CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

CREECA’s mission is to support research, teaching, and outreach on Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, and Central Asia. We approach this three-part mission by promoting faculty research across a range of disciplines; by supporting graduate and undergraduate teaching and training related to the region; and by serving as a community resource through outreach activities targeted to K-12 teachers and students, other institutions of higher education, and the general public. As a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center, CREECA hosts a variety of events and lectures which are free and open to the public. You can find recordings of past events here.

  1. Power and Possession in the Russian Revolution

    2月20日

    Power and Possession in the Russian Revolution

    [About the Lecture:] The revolutions of 1917 swept away not only Russia’s governing authority but also the property order on which it stood. The upheaval sparked waves of dispossession that rapidly moved beyond the seizure of factories and farms from industrialists and landowners, envisioned by Bolshevik revolutionaries, to penetrate the bedrock of social life: the spaces where people lived. In Power and Possession in the Russian Revolution, Anne O’Donnell reimagines the Bolsheviks’ unprecedented effort to eradicate private property and to create a new political economy—socialism—to replace it. O’Donnell’s account captures the story of property in reverse, showing how the bonds connecting people to their things were broken and how new ways of knowing things, valuing them, and possessing them coalesced amid the political ferment and economic disarray of the Revolution. O’Donnell reminds us that Russia’s postrevolutionary confiscation of property, like many other episodes of mass dispossession in the twentieth century, largely escaped traditional forms of record keeping. She repairs this omission, drawing on sources that chronicle the lived experience of upheaval—popular petitions, apartment inspections, internal audits of revolutionary institutions, and records of the political police—to reconstruct an archive of dispossession. The result is an unusually intimate history of the Bolsheviks’ attempts to conquer people and things. The Bolsheviks’ reimagining of property not only changed peoples’ lives and destinies, it formed the foundation of a new type of state—one that eschewed the defense of private property rights in favor of an enduring but enigmatic new domain: socialist state property. [About the Speaker:] Anne O’Donnell is Associate Professor of History at New York University. Her first book, Taking Stock: Power and Possession in Revolutionary Russia, charts the rise of illiberal Soviet statecraft through the conquest of the urban material environment. It is a history of market-making in reverse: of how people have lost their worlds of things; how they have taken things from one another; how they scrambled conventional indicators of value, and how these searingly intimate, yet widely shared experiences coalesced into a staging ground for socialist revolution. Her next project will be a study of the study of poverty in the post-war Soviet Union.

    57 分鐘
  2. Writing the Soviet History of Philosophy in the 1960s–1980s

    2月3日

    Writing the Soviet History of Philosophy in the 1960s–1980s

    About the Lecture: During the 70 years of its existence, the Soviet Union claimed to be a communist state based on the philosophical doctrines of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and, at the later stages, Vladimir Lenin. This made philosophy a mandatory course in every Soviet university and led to the creation of a peculiar version of the history of philosophy. Leading Soviet specialists, such as Valentin Asmus and Igor Narskii, interpreted the history of philosophy as a dialectical struggle of oppositions, such as materialism and idealism, religion and science, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Consequently, they divided philosophers of the past into two camps: allies, whose theories preceded dialectical materialism, and foes, who belonged to the idealistic camp. This talk will highlight the principal patterns of the Soviet approach to the history of philosophy and illustrate them through the case study of Igor Narskii’s interpretation of David Hume’s theory. About the Speaker: Viacheslav Zahorodniuk was an assistant professor at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. He defended his PhD thesis, “The evolution of the ‘idea’ concept in the British philosophy of the 17-18th centuries,” devoted to Locke’s, Berkeley’s, and Hume’s epistemology. Zahorodniuk was a postdoc in the Department of Philosophy at the University, working on a project on Hume’s theory of knowledge. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Research in Humanities, working on the project “Early Childhood in the Early Modern: Locke’s Accounts on Children Perception.” His interests also include Soviet studies, and an article, “Painted Red: The Soviet interpretations of Hume’s epistemology,” is forthcoming in Hume Studies.

    47 分鐘
  3. Mapping Land Use and Habitat Changes in the Caucasus Through Spy Satellite Data

    2024/12/06

    Mapping Land Use and Habitat Changes in the Caucasus Through Spy Satellite Data

    About the lecture: The legacy of past human activities strongly shapes current landscapes and ecosystems, with today’s actions set to leave similar long-term impacts. Predicting future landscape changes, however, requires a thorough understanding of past ones, yet most land and habitat change studies are limited to recent decades—starting only in the 1980s with the availability of 30-m satellite data or in the 2000s with commercial high-resolution satellites. This presentation will introduce an alternative approach, using high-resolution imagery from the 1960s U.S. Corona spy satellites series to trace landscape changes over the past half-century. Focusing on the diverse Caucasus region, with its wide variation in elevation, climate, ecosystems, and historical land-use patterns, this presentation will highlight methods to create detailed land cover maps capturing landscapes before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These historical maps provide a unique perspective on land changes, as well as habitat changes for wild species. This presentation will underscore the value of 1960s spy satellite data for understanding long-term land cover and habitat changes of large ungulate species, offering new insights into historical land use and its implications for wildlife and conservation. About the speaker: Afag (pronounced ah-fah) is a remote sensing and conservation expert with extensive field experience in the Caucasus region. Currently an Honorary Fellow at the SILVIS Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (https://silvis.forest.wisc.edu/people/), she holds a PhD in Forestry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Postgraduate Diploma in Wildlife Conservation from the University of Oxford. Afag’s research employs high-resolution satellite data to map historical land cover in the Caucasus eco-region, investigating long-term landscape changes and their impacts on wild habitats. Her past work has contributed to projects in wild mammal species’ reintroduction, habitat management, and human-wildlife conflict mitigation, and she has shared her findings in various publications (link to google scholar – https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sqSt3H4AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao). In addition, employed as a data scientist at Spatial Informatics Group (SIG), she is currently involved in environmental projects in developing countries. Fluent in three languages and conversant in two others, Afag brings a global perspective to her work.

    42 分鐘
  4. Post-Protest “Misdemeanorland”: An Ethnography of Legal Repression and Legal Resistance in Russia

    2024/11/11

    Post-Protest “Misdemeanorland”: An Ethnography of Legal Repression and Legal Resistance in Russia

    About the Lecture: The legal repression of opposition protests in pre-war Russia is characterized by the deployment of a bifurcated repressive system. This system relies, on the one hand, on “administrative” offenses and, on the other hand, on the criminal justice system to punish protesters. Following the demonstrators from the streets to the police bus, the police precincts and the court, this talk analyzes the case of relatively low-stakes prosecutions for protest-related “administrative” offences and the defensive legal mobilization that they prompted. This use of law and rights claims and sustained organization of legal aid and information support for prosecuted individuals in cases, where a guilty verdict is all but certain, speaks to the broader question of authoritarian legality and constant oscillation of defense actors and defendants themselves between belief and disbelief in law. About the Speaker: Renata Mustafina is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. Renata is a law and society scholar with research interests in authoritarian legality, legal mobilization, and defense lawyering in repressive settings, as well as in critical approaches to human rights. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled “Against Impossible Odds: Defensive Legal Mobilization in Russian Protest-Related Prosecutions,” ethnographically studies the legal aftermath of opposition protests in pre-war Russia (2012-2017). Renata holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Sciences Po, an M.A. in Sociology from École Normale Supérieure, and an undergraduate degree in International Relations from Moscow State University

    47 分鐘
  5. Rivers and Society in Late Soviet Georgia: Nation, the Environment and the Everyday

    2024/11/01

    Rivers and Society in Late Soviet Georgia: Nation, the Environment and the Everyday

    About the Lecture: Georgia’s 26,000 rivers connect citizens to nature, to their childhood, to their unique regions, each of which has its “mother-river.” The sounds of rushing water as well as the sights and scents of riverside gatherings provoke powerful memories and remain central to Georgian identity. Rivers also form the republic’s economic backbone. This presentation will focus on late Soviet Georgia, when hydroelectricity and gravel taken from riverside quarries joined irrigation and fishing as key contributors to Georgia’s development. Decisions on how to use rivers—at the republic and everyday level—governed the type of state and the spaces where Georgians worked and lived. These decisions, often haphazard and sometimes reversed, manifest a far more complicated dynamic than a simple dichotomy between modernization and conservation. They also implicated a wide range of actors beyond government and expert circles. Rivers themselves, finally, were far from passive actors in these decisions and contests. This presentation, based on oral histories, ethnography and archival sources, will blend human and non-human histories as well as deconstruct late Soviet Georgian state and society through riverine interactions. About the Speaker: Jeff Sahadeo is a professor at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). He received his PhD in History from the University of Illinois. He is the author of Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1923 (Indiana University Press, 2007) and Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow (Cornell University Press, 2019). He has published in Slavic Review, Journal of Modern History, Central Asian Survey and other major outlets. His first article from his current project on rivers in tsarist and Soviet Georgia, “The Mtkvari River’s Many Faces: Symbolism, Space and Agency in Late Imperial Tiflis,” is available open access at https://doi.org/10.22215/cjers.v17i1.4436

    46 分鐘
  6. Estonia’s Nordic Identity: History and the Present

    2024/10/31

    Estonia’s Nordic Identity: History and the Present

    About the Lecture: The idea of Estonia as a Nordic country gained traction in the late 19th century alongside the rise of Estonian nationalism. As Germany and increasingly also Russia came to be perceived as historical adversaries of the Estonian nation, Sweden’s arguably benevolent influence on Estonia’s history in the 17th century ‘good old Swedish times’ provided the Estonian national movement with an alternative model not just for their understanding of Estonia’s history but also for its political future. The presentation that is based on Mart Kuldkepp’s recent book Nordic Estonia will highlight the continuous efforts of early Estonian nationalists to position the country within the Nordic cultural sphere both before the achievement of Estonia’s independence, and after, with the leaders of the interwar-era independent Estonian state consistently seeking alignment with Sweden and other Nordic nations. Not least in terms of security policy, the recognition of this identity by other Nordic countries was seen critical in shaping Estonia’s geopolitical relationships. Yet it is only in the recent decades that it has found somewhat broader resonance and acceptance abroad. Today, when all the Nordic and Baltic states are members of NATO and most of them also of the EU, the ‘Nordic’ label is perhaps less important as a form of self-identification than it used to be. Yet it remains an exceptionally strong regional brand, and in the minds of most Estonians, their Nordic identity strongly contrasts with other, usually externally imposed labels, such as ‘Baltic’ or ‘post-Soviet’. About the Speaker: Mart Kuldkepp is Professor of Estonian and Nordic History at University College London in the UK. He defended his PhD at University of Tartu in Estonia in 2014 and joined UCL in 2015, where he has worked as lecturer, associate professor and professor. A few months ago, his book Nordic Estonia: The Birth of a Nation State was published in Estonia, tracing the political and intellectual history of the idea of Estonia’s Nordic identity in the first decades of the 20th century. He is currently a visiting professor at Yale University.

