Race in Focus (Session 7): Talking About Whiteness: Racial and Ethnic Minorities in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia

February 19 @ 1-2:30PM CT via Zoom
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MODERATOR:

Roman Utkin specializes in twentieth-century Russian and Soviet poetry, prose, and visual culture. He enjoys teaching and writing on queer theory, exile, comparative modernisms, performance studies, and cinema. His current book project, Russian Berlin, examines the patterns of migration and cultural flows between Eastern and Central Europe and shows how refugees from Soviet Russia formed a unique diasporic community in Weimar Berlin. A native speaker of both Tatar and Russian, Roman serves on the board of the Committee on Advocacy for Diversity and Inclusion within the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is also a founding member of Q*ASEEES, the Society for the Promotion of LGBTQ Studies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Roman was educated in Russia and the United States, earning an undergraduate degree in philology at Kazan State University (2007) and a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures at Yale University (2015). Prior to joining the Wesleyan faculty, he taught at Davidson College.

SPEAKERS:

Marius Turda is Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities and Professor in 20th Century Central and Eastern European Biomedicine at Oxford Brookes University (UK). Originally from Maramureș (northern Romania), Prof. Turda has been teaching at Oxford Brookes since 2005. He is the founding director of the Cantemir Institute at the University of Oxford (2012-2013) and founder of the Working Group on the History of Eugenics and Race (HRE), established in 2006. He is a member of Academia Europaea, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Fellow of the Galton Institute. He has published extensively on the history of race and eugenics in East-Central Europe, with a particular focus on Hungary and Romania. He is the general editor of the 6 volume series A Cultural History of Race (London, 2021). At the moment he's completing a book on scientific racism in interwar Hungary.

Lauren Woodard is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies in the MacMillan Center at Yale University. Her research interests are migration governance, national identity, diasporas, and borders. Trained as a cultural anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, her research focuses on migration, race, and national identity in Russia. Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among government officials and immigrants in Russia, her book project, The Politics of Return, examines tensions between exclusion and inclusion in Russia’s migration policies.

Sean Roberts is Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the International Development Studies Program at George Washington University. Having conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the Uyghur people of Central Asia and China during the 1990s, he has published extensively on this community in scholarly journals and collected volumes. In addition, he produced a documentary film on the community entitled Waiting for Uighurstan (1996). His present research is focused on China's development of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region as well as on democracy development in former Soviet Central Asia. Roberts continues his applied work on the design and evaluation of democracy and governance projects in the former Soviet Union, most recently in Ukraine where he worked on a USAID project to support decentralization and anti-corruption.

Monika Bobako is Associate Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She holds PhD as well as habilitation in philosophy and an MA in gender studies (obtained from the Central European University in Budapest). She is the author of two books, Islamophobia as a Technology of Power: A Study in Political Anthropology (Kraków 2017, in Polish) and Democracy and Difference: Multiculturalism and Feminism in the Perspective of the Politics of Recognition (Poznań 2010, in Polish). She is also the editor of the volumes The Theologies of Emancipation (Praktyka Teoretyczna, 2013) and Islamophobia: Contexts (Praktyka Teoretyczna, 2017). Her areas of specialization include political anthropology, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and religious studies (with a special focus on Islam as well as gender). In 2018 her book Islamophobia was awarded the Jan Długosz Prize and was nominated for the Tadeusz Kotarbiński Prize, which are both major academic awards in Poland.

Among the first African Americans to join the American Communist Party and an important architect of communist approaches to race, racism, and African American equality, Lovett Fort- Whiteman (1889-1939) was one of the US citizens convinced (naively, to be sure) that Soviet society showed the way for overcoming racism in the United States. While visiting the USSR in 1924, Fort-Whiteman wrote to W.E.B. Du Bois: “There is a perfect spirit of internationalism here.” “Women from the various Circassian republics and Siberia, men from China, Japan, Korea, India, etc. all live as one large family, look upon one another simply as human beings ... Here, life is poetry itself! It is the Bolshevik idea of social relations, and a miniature of the world of tomorrow.”

Communist positions on race and racism have yielded both successes and failures worldwide since 1917. Despite the mixed results, Fort-Whiteman’s words recall the impact that global colonialism has had on the social construction of identity, including in our world region; its legacy on research and teaching in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (SEEES); and its effect on perpetuating systemic inequities in academia as a whole. To address this legacy, this series is designed to elevate conversations about teaching on race and continued disparities in our field while also bringing research by scholars and/or on communities of color to the center stage.

The series is comprised of four segments: two pedagogy webinars; two lighting rounds on the experience of minority scholars in the field; and two roundtables featuring research by scholars of color and/or on racial minorities, concluding with a forum on the reception of the Black Lives Matter movement in our field. For the full schedule click here.