Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia are often conceptualized as a single geopolitical unit. The 21st century has challenged these conceptions due to breakthroughs in technology and medicine, new regional conflicts, and the continuing effects of globalization. These transformations have molded individuals, nations, cultures, languages, and disciplines, provoking questions of identity. For our platinum conference GOSECA invites presentations exploring identity today.
This program is subject to change.
All papers will be pre-circulated and there will be no presentations. Audience members are strongly urged to read the papers by the members of the panel that they plan on attending in advance. To request access to papers, please email raja.adal@pitt.edu with your affiliation and the panel(s) that you are planning to attend. For more information, please click here.
The material history of state authority, of corporate capitalism, or of any other modern institution begins in the office. Without paperwork there is no government. But with paperwork, there also come the paper, pens, brushes, screens, drives, keyboards, and other instruments for inscribing, copying, transmitting, storing, and consuming texts. This conference seeks to trace the material history of inscription in bureaucratic cultures. In scope it covers the globe and in time, although it takes our current historical moment as a point of departure, it starts with the assumption that the very first office technology may well have been writing itself.
Methodologically, this conference brings together three roughly defined fields that have often existed in isolation: media studies, the history of writing systems, and the study of bureaucratic cultures. Fueled by the rise of electronic literature, literary theorists have joined media theorists in thinking about how transformations in the medium of writing is recasting our relationship to the text. Scholars of writing systems are also concerned with the material mediation of writing but focus on the invention and development of scripts and on the consequences of changes in their material bases. Scholars of bureaucratic cultures study the material mediation of writing in the context of institutional structures, whether corporations or government bureaucracies or otherwise, that are ubiquitous in everyday life. This conference seeks to cross-pollinate these three approaches. It asks not only how instruments of inscription from brushes to typewriters to computers have changed over time, but how their transformation relates to how power is constructed, distributed, and exerted, within the office and beyond.
We ask two central questions. First, how do instruments of inscription mediate bureaucratic practice? Does it matter if a text is written with a brush, a pen, or a typewriter? Historians have traditionally focused on the semantic contents of texts while art historians have been concerned with the formal properties of images. Can a material history of writing provide us with a vantage point from which to think about the relationship between semantic meaning and material form? This is all the more of a concern today, when we are unsure about the future of the text. As writing is de-territorialized, produced anywhere in the world, including by non-human bots, the separation of the body of the writer from the text that began with scribes and typewriters has, with fake news, brought us to the edge of a crisis of credibility. What is the future of writing? This moment, when it also seems that the written text is being supplanted by images and video, is a good time to rethink the visual, aesthetic, and material nature of writing.
The second question concerns how writing mediates our relationship to the archive. How does it matter if we see an office document in its original, as a facsimile, or as a printed reproduction? Bureaucratic documents such as laws and treaties often take multiple forms. Japanese laws from the nineteenth century to today, for example, are simultaneously printed in an official gazette and available as a unique copy with the vermillion seal of the emperor, the wet signature of the cabinet ministers, and the date and summary of the law written with a brush. Does it matter which version of the law legal scholars, historians, or anyone else uses? And what methods do we use for “reading” the materiality of a document? At a time when digital methods are allowing for the large-scale distant reading of thousands or millions of texts, can we use such methods without forsaking the materiality of the text?
Co-organized by Raja Adal (University of Pittsburgh) and David Lurie (Columbia University).
Raja Adal (University of Pittsburgh)
Stephen Chrisomalis (Wayne State University)
Andrew Glass (Microsoft Corporation)
Katherine Hayles (Duke University)
Matthew Hull (University of Michigan)
Hoyt Long (University of Chicago)
Bryan Lowy (Princeton University)
Christopher Lowy (Carnegie Mellon University)
David Lurie (Columbia University)
Brinkley Messick (Columbia University)
Mara Mills (New York University)
Lara Putnam (University of Pittsburgh)
Dennis Tenen (Columbia University)
Annette Vee (University of Pittsburgh)
Tyler Williams (University of Chicago)
Yurou Zhong (University of Toronto)
Emerging Scholars on the State of the Field, Activism, and Advocacy is the third panel in the Decolonization in Focus Series.
The Russian war in Ukraine has had innumerable impacts, from personal to political, local, national, and global. One of the many sea changes wrought by the war has been the reckoning within Slavic/Russian & Eurasian Studies over the outsized role Russia has played and continues to play in the field and what could and should be done about it. The invited panelists in this series will consider the relationships of power that have long dominated the region, how they have impacted the field of study, and what, if anything, could and should be done about it.
The series will consist of six wide-ranging panels featuring speakers from a variety of disciplines and institutions. Panelists and participants will be encouraged to consider why decolonizing Russian & Eurasian studies matters, how to implement concrete change in their classrooms, and how to conceive of the future of expertise within the field. All sessions will be convened using Zoom, live-streamed via YouTube, and recorded to be made available for later viewing.
Are you looking to gain experience that will help prepare you for a globally-connected job market? Stop by Drop-In Hours to learn more about getting the Global Distinction added to your academic transcript, receiving special recognition at graduation, and standing out to prospective employers!
Do you like books? Do you like boba? Join the Asian American Futures Collective's Books and Boba Reading Group. We're reading "Afterparties" by Anthony Veasna So. Free books available in limited quantities. RSVP at bit.ly/booksandboba1 to reserve a copy of the book and be counted for a free boba drink during the event!
The Global Studies Center and Postindustrial, a multimedia outlet focused on reimagining industrial communities, is hosting a 4-part series that will allow a small group of students to develop journalism skills while learning about global issues in the context of Appalachia. Students will get the opportunity to learn about podcast production and journalistic writing from Postindustrial journalists that have a wealth of knowledge and experience in reporting on global issues as they relate to our region. By the end of the series, students will have the tools to produce narrative written work, created a podcast episode, and learned about other podcast production techniques. These skills will be situated in discussions about the impacts of the war in Afghanistan, slow violence, and extractive economies featuring conversations with individuals who experienced those impacts firsthand both at home and abroad. This event is solely in person.
On the anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, REEES and GOSECA invite all to join us in witnessing the artwork, testimonials, and lived experiences brought about by the war.
On ‘Decentering’ and Reimagining Slavic and East European Studies from the Periphery” will be delivered by Sunnie Rucker-Chang, Associate Professor at the Department of Slavic and East European Studies at Ohio State University. Dr. Sunnie Rucker-Chang writes on racial and cultural formations, minority-majority and minority-minority relations in Southeast Europe. Her work has appeared in Critical Romani Studies, EuropeNow! - A Journal of Research and Art, Interventions: Journal of Post-Colonial Studies, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, Slavic and East European Journal, and Slavic Review. She is currently finishing a monograph examining the politics of Blackness in former Yugoslav states that challenges conventional ideas of race and racialization in the Balkans and connects the region to broader trends in European Studies.
This is a hybrid event.
