INTERSECTIONALITY IN FOCUS: Talking About Globalization: Gender, Race, Dis/ability and Politics

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MODERATOR:
Vitaly Chernetsky (University of Kansas) is Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures at the University of Kansas. He completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to the University of Kansas, he taught at Columbia University and at Miami University in Ohio. His research interests include Russian literature and culture (film, theatre, visual arts); Ukrainian literature and culture; East and Central European literatures and cultures; Central Asian literatures and cultures; intellectual history of Russia and Ukraine; cultural aspects of globalization; postmodernism/postmodernity; Modernism/modernity; modernist and postmodernist writing worldwide; postcolonial theory and postcolonial writing; identity and community; diasporic cultures; nationalism and ethnicity; literary and cultural theory; cultural studies; film and film theory; feminist theory; gender studies; LGBT studies; and language pedagogy. He is a past president of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (2009-2018) and the current Vice President and Scholarly Secretary of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the US.

PRESENTERS:
Bolaji Balogun (University of Sheffield) is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Leeds and previously held a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Fellowship at Krakow University of Economics, Poland where he was a lecturer at the Department of European Studies. Balogun’s research focuses on Blackness and racialization in Central and Eastern Europe. As well as his academic outputs in this area, Balogun has written for academic media outlets such as the Sociological Review Blog; Open Democracy, LSE Blogs, Discover Society, Baltic Worlds, and The Muslim News. Balogun also serves as a peer-reviewer for a number of academic journals.

Lucie Fremlova (Independent Scholar) is an independent researcher who works at the interface between academia, social movements, and policy. Her close-up, transdisciplinary research focuses on ethnic, ‘racial’, sexual and gender identities, particularly in relation to queer Roma. In her innovative theoretical approach, she combines intersectionality with queer theory. Her book Queer Roma has recently come out (Routledge, 2021) and her article “LGBTIQ Roma and Queer Intersectionalities: the Lived Experiences of LGBTIQ Roma,” published by the European Journal of Politics and Gender in 2019, won the EJPG 2021 Best Article and the Council for European Studies Gender and Sexuality Research Network 2019 Best Article Award. Her article “Non-Romani Researcher Positionality and Reflexivity: Queer(y)ing One’s Privilege” was the most-read article published in 2019 in volume 1, number 2 of the Critical Romani Studies Journal.

Teodor Mladenov (University of Dundee) is Senior Lecturer at the School of Education and Social Work, University of Dundee. Previously he was Marie Curie Individual Fellow at the European Network on Independent Living (2017-2019), and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Public Policy Research, King’s College London (2013-2016). He authored Critical Theory and Disability: A Phenomenological Approach (Bloomsbury, 2015), and Disability and Postsocialism (Routledge, 2018). From 2000 to 2009, he was actively involved in campaigning for disability rights in Bulgaria. His research areas include disability studies, disability theory, (international) social policy, (post)socialism, social justice, and critical theory

Tamar Shirinian (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is a cultural anthropologist focusing on queer theory and studies, transnational feminisms, political economy, the processes of postsocialism, psychoanalysis, and more recently medical and psychological anthropology. Her first book project investigates the intersections of political-economy, gender, and sexuality in the postsocialist Republic of Armenia. Survival of a Perverse Nation: Queer Transformations in Postsocialist Armenia is a queer ethnography that takes postsocialist transformations as its object of study, showing how a widespread rhetoric of perversion (aylandakutyun) conveyed a sense of an Armenia on a queer and perverse path toward no future. Her research has also explored feminist movements, the 2018 “Velvet Revolution,” and the strategies of fake news in Armenia as well as broader questions of non-Western forms of sexuality and sexual culture and the relationship between sexuality and geopolitics. Her most current research takes up questions of access and equity in mental healthcare in the United States.

ABOUT THE LECTURE SERIES

From Critical Pedagogies to Research Practice and Public Engagement in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and exacerbated pre-existing institutional, structural, and systemic discrimination and inequality in societies across the world. Furthermore, continued campaigns against gender and LGBTQ equity in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, racism in the United States, and the social protest movements that rose in response to such exclusionary projects have reinforced calls for intersectional approaches in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (SEEES). Class, ethnicity and race, dis/ability, gender and sexuality, and other identity markers interweave to produce inequality differently in Eastern Europe and Eurasia than in the Americas or Western Europe. Yet, it is these very differences that provide a rich ground for intellectual conversations in our field.

FALL 2021 SESSIONS

VIEW THE RECORDINGS OF THE 2020-2021 RACE IN FOCUS SERIES

SPONSORS:
Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies, University of Chicago
Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of Kansas
Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of Michigan
Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of Texas at Austin
Center for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Ohio State University
Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University
Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center, Indiana University, Bloomington
Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington
Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign