SEE NEXT
Seminar: East European and Northern Eurasian Crosstalk.
(A working group at the UIC Institute for the Humanities)
Every third Wednesday of a month at 6 pm
SEE NEXT is founded to discuss innovative scholarship on managing, producing, and making sense of diversity; on race, gender, civilizational, national, and other types of hierarchies; on imperial, national, and other types of social imagination and narratives; on the politics of comparison in Northern Eurasia and Eastern Europe and on dealing with imperial legacies; on specific regional languages of self-description and self-representation and on the contextual and situational nature of regional identities. These topics are as relevant for studies of historical empires, imperial cultures, and societies, as they are for the analysis of nation-states, seemingly homogeneous cultures, and societies, and they allow us to put our specific regional cases on the larger map of current methodological debates in history, anthropology, literary studies, political theory, and so on. The assumption that we study complex phenomena characterized by internal dynamism and diversity underlines our common pursuit, and makes our studies relevant beyond our narrow geographically defined fields.
Once a month, the multidisciplinary community of students of the region of East and Central Europe, the former Russian Empire, and the USSR from Chicagoland (and beyond) will meet to discuss a new case study. Open to scholars from the social sciences and humanities alike, SEE NEXT has only one requirement: presenters must be prepared to discuss their particular cases within broader methodological, disciplinary, and geographical contexts suggested by other participants. While any national, regional, or cultural experience is unique, there should be some meta-language (a middle-range theory, an explanatory model, a discursive strategy) that makes someone’s unique case relevant to the interests of the rest. This will help us to strengthen the community (and hence the field) of Russian, East- and Central European Studies, as well as to relativize the existing powerful inclination toward all sorts of Sonderweg histories, cultural exclusiveness, and implicit politicization of research. Without compromising the political sovereignty and cultural ingenuity of all peoples of the region, the point of departure for SEE NEXT relies on acknowledging the fundamental interconnectedness and mutual influences of lands, countries, and cultures. The seminar concerns the multidimensional and multivalent diversity (and the many attempts to rationalize it or wipe it out) that perhaps constitutes the most distinctive feature of the region over the past millennium.
As another step toward acknowledging the importance of (academic) diversity and relativizing its direct political implications, SEE NEXT invites graduate students to take active part in our sessions, including in the key role of Graduate Student Inquirer. After each presentation, a Graduate Student Inquirer (GSI) will have the floor to ask questions and comment on the presentation.
SEE NEXT format:
An invited speaker will be asked to precirculate theses of two–three pages on the topic of the future talk. The talk itself will be structured as follows:
● Presentation, 30–35 minutes;
● Graduate Student Inquirer, 5–10 minutes;
● General discussion and response of the presenter, 30–40 minutes.