Register here.

Learn the history of mărțișor and watch the Romanian Room committee make them and talk about this old tradition.

Falling on March 1 of every year, Mărțișor is an old Romanian tradition of gifting a red and white string attached to a small piece of jewelry or a flower. This is believed to bring health and luck to the wearer.

The Spring Festival of the Egg is a FREE virtual family oriented event welcoming the coming of Spring in many ethnic traditions as featured by members and friends of the Nationality Room Committees at the University of Pittsburgh. Videos include: Egg Decorating, Palm Weaving Demonstrations, Ethnic Cooking Demonstrations, The Festival Of Colors, Ethic Recipes, Butter Lamb Carving, Cooking Baking, Springtime Story Telling, Spring &  Easter Customs, Special Children's Egg Decorating, Kid's Cookie Making, Easter & Springtime Printable Coloring Pages, Jelly Bean Guess, Egg Festival Marketplace and more.

Sponsors:
University of Pittsburgh
Polish Nationality Room Committee
Nationality Room Committees
Nationality Rooms Programs & Intercultural Exchange Programs
University Center For Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies
Polish Falcons of America
Carpatho-Rusyn Society

Participants:
The Nationality Room Committees: Czechoslovak, Indian, Irish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Philippine, Polish, Romanian, and Ukrainian & members of the Bulgarian and Carpatho-Rusyns communities.

Beyond Crisis Creativity: Imagining New Futures Through Art and Youth Activism

This un-conference explores how cultural organizations made up of artists, young people, cultural workers, organizers, and neighbors take up supposedly devalued city spaces to create new vocabularies and heuristics for value beyond exchange value, and use cultural practices to tell stories of place and forge transnational connections. It also maps how how certain forms of creative identity are commodified. We seek to create a conversation across borders, cultures, institutions and generations. Participants will come from Pittsburgh; Barcelona; Cali; Portugal; and Chicago, among other places, in order to address the interconnections between the kinds of challenges that artists/youth face in using creative practice to imagine more just futures and the networks of solidarity nascent and established between cities and practitioners.

The conference is open to everyone. If you choose to attend in person, please complete registration form no later than March 3rd, 2022. There is no deadline to register for those attending virtually. There will be an option to attend virtually via Zoom. Registration information, featured speakers, and conference schedule can be found on the event website.

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE

8:45-9:00am: Virtual coffee

9:00-9:15am: Welcome, Ellen Larson 9:15-9:45am: Keynote, Barbara London

9:45-10:45am: Panel 1 ACTIVATED VIRTUALITIES

Jori Snels, University of Amsterdam

“The in-between-space: Reimaginations of virtual being in aaajiao’s + Lu Yang’s videogame art”

Sarah Myers, Stony Brook University

“When a Black Man’s Blue: HBO’s: Watchmen and the Draw of the Alternate History Genre”

Frederica Simmons, University of St. Thomas, Minnesota "Ephemeral Movements: Mapping Anti-Racist Protest Art"

10:45-11:15am: Alison, Langmead, Faculty Respondent + Audience Q&A
11:15-11:30am: Break

11:30am-12:30pm: Panel 2 VIRTUAL PRACTICALITIES

Luise Mörke, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

“Insubstantial Actualities: The digital and the analogue in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021)”

Gene Anthony Santiago-Holt, University of Delaware “Noise, Performance, and Puerto Rican (Taino) Futurism”

Xiaofan Wu, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University "A Live Stream that May Last for Years"

12:30-1:00pm: Josh Ellenbogen, Faculty Respondent + Audience Q&A

1:00-2:00pm: Break

2:00-2:40pm: Panel 3 - GEOSPATIAL BORDERS

Cindy Evans, Florida State University

“Frieder Nake and the Ethics of Cold War Computer Art”

Clara Royer Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

“Allocating the Bandwidth: Slow-Scan and the New World Information Order (1978-1990)” 2:40-3:10pm: Jennifer Josten, Faculty Respondent + Audience Q&A

3:10-3:30pm: Break

3:30-4:30pm: Panel 4 - FUTURISTIC REALITIES

Isaiah Bertagnolli, University of Pittsburgh

“‘More Human than Human’: Virtual Humanisms in the Blade Runner Universe”

Sophia Salinas, Southern Methodist University

“Cyber Touch: The Body and Transgression in Cyberfeminist Art Practices”

Cory Wayman, University of Utah

“She Lies, She Cries: Currencies of Affect, Beauty & Performance in Leah Rachel’s Curious Female Casting Couch (2017)”

4:30-5:00pm: Terry Smith, Faculty Respondent + Audience Q&A

5:00-5:15pm: Closing remarks, Ellen Larson

https://pitt.zoom.us/j/99959033357

Meeting ID: 999 5903 3357

Passcode: virtual

1991 ushered in the so-called "archival revolution," allowing scholars if Russia and Central Asia to access written sources that had been inaccessible to international scholars. The end of the Cold War also allowed first-hand engagement with people living throughout Eurasia. howeve, this paradigm shift has not been matched by methodological reflection on how best to combine oral history with more traditional methods. This practical workshop will address all of the questions you had about oral history but were afraid to ask: best practices, ethical issues, and the possibilities oral history offers to the repertoire of scholars studying Eurasia.

Instructor: Krista Goff is a historian of Soviet and post-Soviet history, with a particular interest in the North and South Caucasus. In her research and teaching, she explores the historical formation of minorities and the experience of minoritization in these historical contexts, as well as interrelated themes of nationalism, citizenship, empire, ethnic conflict, genocide, and migration. In addition to being associate professor of history at the University of Miami, Goff is also co-editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and co-director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Think Tank, which is based at Howard University. Dr. Goff’s most recent book, Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus (Cornell UP, 2020) has won numerous prizes, including the Rothschild Prize from the Association for the Study of Nationalities, the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Baker-Burton Award from the European Section of the Southern Historical Association.

Moderator: James Pickett, Assistant Professor of History, University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Silvio Almeida is a Tinker Visiting Professor at Columbia University's Institute of Latin American Studies. He holds a PhD from the University of São Paulo School of Law and is founder and president of the Luiz Gama Institute, which provides legal advice and citizenship training to vulnerable populations in Brazil. He is the author of Structural Racism (São Paulo, 2018), Sartre: Law and Politics (São Paulo, 2016), and many other publications. Luiz Gama was a Brazilian rábula (self-taught lawyer), abolitionist, orator, journalist, writer, andconsidered a key actor in the abolition of slavery inBrazil. Dr. Almeida will discuss Luiz Gama as a thinker and interpreter of Brazilian social thought. Lunch will be provided. Registration required for both in-person and virtual attendees.

March 25th
6:30 - 8:15PM
Cathedral of Learning, Room 0G24 and Zoom
Screening of Style Wars, with conversation led by Pittsburgh writers Max “Gems” Gonzales and Shane Pilster after the screening

University members can access this film through the University Libary System.

If you plan on attending any events in-person as a non-Pitt affiliate, please fill out this form no later than the day before the event. If you are not Pitt-affiliated, you will recieve an email confirmation from Pitt Guest Registration before the conference to allow you into the appropriate campus buildings. There is no deadline for Pitt affiliates. Register here - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfppOUqB5q-Kr2cq3oZBJMfdr-9Tay8...

If you are attending the post-screening conversation by Zoom at 7:30PM, please register for the link here - https://pitt.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYof-2hpjsiHdWuLbHqcFlrvUVlqzxuQFkn