beyond. The subject of East European area studies is currently undergoing a process of critical reassessment. For the past 30 years, as an area, Eastern Europe and post-Soviet states have been defined as post-communist, and the space belonging to the former Soviet Union as post-Soviet. “Post” has marked a transition through a process of continuation and negation. The war may end this condition of “post”, implying the collapse of the post-Soviet geopolitical consensus. The conference invites critical discussion about the potentials, limitations and (mis)uses of methodologies that challenge hegemonic approaches in East European Studies/area studies. What is happening to area studies? Where are we now, as a consequence of the war? What new theoretical and methodological instruments do we need in this new situation? The transformation of the region also poses serious challenges to scholars. Continual redefinition of the “areas” of study reproduces the hierarchies of geopolitical entities, languages and cultures reflected in the distribution of resources, academic interests and practices. Knowledge production always risks becoming ensnared in hegemonic structures (imperial, patriarchal, authoritarian) and non-academic interests and discourses (e.g., policy- and profit-making). This conference seeks to critically examine the area's current conditions for knowledge production. How is knowledge produced, and by whom? How can we work in and with the area today? The conference aims to cover the following aspects, among others: • War and its impact on area studies. • What will happen to the dominance of Russia in area studies? • How the “area” is currently defined. • Challenges to knowledge production in the region in the face of the war. • Critical perspectives on knowledge production, knowledge regimes, politics and academic freedom. • New imperialism, anticolonialism, decolonisation and other perspectives on area studies. • Training for specialists in area studies – problems and the future. • Language(s) in area studies. • Loci of knowledge production: hierarchies and precarity. • Academia and professional ethics. • The politics of funding and its impact on the state of knowledge in the region. • Interrelationships between history and memory. • Teaching and cooperation with/in Eastern European Studies. • Knowledge production, policymaking and activism.

"Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women's and Gender History", 2023

This article examines the history of knowledge production about the former Eastern Bloc in the American and Polish academic contexts. It explores how debates about authority and authenticity are embedded in the deeper histories of area studies and in long-standing conflicts dating from the earliest years of the field of Slavic and East European Studies. The discussion about authority and authenticity within feminist circles mirrors larger conflicts between proponents of the totalitarian thesis and the so-called revisionists. The conflicts between these two schools precipitated a continuing epistemic crisis that also infects the academic cultures of Eastern Europe and is exacerbated by the neoliberalization of academic knowledge production. The epistemic cultures perpetuating Cold War stereotypes may lead to self-censorship or dissuade young researchers from studying the gendered aspects of lived experience in the communist era.

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2018

The paper aims to analyze the main arguments and dynamics of the debate on anthropological traditions in/of East-Central Europe through the prism of the “anthropology of postsocialism,” which has significantly conditioned intellectual exchange over the last decade. The internal logic of strategies employed by participants in the discussion has recently shifted from the need to “catch up with the West” towards a “think globally, act locally” rhetoric, but it has not managed to break entirely with an unproblematized concept of difference. Consequently, such binaries as East – West or local – global more or less explicitly still provide the organizing principles of the discourses in question. In the light of this predicament, the author turns to a toolbox that includes some elements of the “anthropology of the contemporary” of Paul Rabinow, the “para-ethnography” of George Marcus and the “ethnography in late industrialism” of Kim Fortun. The purpose of the suggested analytical devices is to destabilize the categories utilized in the discussed debate on the one hand, and to show its embeddedness in the wider context of the contemporary world on the other. Th is enables moving beyond dichotomous thinking and toward a more all-encompassing approach.

with Katalin Miklóssy & Dieter Segert Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, Vol. 23, No. 1.

2013