Cengiz Haksöz has a BA degree in Political Science and International Relations at Marmara University, Istanbul, and MS degree in Sociology at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. He is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology, at the University of Pittsburgh. He is studying food, collective memory, and social identities. His dissertation research is on identification strategies of Pomak communities (Slavophone Muslims) in Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey.

Change and calls for change are constants in the region of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. The Bolshevik Revolution, the annus mirabilis of 1989, color revolutions and the drive towards EU membership - all were, at least in their time, viewed as massive upheavals which, for many, promised to bring better days. Today, public discourses throughout the region are replete with themes of change: Changes in existing values to more "progressive" ones, regime change in semi-authoritarian states, "modernization" of economies, bureaucracies, political parties, societies and social structures.

For the past two months, hundreds of thousands of protesters have gathered in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev to express broad displeasure with the ruling government. Join CILE in a discussion of these protests and the political crisis in Ukraine led by three Ukrainian guests of the law school.

The Guardian first revealed the NSA's comprehensive surveillance program in early June of last year, working from information from the now-infamous Edward Snowden. Two weeks later, a series of articles exposed NSA and British spying on European and South American officials at a G20 meeting and by the end of the month, Der Spiegel had published details of America’s electronic surveillance and bugging of European Union offices and the embassies of France, Italy, Greece, and others.

International efforts to improve the quality of local or municipal-level governance in developing societies often produce mixed results. In this article, the authors draw on new institutionalism to argue that the impact of international assistance for better local governance in Bosnia-Herzegovina is shaped by the opportunities for local leaders to form pro-reform pacts (Goetz 2007) and by interaction with locally distinct, informal “rules-in-use” (Ostrom, 1999) in local administrations.

ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH is a novel written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir (New World). The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s, and describes a single day of an ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. Its publication was an extraordinary event in Soviet literary history—never before had an account of Stalinist repression been openly distributed.

The eighth edition of the Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival is dedicated to the legacy of world-renowned filmmaker, psychologist, and Carnegie Mellon professor, Paul Goodman, and to his professional focus on the human challenges and achievements of diverse groups of workers worldwide.

A group of high school students from Winchester Thurston toured the Nationality Rooms and attended a presentation by REES Program Manager Dawn Seckler in the Russian Room, focusing on Russian language and culture and opportunities to pursue the study of Russia.

The Department of History European Colloquium presents Emanuela Grama, Carnegie Mellon University. Presenters: Andrew Behrendt and Adelina Stefan. Emanuela Grama from Carnegie Mellon University will be the main commentator on their papers and presentations.

Since the 1990s, psychological trainers, coaches, and psychotherapists have fanned out across the Russian psyche politic. In posing a psychological subject as a substitute for the “Soviet Person,” psychologists have also resuscitated the individual personality as site of social concern. This cultural shift is evident in the way that positive psychological concepts like self-esteem, personal growth and emotional management have been integrated into parenting, education policy, mass-media programming, advertising, human resourcing and economic modernization.