Bodies in Focus • Why Bodies Matter

BODIES IN FOCUS: Power, Subjectivity, and Practice in East European and Eurasian Studies

This six-part virtual event series will examine body matters within Eurasia through a variety of disciplines and themes. The body-as-method has emerged recently to provide novel insights on society, culture, and identity by foregrounding alternatives to Western traditions that marginalized the corporeal dimensions of social and personal existence.

Why is the body good “to think with” on both intellectual and professional matters?

How do classed, diversely abled, gendered, and raced bodies interact in the daily lives we study or inhabit through our avocations?
What is the continuously evolving relationship between the body and the body politic, whether the nation, empire, the EU, or NATO?
Is research and teaching disembodying and can recentering “embodied and uncomfortable knowledge” therefore move liberation in East European and Eurasian Studies forward?

To address these questions, “Bodies in Focus” will have six virtual, recorded panels featuring speakers from various disciplines and institutions. Panelists and the audience will explore how bodies matter for the study and teaching of East European and Eurasian social and material environments, our understanding of power and equity, and for the cultivation of human capacities in our field.

November 8. Why Bodies Matter

11:00 am – 12:30 pm (EST)

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Moderator: Vitaly Chernetsky, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies & University of Kansas

Speakers: Maria Cristina Galmarini, William & Mary
Pawel Lewicki, Independent Scholar
Darya Tsymbaluk, University of Chicago

This series was developed and implemented by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies at The Ohio State University, and the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with support from the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies. The organizing institutions thank our scholarly consultants Maria Cristina Galmarini, Darya Tsymbaluk, and Pawel Lewicki for shaping this initiative intellectually in collaboration with us.

CO-SPONSORS
Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of Kansas
Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of Texas
Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill
The Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University
Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, The George Washington University
Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington
Russian, East European, and Eurasia Center, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign