Ongoing Research Projects

Междисциплинарный центр изучения истории, экономики и общества (http://www.icshes.ru), Международный институт социальной истории и Российская экономическая школа готовят он-лайн архив российской исторической статистики ("Электронный архив Российской исторической статистики, XVIII – XXI вв.").

Предполагается, что архив будет представлять собой хранилище исторической информации, собранной из различных опубликованных и неопубликованных источников, стандартизированной и организованной в виде базы данных. Тематика архива – статистика по экономической и социальной истории России за последние три века (XVIII-XXI вв.).

В последние годы число электронных архивов исторической статистики, доступных он-лайн, резко возросло. Самые известные:

TOWARDS A NEW CULTURAL HISTORY OF EASTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE: CRITICAL ISSUES AND REAPPRAISALS

PROJECT PERIOD: June 2011 - May 2013

DISCIPLINES: History, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Cultural Anthropology

REGION/COUNTRIES: Belarus, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine

ACADEMIC PROFILE: Junior university professors/ lecturers

APPLICATION PROCEDURE: Application Form; Curriculum Vitae; List of publications; Draft of a course syllabus in the field of cultural history; Scholarly text related to the topic of the project

CONTACT E-MAIL: spis2005@yahoo.com

The main aim of the project is to discuss new teaching and research agendas in humanities and to introduce approaches that have been mostly developed within the field of cultural history into the university teaching. During the recent decades a new cultural history has developed as one of the most dynamic, interdisciplinary and innovative fields of historical studies. The project will help to redesign existing (“normative”) courses on cultural/historical anthropology, history of culture, sociology of culture and cultural studies, and to introduce new courses on cultural history in the undergraduate curricula in the region. The project shall produce the following main results: participants will design and introduce new courses; on-line resource center in the field of cultural history of the region will be developed; participants will be equipped with crucial resources (including syllabi, reading packets, books, digital materials, CDs, etc) to cover existing resource gaps at their institutions.

RATIONALE AND GOALS OF THE PROJECT

There is a growing sense that the national narratives accepting nations as natural and primary frame of the contemporary world are no longer tenable as the main interpretative framework in humanities and social sciences while undergraduate university curriculum is still mostly structured along these lines. Although the national normative approach used to be traditionally strong in the disciplines classifying their object-matter spatially – history, literature, political science, study of culture, – the national paradigm is currently crucially challenged by the new trans-disciplinary approaches and new fields of study – such as gender, cultural, post-colonial and other studies, and in those parts of more traditional disciplines that have been affected by these new academic concepts. Besides, and sometimes outside of the national frame, region and place emerge as foci of scholarly research, collective memory (often suppressed), intellectual projects and common people’s experiences. Questioning of the legitimacy of spatial framework is accompanied by the similar distrust of the linear chronological and developmental time as progress of the national narratives. This rethinking of the basic operational categories of humanities and social sciences has turned into a common ground for the convergence of various disciplines in terms of both theory and collaborative projects either of scholarly or public nature.

As far as now, these changes have touched upon the university curricula in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe only to some extent with those most susceptible to them being younger scholars whose attempts to change the situation are limited institutionally. Younger scholars lack networks that will help to establish cross-institutional connections, trans-disciplinary alliances, concerted motions to introduce curricula changes, and help rethinking and defending new theoretical frameworks that have to be introduced in the university courses’ content with adequate teaching methodology being developed.

This project aims at the convergence of agendas from various disciplines represented by younger faculty members into projects animated by the shared concerns. Taking history as the traditionally strong and well entrenched in university discipline through which categories of social time and space are usually assimilated by the students, we shall open multidisciplinary dialogue about these concepts basic for any interpretive framework in sociology, political science, cultural studies and anthropology. This convergence has to materialize in the networks working on the translation of new theoretical frameworks and perspectives from their research into their teaching, in collaborative research projects, public appeals and sustained cooperation between younger faculty members sharing some basic ideas about what social world is like.

New thematic foci – region, place, non-linear time – provide a viable alternative to the nationally-confined research frameworks and narratives, indicating how things could have happened differently and serving as focal point for alternative visions of political and cultural organization of the world. These new foci are difficult to reify, their boundaries and structures are more flexible, their shapes are fluid and characteristics – deceiving. Precisely because of this they have attracted dissenting voices of those trying to transgress the boundaries of their respective disciplines and to create broader, more inclusive, socially more relevant and appealing to the broader audience academic projects.

On the other hand it is important to remember that all these new thematic foci are also suitable for “essentialization” and should not be taken as objective and granted. Similarly to nations, regions, places and social time were created and reinvented through the history, frameworks built on their basis can be confining and misleading, serving the political needs and discriminating the other (as, for example, exclusive Central European discourse), if not critically rethought with the help of new methodological tools of humanities and social sciences. Therefore, it is indispensable to analyze all these categories in comparative perspective, transgressing the borders of traditional disciplines of teaching and research.

The main goal of this project is: to take constructed character of social space and time as a promising and potentially explosive concept, to explore research potential of national/regional/(g)local cognitive frameworks providing to seminar’s participants sound alternatives that have potential to challenge the dominance of nation-centered paradigm and to devise adequate teaching methods and techniques facilitating this.

Instead of seeing East-Central Europe as a coherent macro-region or perennial political and cultural borderland, in this project both Eastern and Central parts of Europe (including Russian/Soviet post-imperial space) are conceptualized as a flexible multitude of fluctuating micro-regions with no developmental path being predetermined and predestined, with their specific and common features becoming apparent only in comparison. Therefore the next goal of this project is to promote comparative analytic framework in social sciences and humanities in the region, inculcating comparative research optics among the seminar’s participants and developing methods for integration of this framework into their teaching.

Believing that the only way in inter-disciplinarity to go beyond declarations of intent and superfluous knowledge of secondary literature is real collaboration of various disciplines in work on a concrete empiric case, something that is better defined as trans-disciplinarity (which instead of staying in-between the disciplines implies projects drawing on a range of approaches to reach the desired goal), we see our next goal as the emergence of trans-disciplinary for course development and research projects focusing on the regions and run by the seminar’s participants in collaboration with seminar’s faculty.

It is also our conviction that serious empirical work cannot be detached from the serious engagement with theoretical debates in the disciplines. Moreover, nowadays humanities and social sciences share the common body of theory, acquaintance with which is a precondition of active participation in the life of world academia. National/regional/(g)local paradigms will be reconsidered in the context of contemporary theoretical debates and different methodologies by moving from empirical studies utilizing them to the works of theory themselves.

Therefore one of this project’s goals is to acquaint project’s participants with the range of theoretical approaches and methodologies which would be helpful for their development as scholars, to realize these methodologies’ potential and relevance to their own scholarly interests and teaching obligations.

More details: http://www.timeandspace.lviv.ua/

"Mapping the Gulag" is the first attempt to map, systematically, the changing geography of Russia's penal institutions over an eighty-year period from the 1930s to the present day.

This website is one element of a research project ("Women in the Russian Penal System") investigating the impact of Russia's penal geography on women's experiences of imprisonment in Russia and the challenges they face on re-entry to society after release. The idea informing the project is that many of the problems of the contemporary Russian penal system (including high rates of recidivism, family breakdown, physical and mental health problems) may be associated with the location of penal colonies in extra-urban regions in remote parts of the country, and the distance prisoners are therefore sent to serve their sentences. The practice of expelling 'convicted offenders' (however defined at any time) to the peripheries raises important questions about the direction of change in the penal system in post-Soviet Russia.

The outline of the idea behind the project:

By mapping the Gulag through time we can correct the impression that there was a complete and continuous coverage of the USSR with labour camps in the Stalin era. In reality, the geography of the Gulag was complex and penal institutions were not fixed in time and space; as new camps were formed, others were closed, and certain regions experienced intense development at certain times and others not, depending upon the economic and political priorities of the day.

The maps included on this site try to capture this changing geography, showing the geographical spread of penal institutions in the USSR at critical periods in its history - the eve of the Great Terror, the War years, on the eve of Stalin's death and of the Secret Speech, and what was left after the major wave of prisoners' releases.

The aims of the project are:

Memory at War is an international collaborative project investigating the cultural dynamics of the 'memory wars' currently raging in Poland, Russia and Ukraine. Employing a collaborative methodology grounded in the analytical and critical practices of the humanities, the project seeks to explore how public memory of twentieth-century traumas mediates the variety of ways in which East European nations develop in post-socialist space.

The University of Cambridge is leading this project, which will be accomplished in association with the Universities of Bergen, Helsinki, Tartu and Groningen.

Scholars and practitioners alike have framed the cultural and political transformations in Eastern Europe in terms of a 'transition paradigm,' as a passage from totalitarianism toward a horizon marked by the practices of modern liberal democracy. The Cambridge MAW team seeks to advance the state of the art by developing a 'memory paradigm' that casts the variety of these transformations as differential responses to legacies and traumas of the imperial, Soviet, and national pasts.

In real time (2010-2013), the project explores the dynamics of cultural forms of memory and the interactions of these forms inside and across Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. It offers a new metric for measuring the profound changes that these countries have undergone since the collapse of the Soviet bloc and attempts to come to grips with the hidden obstacles populating the cultural field that can obstruct further and deeper changes.

The Cambridge team also plays a central role in facilitating the scholarly exchange between MAW project partners.

The project was launched in 2010 and will run for three years.

Current projects:

University of Cambridge
Mapping Memory Events in Transnational Space

University of Bergen
Web Wars: Digital Diasporas and the Language of Memory in Russia and Ukraine

University of Helsinki
The Use and Abuse of History in Identity Politics in Eastern Europe

University of Tartu
The Power Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe: Securitising the Legacy of Communism in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine

University of Groningen
The Imperialism of Martyrdom: Suffering, Agency, and Memory in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Films and Novels

More details about the project are in the MAW newsletter, please click here to download it.

The website of MAW project: http://www.memoryatwar.org

We are pleased to inform you about the launching of a new research project "Understanding Violence in Russia: War, Institutions, Society" (http://russiaviolence.hypotheses.org/).

