Themes We Explore

Following the lead of a growing number of political scientists, geographers, historians, economists, biologists, literary scholars, archaeologists and others, the 2015–2016 cohort focused its inquiry around three broad ideas:

First, the institutions, infrastructures, and technologies that shape the passage of human beings, objects, animals, diseases, and ideas across space. These include everything from passport policies and land surveys to highways, marketing campaigns, pilgrimage routes, GPS systems, pasturing practices, and NGOs.

Second, the ways in which inhabitants of rural and urban spaces of Eurasia have documented, studied, and imagined the experience of mobility. What are the effects of immigration on the built environment? How is social mobility inscribed in the urban landscape or represented in film, literature, and art? What are the various ways in which government officials and bureaucratic regimes control the flow of goods, services, information, and people? And can the tools and methods of digital scholarship shed as much light on archival material as they can on Twitter feeds?

Third, mobility as a multi-scalar phenomenon: one whose significance is rooted in the relationship between individual and communal, private and public, local and universal, but also in the relationship between the human and “natural” worlds. How do attempts to maintain connections with family members or to recreate cultural and social practices impact immigrant communities? Is it possible to map both the emotional and the economic costs of major disasters and the spatial challenges they create?

Can thinking about migration and mobility help us better understand the individual states that occupy the Eurasian landmass as well as the connections among them, their neighbors, and the global community? To this end, participants explored new methodologies, posed new questions, and developed new modes of presenting research to the academic world and beyond.

The interest in the social production of cultural space grows out of the 1990s “spatial turn” and accompanying work on cultural “mobilities,” advanced by more recent work in globalization and memory studies. The coordinators understood “cultural space” to denote culturally-defined zones, physical or virtual, geographical or imagined, that are produced, sustained, monitored and contested by human practices.  Cultural space is a dynamic product of cultural activity and discourse, as well as a framework for the evolution and transmission of beliefs, behaviors, memories, and values. Since cultural space is such a capacious construct, however, the program participants worked together to map both its enormous reach and its necessary limits.

Relevant project topics included:

SITES: Physical markers of cultural memory, such as UNESCO World Heritage sites, crisscrossed by the politics of preservation, restoration, and reclamation; spaces set apart, such as prisons and labor camps, environmental disaster areas and zones of ecological particularity; overlapping and contested areas including frontiers, borderlands, and war zones.

SYSTEMS: Cultural networks and institutions such as economic markets, immigration policies, kinship networks, and imperial bureaucracies. The spaces these systems produce might take the form of diaspora communities, sovereign nations, legal systems, international organizations, or virtual worlds.

PRACTICES: Generating, transmitting, and transforming cultural space via imperial conquest and expansion, modernization, war and terrorism, globalization and mass media. On a micro level, mechanisms relevant to this theme might include local commemorative practices, cartographical representations, the space of private life, and virtual community venues such as blogs.

The work in the Fellows Seminar was closely connected to a 4-year Mellon Foundation grant on interdisciplinary recontextualization of urban studies, co-coordinated across all of the Harvard schools by Professors Blau and Buckler.  This Mellon project includes a major research portal on Berlin and Moscow, opening out to all post-socialist cities across Eurasia.  The consideration of Eurasian cultural space, however, was by no means be limited to urban environments.

Relevant topics include (but are by no means limited to) the following:

History – Biography as a scholarly and popular genre; subject formation among newly liberated serfs or newly enfranchised citizens; mixed identity construction in the Pale of Settlement or in other border regions; allegiances to European or to Asian cultures at different historical moments; inter-marriage; child-rearing and the means of inculcating identities in various settings, from the family to more institutional structures; the consequences of war and trauma; resistances to psychoanalysis or psychotherapy in the Soviet era; norms of behavior and the everyday.

Literature and the Arts – Writing and artistic practices that construct identities, including diaries, letters, self-portraiture, and photography; translation and national cultural identities; changing norms, performance practice, and reader responses for poetry; theater, performance, stand-up comedy, dance, video, and cinema; fashion, masks, and costume; blogging and other internet practices; narrative structures in subject formation; national genius or national hero figures; media stars; puppets, dolls, robots, and human simulacra.

Social Sciences – Advertising and the creation of consumer culture in the post-Soviet era; notions of communal identity and the social spaces for identity construction; parties, cliques, mobs, clubs, summer camps, and other social groupings/spaces; legal regulation of identity, including sexual identity; professional discourses and professional identity; hate speech, racism, homophobia and other means of inhibiting identity formation; wealth and poverty as identity markers.

History – work on surveillance has analyzed not just how the imperial Russian and Soviet state gathered information and what information they gathered, but also how they used various technologies of rule (e.g. the passport, census, map, autobiography) to categorize individuals by identity, loyalty, geography and utility. Social and cultural historians have in turn traced how these categories took on meaning both collectively (nationalism, class conflict, patriotism, dissent) and individually (in projects of self-transformation and self-protection). Political historians have studied how information-gathering and categorical construction has influenced policy formation, political policing, mass coercive actions and mass persuasion. Other work analyzed how subjects spoke to the state through petitions, denunciations, personal narratives, riots and mass collective actions; how individuals have communicated information in periods of censorship through gossip, rumor, and Aesopian language; and how evolving technology has transformed communicative possibilities.

Literature and culture – scholars have studied the many resources of language, genre and literary tradition to provoke reflection on imperial Russian and Soviet information practices and policies. They have assessed techniques of myth-making, ambivalent representations and the modeling of alternative realities. Beyond studying individual works and their reception, they examine actors in the literary process including authors, publishers, censors, readers, theoreticians and critics. The Tartu-Moscow semioticians have at times drawn directly on information theory in developing their approach to the generation of texts and discourse.  Such everyday and more formal genres as novel, film, memoir and jokes have proven fertile ground for research, which has often drawn upon the methods of the social sciences.

Social sciences – scholars have, like historians, evaluated the ways in which governments collect, disseminate and interpret information. Some fruitful work explored how processes of reifying economic, social and political activity lead governments, elites and mass publics to understand the world around them. For example, economic data regularly influence public policy-making, and yet the process of categorizing and accounting for economic activities reveals the necessity of judgment and the use of prevailing social constructions for creating meaningful categories. Recent work by scholars who emphasize the influence of social constructions such as collective identities and domestic and international norms of appropriate practices, suggest that information is mediated by particular understandings of the world. Economic sociologists and political scientists have examined the cognitive frameworks that are necessarily employed when making sense of myriad pieces of economic information. Market participants themselves must attribute meaning to seemingly straightforward concepts like budget deficits, inflation and rates of growth in national output in making investment decisions, which in turn can have self-fulfilling consequences for the sustainability of economic policy stances.