THINKING “RACE” IN THE RUSSIAN AND SOVIET EMPIRES
March 5-7 UIC and UChicago campuses
This conference explores shifting conceptions of race and ethnicity through the transition from the Russian to the Soviet empires. It proposes an approach to race and ethnicity as discursive formations that emerge in a broad archive of ethnographic, linguistic, geographic, and popular media, which furnished both hegemonic discourses of scientific modernity and Russian/Eurasian exceptionalism. Exposing this interdisciplinary notion of “race sciences” and its intersections with related scientific, aesthetic, and political regimes, this conference will examine how race science came to be grounded in both the practical imagination and Imperial Russian and Soviet policies, which served in the ordering and management of the colonial population through diversity mandates, nation-building and border redistricting, as well as restructuring aesthetic and affective regimes of seeing and feeling. We will trace how conceptions of race and ethnicity shifted over the revolutionary transition and responded to specific local and global geopolitics. Working across the disciplines of history, history of science, anthropology, literature, as well as visual media and performing arts, this workshop will expose the ways in which shifting conceptions of race and ethnicity influenced the development of new scientific paradigms and contributed to the restructuring of the social, political and artistic imagination amidst the process of imperial expansion.
SPONSORS
At the University of Illinois at Chicago:
SEENEXT Interdisciplinary Working Group
UIC Institute for the Humanities
UIC Jewish Studies Program
UIC Institute for Research on Race & Public Policy
History Department, UIC
Department of Polish, Russian and Lithuanian Studies, UIC
School of Literatures, Cultural Studies and Linguistics, UIC
UIC School of Theatre and Music
At the University of Chicago:
Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies (CEERES)
Department of History
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Franke Institute for the Humanities
Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies
Pozen Family Center for Human Rights