The aim of our research project is to analyse, in contemporary Russian society, both the nature of violent acts and their consequences in social and political practices. Based on field interviews and in-depth analyses of sources available in Russia, the aim of this research project is to present a few places and incidents where violence is/has been expressed. In particular, these interviews will concern:

* violence in state institutions: army, police, penitentiary system
* riots and collective acts of violence
* xenophobic and racist acts of violence, particularly those in
connection with migrants
* army and police veterans, perceived both as potential authors of
violence and victims of violence on the part of the state
* war violence
* violence in the family/domestic sphere
* gender violence
* the role of justice in the prevention, sanction and/or perpetuation
of these acts

The full project is available on the blog "Understanding Violence in Russia" at http://russiaviolence.hypotheses.org/

The blog (in French and in English) has been created in order to make available to researchers and to the public a corpus of articles and references on violence in Russia. It aims at analysing those data and at favoring collaboration between researchers and practitioners working on those topics.

This blog is supported by "Emergences" programme of the City of Paris.

If you need any information about this project or wish to submit an information related to our research topics, please do not hesitate to contact one of the blog administrators.

Françoise Daucé, CERCEC
Gilles Favarel, CERI
Anne Le huérou, CERCEC anne.lehuerou@free.fr
Lukasz Jurczyszyn, CADIS
Amadine Regamey, Paris I amandine.regamey@gmail.fr
Elisabeth Sieca-Kozlowski, CERCEC, PIPSS.ORG, kozlowsk@club-internet.fr

ANNUAL SEMINAR OF AB IMPERIO QUARTERLY: EMPIRE STUDIES – A ROADMAP FOR THE 2010s

The primary goal of Ab Imperio seminar is to build on the journal’s mission: to bridge the ever-broadening divides between different disciplines, narrowly defined area studies, and national academic traditions. By bringing together scholars from different regional and topical fields, the journal strives to restore a broader historical context that was sustained in the past by the common field, formerly known as “Russian/Soviet Studies.” The disintegration of that field into a variety of national and regional historiographies opened up new research possibilities and inaugurated new research agendas, but the parallel demise of the common sphere of knowledge and reference threatens the very prospects of newly independent areas studies. Any attempts to write a “Russian” history in isolation from Ukrainian historical materials, or to sustain a narrow focus on Central Asian events without a proper knowledge of the empire-wide policies and institutions lead to all kinds of one-sided and even erroneous conclusions. A broad historical context and a common sphere of reference are needed to avoid a usual anachronism of imposing contemporary political map upon the distant past. (An opposite development is highly improbable: the broadening of the scope of historical analysis would not result in the erosion of the present-day political sovereignty). It is quite a challenge to attempt reconstructing a broader historiographic context in the absence of any formal or informal institutional settings.

Thus, the first stage of a new series of seminars conceived by Ab Imperio can be compared to the outlining a roadmap. We depart from an assumption that individual scholars operate within semi-isolated research fields structured, simultaneously, by the unique empirical case studies and universal analytical models and concepts. The former make a cross-field dialogue impossible (every case study is unlike the other), the latter make it redundant (“microhistory” or “new political history” are too general notions). What is missing is the sphere of middle-range generalizations that would provide for a meaningful dialogue of scholars studying different periods in the past of neighboring regions. Ab Imperio offers a general framework of empire studies as a middle-range theoretical device allowing to accommodate individual unique case studies in a common conceptual sphere without the imposition of any single normative explanatory scheme (be it a narrative of groupness, or a teleological perspective of regional development). Imperial history will be used as an analytical resource for re-thinking a variety of historical phenomena that include contested historical memory, cultural construction of identity in the situation of historically formed diversity, historically varied projects and modernity and the definition of the self.

The seminar will encourage scholars to reflect on their individual research projects as belonging to their respective specific fields, yet at some level related to each other as different “windows” on the common heterogeneous historical reality. As a general guide, the organizers offer the following questions:


1. How does the specific historical experience of the post-Soviet space complicate the universality of historical paradigms? Linked to this question is the query about how do contemporary scholars define the boundaries of the region from the viewpoint of their own research questions.


2. Are there interesting cases that prove that historians of the region can be pioneers in suggesting new methodological frameworks for other historical fields? Alternatively, which particular aspects of the study of the region have the potential to influence historical scholarship at large?


3. One can say that the regional studies of post Soviet space have been behind the “western” innovative historical research in opening such perspectives as cultural history or historical memory. Is it the case, judging from your experience? What is the reason for this state of affairs?


4. What are the challenges of synthesizing historical knowledge in usable narratives in our region? In other words, how can the rapidly disintegrating and destabilizing field be thought of as a coherent text to be translated into textbooks?

Ab Imperio seminar will take place in Kazan on October 7-11, 2010. Papers presented at the seminar may be published in AI 1-2011. The working language of the seminar is English.

NB: Ab Imperio covers travel expenses of the participants (including airfaire and ground transportation, hotel, and per diem in Kazan).