Join us for a Book Panel: 

Researching in the Former Soviet Union:

Stories From the Field

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

10:00AM - 11:15AM (EST)

Click Here to Join Zoom Session

Written for early-career scholars still in the planning stages of their research, Researching in the Former Soviet Union (BASEES/Routledge, 2022) explores some of the challenges researchers face when conducting fieldwork in the former Soviet region. It addresses key questions, including: What difficulties do scholars, especially women, encounter when researching in the region? How does an early-career scholars’ positionality, especially their nationality, ethnicity, and sexuality, contribute to their experiences of inclusion, exclusion, and access while conducting fieldwork? How do early-career scholars navigate issues of personal safety in the field? How do junior academics successfully conduct high-risk research? The book includes contributors from both the region and Western countries, paying particular attention to the ways researchers’ subjectivities shape how they are received in the region, which, in turn, influence how they write about and disseminate their research. The book also explores ways to continue research away from the field through the use of digital methods when physical access is not possible.



During this book launch event, some of the contributors to this edited volume will briefly present their chapters and reflect about their experiences conducting field research in the states of the former Soviet Union.

SPEAKERS

Dr. Jasmin Dall’Agnola holds a PhD in Politics from Oxford Brookes University. Her research focuses on the relationship between gender, governance and technology in Central Asia. She has been awarded a prestigious two-year, full-time fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation for her postdoc project on smart city technologies in Central Asia. The results of her research have been published in numerous peer-reviewed academic journals and publishing houses, including Europe-Asia Studies, Religions, Central Asian Affairs, and Routledge.

Andrea Peinhopf holds a PhD in Sociology and Anthropology from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. Her PhD thesis, which was funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), explored the impact of violence and unresolved conflict on social relations in the contested state of Abkhazia, where she conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork. The results of her research have been published in Ethnopolitics, Nationalities Papers, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies, and The Global Encyclopedia of Informality.

Rasa Kamarauskaite is a PhD Student at UCL, SSEES. She is interested in managing non-heterosexual sexualities in everyday lives: when, where, and how they are verbally disclosed, kept as a secret, or revealed in tacit ways. The background of her research is informed by studies of public and private, body and space, sexuality, Communism and post-Communism. Her broader research interests are: gender and sexuality in Communist and post-Communist contexts; practices of maintaining privacy in Communist and post-Communist countries; modes of being in public in Communist and post-Communist contexts; history of Lithuania.

Abigail Karas completed her DPhil in Russian at the University of Oxford and defended her thesis with no corrections. Her research looks at the interaction between urban space and local identity, and Russian material culture and anthropology of the built environment, with a focus on cities. Her work is cross-disciplinary, drawing predominantly from anthropology, urban history and cultural studies. She has also taught as a PGTA at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London and as a sessional lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, and is working on module development for the University of Plymouth.

Ruta Skriptaite is a Doctoral Researcher in the School of Politics and International Relations of the University of Nottingham. Her doctoral research explores the affinity between traditional masculinity and political image-making in post-Soviet spaces by providing a comparative analysis of the Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, and the late Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov-Turkmenbashi. She also currently works on a collaborative project with her supervisor Dr. Carole Spary that is focusing on the gendered aspects of the self-representation of the Belarusian pro-democracy leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

Moderator, Sebastien Peyrouse

Research Professor, Central Asia Program, IERES, George Washington University  and a Senior Fellow with the George H. W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China relations. His main areas of expertise are political systems in Central Asia, economic and social issues, Islam and religious minorities, and Central Asia’s geopolitical positioning toward China, India and South Asia.