    56 分鐘
  7. Russia’s War against Ukraine and The February 24th Archive Project

    2024/10/21

    Russia’s War against Ukraine and The February 24th Archive Project

    Solidarity Networking and Ukrainian Mental Maps: Russia’s War against Ukraine and The February 24th Archive Project About the Lecture: I am an East European intellectual and political historian by training, and a student of map prejudices by practice. For a digitally activist Ukraine, the February 24th Archive is a polyphonic treasure trove of solidarity and resistance to Russia's war of aggression. My archive bridges six main multilingual groups: (1) professionally trained field experts in Ukrainian Studies; (2) interested nonspecialists in and beyond academe; (3) leading journalists; (4) OSINT amateurs and mapmakers, who catalogue war crimes and build cases with evidence for criminal prosecution; (5) diplomats and policymakers; and (6) most crucially, a voting citizenry that crosses ideological lines, hoping to raise literacy against malignant disinformation. While we commonly think about how social media divides and polarizes in 2024, I will introduce strategies on how I have worked against over the past three years against currents of unseen algorithms on digital platforms. I take inspiration for my ongoing Twitter/X war archive from scholarly work in the history of social and radical cartography, and ongoing Ukrainian war documenting projects. My goal for the February 24th Archive is to respect Ukrainian privacy and ethical issues toward a future Nuremberg tribunal moment, while basing a rolling public war digital record in a daily working Global Commons which is too often flooded with disinformation. About the Speaker: Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018); just translated into Russian (Academic Studies Press, 2024); Ukraine under Western Eyes (Harvard University Press, 2013); and Mapping Europe's Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012). He has been a contributor to Chicago's international history of cartography series, and he has translated over 300 entries from Russian and Polish for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, in multiple volumes, published jointly by USHMM and Indiana University Press. Professor Seegel is a former director at Harvard University of the Ukrainian Research Institute's summer exchange program. From 2019 to 2022, he hosted 89 author-feature podcast interviews on the popular New Books Network. He is the founder of The February 24th Archive, an ongoing 24-hour community-driven, public-facing digital project focused on building global solidarity for Ukrainians, with 1000s of threads and averaging 30 million people in 75 countries per month across the world. Professor Seegel was awarded the Vega Medal of 2024 by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (SSAG) for his scientific contributions to human geography. He received the gold medal from King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden on 22 April, celebrated annually as Earth Day.

    43 分鐘
  8. “Reporting from a Lost Country,” a conversation with Elena Kostyuchenko

    2024/10/04

    “Reporting from a Lost Country,” a conversation with Elena Kostyuchenko

    About the Lecture: This conversation will be devoted to Elena Kostyuchenko’s book I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country (2023), “a haunting book of rare courage,” as Clarissa Ward, CNN chief international correspondent, called it. In March 2022, as a correspondent for Russia’s last independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, Kostyuchenko crossed the border into Ukraine to cover the war. It was her mission to ensure that Russians witnessed the horrors Putin was committing in their name. I Love Russia stitches together reportage from the past fifteen years with personal essays, assembling a kaleidoscopic narrative that Kostyuchenko understands may be the last work from her homeland that she’ll publish for a long time—perhaps ever. It exposes the inner workings of an entire nation as it descends into fascism and, inevitably, war. I Love Russia earned several distinctions, including a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and TIME, and the Pushkin House Book Prize (London, U.K.). About the Speaker: Elena Kostyuchenko is a Russian journalist; in 2024-2025, she is a Fellow at The Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Harvard University. She was born in Yaroslavl, Russia, in 1987, and she spent seventeen years reporting for Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s last major independent newspaper, until it was shut down in the spring of 2022 in response to her reporting from Ukraine after the start of the Russian invasion. She is the author of two books published in Russian, Unwanted on Probation and We Have to Live Here, and is the recipient of the European Press Prize, the Free Media Award, and the Paul Khlebnikov Prize. This event is part of the CREECA lecture series, which is held on Thursdays at 4:00 pm. Coffee, tea, and cookies served starting at 3:45. **This talk was co-sponsored by the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Center for Journalism Ethics.**

    1 小時 5 分鐘

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4.4
(滿分 5 顆星)
15 則評分

簡介

CREECA’s mission is to support research, teaching, and outreach on Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, and Central Asia. We approach this three-part mission by promoting faculty research across a range of disciplines; by supporting graduate and undergraduate teaching and training related to the region; and by serving as a community resource through outreach activities targeted to K-12 teachers and students, other institutions of higher education, and the general public. As a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center, CREECA hosts a variety of events and lectures which are free and open to the public. You can find recordings of past events here.

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